To you your path, and to me mine—

35

Grandmother, where are you? What’s keeping you? Please return soon. There’s hope yet: there’s life in us still, and blood still trickles through your daughter’s veins.

Her hand, still warm and capable of grasping, would, if it were cold and in the grave, so haunt your days and chill your remaining nights that you would wish your own heart dry of blood, just so in her veins red life might stream again and your conscience be calmed.

See, here it is—she holds out her hand, she cries out to you.

36

My mother’s last conscious moments with me: She struggles up in the dark of her bedroom, unable to comprehend what has woken her. The liquid warmth of her blood is a shock, but so familiar from her childhood that she presumes herself in Chennai, waking up to a familiar if infrequent deluge.

“Abba,” she calls out, “Ammi—”

The blood has soaked through her clothes to the sheets, and she pulls her knees in to escape the wet patch, even though in the dark she can’t make out its extent. But her own body prevents her, a protrusion growing out of her, solid, globe-like, unexpected. It’s then she panics, awash in realization, one thought screaming through her mind: Ishraaq!

For one long paralyzed minute she wills Bill to be here, to help her out of this puddle of blood and carry her away, as he’d done once before. But, of course, Bill is no longer by her side, and neither is Leigh, and Tahera has left, and she’s sent Fiaz away and locked her mother out. Her father is oceans away. She’s all alone, like she’d always feared.

She fumbles for the switch of the bedside lamp. Her hand strikes a vase and sends it crashing down—first the splash of water, then the shattering, loud in the confines of the room. She forgoes the hunt for light and lurches out of bed, her only thought now to get out of the room toward help—for her baby, her baby!—for whom she would bear the pain of stepping on glass, though she tries to avoid where she expects the shards to be.

But it is the water that undoes her, slimy from the stems of calla lilies soaking in it for two days. The first hobbled step on the slippery hardwood floor, and her foot slides. She teeters for a moment, for the second time in a week, poised as if time itself has paused, and then her world pitches backward. Her hands flail, seeking a reprieve, something to intervene, but this time there is no sister to pull her to safety. Her head strikes the bedside table.

Her last gesture before she loses consciousness: one hand strokes feebly the dome of my world, offering and seeking comfort.

Oh, that each moment could be an age. Then we could live long in little space, and Time itself would be annihilated.