“I’d be lying if I said I never took pleasure in my mother’s suffering” [FRAGMENT KSI¡¯KI]

As a young woman, Tara was wild and rebelled against the strict rules for women in India. She left her parents-arranged marriage, joined an ashram, had an affair with an unbridled artist…

Antara – her daughter – accompanied her mother in this life full of ups and downs. Their relationship has never been easy. Years later, when Tara begins to lose her memory and needs care, Antara must face the duty of taking care of her mother who never cared for her, and return to painful and traumatic memories.

Avni Goshi “Bitter Sugar” – excerpt:

I’d be lying if I said I never took pleasure in my mother’s suffering. She had hurt me as a child, so any pain she had to endure afterward seemed to me to be some kind of retribution—balancing a universe that should have a rational order of cause and effect. But now I can’t get even with her.

The reason is simple: Mother forgets, and I can’t help it. You can’t make her remember her past deeds, bathe her in guilt. In the past, I’d casually mention her cruel plays over tea, then watch her furrow her brow angrily. Now, most of the time, she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, her eyes looking far away, eternally happy. When someone sees this, they touch my hand and whisper, “That’s enough. Poor thing, she doesn’t remember anything.” My mother evokes compassion in others, which makes me bitter.

I began to suspect something a year ago, when she was constantly wandering around the house at night. A scared Kaszta, her maid, called me.

“Your mother is looking for bed mats,” she once said. “She’s worried you’ll get wet.”

I pushed the phone away from my ear and reached into the nightstand for my glasses. My husband was still sleeping next to me, his earplugs glowing neon in the darkness.

“She must have been dreaming something,” I replied.

Kashta didn’t seem convinced.

“I didn’t know you were wetting the bed.”

I put my phone down and didn’t sleep a wink until morning. Even in her madness, my mother managed to humiliate me.

One day, a sweeper called at her door and Mommy didn’t recognize her. There were also other situations: she forgot how to pay the electricity bill, she parked the car in the wrong place in the underground garage in her building. That was six months ago.

Sometimes I think I can see the end – the moment when it will be just a rotting vegetable. He will forget how to use the tongue, how to control the bladder, and eventually how to breathe. The degeneration of the human body has its ups and downs, but it does not reverse.

My husband Dilip says it would be good to refresh her memory from time to time. So I write stories from my mother’s past on pieces of paper and stuff them into the nooks and crannies of her apartment. She finds them every now and then, and then she calls me and laughs.

“I can’t believe my own child has such terrible handwriting!”

After forgetting the name of the street she’d lived on for two decades, Mommy called me and said she’d bought a pack of razor blades and wouldn’t hesitate to use them if she got worse. Then she started crying. I heard horns roaring over the phone, people shouting. The sounds of the city of Puna. She coughed and lost the thread. I could almost smell the autorickshaw exhaust she was in, the dark smoke from the tailpipe, as if I were standing right next to her. I felt bad for a moment. This is perhaps the worst kind of suffering – the recognition of your own fall, the penance of watching everything slip away from you. But at the same time, I knew it was a lie. Mother would never spend that much. Why buy a pack of razor blades when one is enough? She had always been prone to public displays of emotion. I decided it was best to make some kind of compromise in this situation: I told her not to be dramatic, but I wrote the incident down in my memory and promised myself that in a while I would look for those razor blades and throw them away.

I record many details of my mother’s life: the time she falls asleep, reading glasses slipping down her nose, the number of Marzorin cones she eats for breakfast, all of which I record. I know what duties she avoids, and I know the places where the surface of her story has been polished smooth.

Sometimes when I visit her, she asks me to call her long-dead friends.

Mother used to be able to remember a recipe she had read only once. She remembered what kinds of tea were drunk in other people’s homes. When she cooked, she would reach for bottles and spices without looking up. She remembered the technique used by Memoni’s neighbors to kill a goat at the Feast of the Sacrifice on the terrace above her parents’ former apartment, to the indignation of the Jain host***, and how the bristly-haired Muslim tailor who lived there had once given her a rusty bowl to hold for dripping blood. She described the metallic taste to me and told me how she licked her red fingers.

– It was the first non-vegetarian taste in my life – she recalled.

We were sitting by the water in Alandi. Pilgrims washed themselves and mourners drowned the ashes of the dead. The muddy, gangrene-colored river flowed imperceptibly. Mommy wanted to get away from the house, from grandma and talking about my father. It was a transitional period when we had already left the ashram****, but I had not yet been sent to boarding school. There was a truce between my mother and me for a while, and I still believed that the worst was behind us. She didn’t tell me where we were going in the darkness, and when we boarded the bus, I couldn’t read the cardboard taped over the front. My stomach clenched with the fear that we’d be lost again on my mother’s whim, but we stayed close to the river where we got off the bus, and as the sun came up, I could see rainbow patterns in the light of the petrol stains that had gathered on the surface of the water. When it got hot, we went home. Nani and Nana* were frantic with anxiety, but Mommy said we hadn’t left the estate. They believed because they wanted to believe, although the story was not convincing – the estate where their house stood was not large enough to get lost. Mommy spoke with a smile, she lied like a note.

Her lying talent was impressive. For a while I tried to match her in it, it seemed to me that it was the only skill worth emulating. The grandparents questioned the watchman, but they could not confirm anything, because he often dozed off at work. So we stalled, as many times later, each clinging to his fiction, convinced he had to mind his own business. When asked later, I repeated my mother’s version. I haven’t learned to resist yet. I was as docile as a dog.

Sometimes I talk about Mami in the past tense, even though she is still alive. She’d be hurt if she’d been able to hold it in her mind. At the moment her favorite person is Dilip. He’s the perfect son-in-law. When they meet, there is no expectation in the air between them. He doesn’t know what she was like before, he accepts her as she is, and has no hesitation in introducing himself to her again and again if she forgets his name.

I’d like that too, but the mother in my memory keeps flashing in and out of my mind like a battery-operated doll whose mechanism fails. The doll freezes. The spell is broken. The child does not know what is real and what he can count on. Maybe it never knew. Cry.

I would like assisted suicide to be allowed in India, as in the Netherlands, not only out of concern for the dignity of the patient, but also for the benefit of all concerned.

I should be sad, not angry.

Sometimes I cry when no one is looking – I mourn, but it is not yet time to burn the body.

* Nani (Hindi n?n?), nana (Hindi n?n?) – terms for mother’s parents: nani is grandma and nana is grandpa. Paternal grandparents are called dadi (d?d?) and dada (d?d?); ** Memoni – an ethnic group from the northern part of ancient India, i.e. from the area of ​​today’s Sindh province in Paki state. Currently, there are less than two million people scattered around the world. Most of its representatives profess Sunni Islam; *** Jainism – Indian non-theistic monastic religion and philosophical system, followers (numbering about five million, mainly in India) are bound by the law of ahinsa prohibiting harming living beings; **** Ashram (Skt. Śrama) – an Indian hermitage or religious center founded by a spiritual master (guru). Some ashrams attract hundreds of followers, including from the Western world.

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