Opposite her, Seema sits engorged, squat fingers clasped around the cup, her face still unlined, as if her forty years have left little mark on her. She appears lost to the world, sipping her tea and stroking her pregnant belly with a smile of contentment and accomplishment, which Tahera knows from their childhood days. So smug and untroubled, while their dying mother sleeps in the next room.

“How’s Ammi?” Tahera asks, despite her resolution not to discuss their mother.

Seema rouses herself. The chamomile has begun to relax her, and the sensation of tautness and solidity as she moves her hands over her stomach has its usual comforting and stabilizing effect. The kitchen, even with Tahera seated across the table from her, glows with a languorous warmth.

“She’s not been sleeping well. I found her awake the other night, sitting here in the dark. I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and she wasn’t in bed. I heard these weird sounds—like a mouse squeaking. I thought she was crying, but no. Just hiccups and jet lag.”

“Has she said anything at all?”

“She’s been telling me about her school days.” Seema and Nafeesa talked for almost three hours that night. “Did you know she used to recite poetry, like you? Urdu poetry. She wanted to be a poet. Used to write and sing ghazals. How come she never sang for us when we were growing up?”

Against the light Tahera looks surprisingly like Nafeesa, the same shape of the head poised birdlike over the same small frame. Seema notices other similarities: the thin, tight lips, the thin nose, the thinning eyebrows. Seema is also reminded of Amina, who she knows will grow up with a strong resemblance to her mother and grandmother. “You two look so alike. I hadn’t noticed before. I haven’t seen you together in so many years. It makes me happy and sad at the same time.”

“Why?” Tahera asks.

“What makes me sad?” Seema repeats. “Isn’t it obvious?”

She suspects in Tahera’s question a suggestion that she has renounced all rights to her family. Over the phone the last two months, the sisters have discussed mainly the logistics of Nafeesa’s visit: when, where, how. Tahera has consulted with their father and other doctors in Chennai, and is a doctor herself, but she has remained tight-lipped about her mother’s condition, answering Seema’s queries with curt, cryptic replies. Seema has since stopped asking. What she knows she’s gleaned from Nafeesa and by consulting her physician friends. “You know Ammi doesn’t have much time, right?”

“Of course I know,” Tahera says.

“We haven’t talked about it.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Did Ammi say how long she’s going to stay?”