What has bothered her since learning Ammi’s condition: her easy acceptance of Ammi’s impending death. She’s tried to tell herself that as a doctor she’s become accustomed, if not inured, to death. But this can’t be totally true, for she could never, not for a moment, imagine Amina dying without dying a thousand deaths herself.

Over the many years of her medical practice, she has encountered death many times. Patients die—parents, brothers, and sisters, even children. And she’s always been perplexed and ashamed at wanting—no, needing—to be present when the relatives gathered around the body, envious of both the dead and the surviving.

She understands that envy now. She’s always been moved by the portrait of Keats on his deathbed in Rome, ever since she found it in a biography in her father’s library years ago. It was painted by Keats’s friend and caregiver. Eyes closed, head sunk in a pillow, eyelashes resting on his gaunt cheeks, Keats looks peaceful, a tender curve to the line of his lips. The portrait radiates love. Only someone who loved him could have painted such a portrait; only someone who was loved could be its subject. So would she like to be watching, so would she like to be watched over.

For how can one know the extent of one’s love until confronted with its loss? How can one know the extent to which one is loved without witnessing the grief of those who profess it?

This must be why she almost welcomes her mother’s death; this is why she’s vexed by her mother’s stoicism, her steadfast refusal to shed tears. A wordless, nameless sorrow seizes Tahera. Not for anything in the world would she want her relationship with her children, especially Amina, to end up this way.

Her mother still holds her hand, though she’s returned to her previous concern. “So you’ll help me cook for Seema’s friends?”

“Yes, Ammu, of course I’ll help.” Ammu—as she calls Amina at times, as she used to call Ammi at times, something only she did, never Seema. Tahera pats her mother’s hand.

Her mother still seems unconvinced, her smile brittle and uncertain. “Tara, it’s not what you think. I had to come here, to San Francisco—to make amends, before—” Nafeesa’s lips move as though rehearsing what to say next.

Tahera touches her fingers to Nafeesa’s lips, silencing her. “Poor Ammu. Why are we always so hard on ourselves?”

Ammi needs her: surely that’s enough. Why does she need any other sign of her mother’s love?

49

Monday morning, it’s raining in San Francisco, a rain that gives the impression that it has not descended from the sky—one can’t see the sky for the fog—but that the city itself, its buildings, its trees, its very air, is made out of water. Every surface, budded with tiny droplets, catches whatever gleams of light there are—headlights and brake lights, traffic lights, lights in storefronts and offices and apartments—and reflects them back in a ghostly glimmer. San Francisco is a dream city in this rain. The three women in the car, on their way to what could be Seema’s last appointment with her obstetrician before her delivery, are drawn into its lulling embrace.