The Opium Eater and Other Stories [a potpourri set primarily in India]

14. Mother

He had lived in Canada for twenty-five years now, a little less than half his life. He had not only accepted the ways of the new world, but had also liked them. Yet they did not come naturally to him. The telephone, for instance—he liked it, it was so convenient, yet he was uncomfortable conversing with a disembodied voice. It was like talking to a doorknob or to a piece of furniture. He would rather talk face to face with people. The same applied to the English language, which he used most of the time. He could handle it well. His class inspection reports were good; so were the evaluations done by his students. But he knew that English had failed to be incarnated in him. It was a tool of his mind, not a limb.

The next morning, at the college, he was in for another surprise. He could not have anticipated the reaction of the head of the department. He had thought that when he told him he would be away for a whole week in mid-term, the chairman would not like it and a shadow of annoyance would pass over his face. He was going away like this for the second time in sixteen months—first when Mother was taken ill, and now when she had died. But old Fletcher did not react like that at all. Instead, he was sincerely sorry and sympathetic.

'Take ten days off,' he said. 'You don't have to run up to there and rush back immediately. Spend some time with your family. We'll look after your classes and the lab.'

In the evening he was on the plane. He had brought some class work along with him, but his mind would not focus on it. It wandered off to thoughts of Mother.

She had brought on her illness herself by staging a kind of medieval play in the inner courtyard of the house. One of her sons, an eminent Karachi surgeon, had gone to London to attend a medical conference and also to have a medical check-up. He had been having chest pains and he had a lot of doctor friends there from his medical-student days, some of whom were well-known cardiologists now.

He was to come back in a week's time. But the doctors found his heart arteries badly clogged and advised immediate by-pass surgery. That delayed his return. Mother asked why he wasn't back, in answer to which an excuse was made: he was looking into some research in his field of work. But as the days went by, she grew uneasy.

'You are hiding something from me,' she said, which, of course, was denied.

On the day set for the surgery she either had a premonition of danger or read the expression on the faces around her. She was sitting on the divan in the verandah next to her pandan, when all of a sudden she jumped up and ran barefooted and bareheaded out into the courtyard. Her hands were stretched out like a mendicant's, and her dopatta, which she had snatched from her head and shoulders, was draped over her extended arms, with the slack in the middle forming a kind of begging bowl. Her face was lifted to the sky and she was hysterically crying: 'Lord, have pity on my child. Take my life; do anything to punish me, but spare my son.'

The outburst brought everyone racing out of their rooms.

'Mother, what are you doing?' cried Nabija, as she flung her arms around her.

'It's my son's life,' she moaned.

'Rashid Bhai is all right,' said Nabija, and led her back to the verandah. Mother took a few unsteady steps, collapsed and fainted.

There was even greater commotion now, and she was rushed to the hospital. The doctors said she had burst a brain vessel.

She did not regain consciousness for two days. On the third day she revived and stammered out: 'How is he?'

'He is all right,' she was told and it was explained that he had had open-heart surgery which went very well.

'Lord, I thank you a million times,' she murmured, 'a hundred million times.' Then she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.