And his father had just died, leaving him as the theoretical head of the family. Following the ineluctable laws of Bengali hierarchies, he was now in charge of their family of three, responsible for his mother and his younger brother. It was this that ate at him more than his father’s death, this swift alighting of burdens and responsibilities when he was so unprepared, so green. How was he going to provide for them? On that deceptively small question, everything foundered. Families were based more on subtle ties of provider and receiver than on any intangible emotional bonding. If he had been ten or twelve at this moment, he wouldn’t have had to think about all this; something would have been arranged by the other adults in the household until he came of age. But he couldn’t hope for it now. If he could become invisible, or just cease to exist, be whisked away to a different country, a different continent. . It wasn’t the first time he had had such fantasies but now, looking distractedly out of the taxi window at a group of strutting pigeons pecking at some spilled grain on the roadside, at two slum children just sitting and staring blankly at traffic and passersby, their eyes opaque and unreadable, he felt guilty about letting thoughts of money enter his head. He should be thinking of his mother, her well-being, not costing it down or ledgering family relationships.
All those fears of his mother dying and leaving him alone were really his fears of a parent in hospital with no money to pay for medical bills, doctors, nurses, medicines, tests. But for now his pockets were heavy with borrowed and given money. He had been sharp enough to grab the bulging wallet which his mother had held so close to her in her week of mourning, a wallet filled with money from relatives, his own friends, Aritra’s friends and their parents, people who instinctively knew that that would be the greatest necessity now that her husband, the family’s sole earner, was dead. Soumik’s mother, Uncle Adip, Mrinal, all had come forward with generous wads of cash, which they had embarrassedly pushed into her hands, or had bypassed her altogether and had given Ritwik and Aritra instead. Taking possession of his mother’s wallet had come naturally; as soon as the taxi had arrived outside the front door, he had picked it up from beside the bed. If he had been less alert, it would almost certainly have been stolen by one of his uncles and, when asked, they would have denied ever having set their eyes upon it. It was the story of their lives in Grange Road. It had been clever of him to get in there first and prevent the money from going missing. That opportune seizing brought temporary redemption from more begging, more debts (he knew the money would be spent in a matter of days) and more shame. At least for now, he wouldn’t have to call on Mrinal for a handout for the first things — the doctor’s home visit, the taxi fare to the hospital, the admission charges.
The hospital was new, swanky, and built and run with the dirty money of Marwaris. Everything seemed to happen swiftly and efficiently here, to Ritwik’s amazement. He had grown up with news coverage of innumerable hospitals in Calcutta where cats roamed and pissed in the wards, dogs came in and walked away with newborns or wandered around licking the wounds and sores of people lying there with no hope of escape. But here there were silent lifts and the white noise of functioning state-of-the-art medical appliances. The insistent air-conditioning goosepimpled his thin arms, the floors shone with the zing and ardour of the new. Money changed hands as he signed the requisite forms — he noticed there was a clause absolving the hospital of all responsibility should the worst happen and wondered if it was true of hospitals everywhere — and his mother was wheeled away by uniformed nurses and attendants to an intensive care unit on a floor high up in the building.
Tabbu’s obtrusive altruism now took the form of an iterative chanting of, ‘Nothing’s happened, everything’s all right, everything will be OK’, and Ritwik started counting on the digits of his fingers how many times he repeated the saving formula. Both he and Tabbu were chain-smoking in the car park just inside the entrance of the hospital, as if what had happened had released them into a new permissiveness. For Ritwik, the act of smoking in front of his uncles still carried a minor charge of flouting accepted codes of behaviour: it was almost a dare on his part, a gauntlet thrown down to his uncles. He had already begun to show them that, just because his father was dead and his mother in a perhaps terminal coma in hospital, he wasn’t going to be bossed around by them. It was best to make things clear from the very beginning. But the cleanly triumphant feeling he had been hoping to be rewarded with didn’t quite arrive. Instead, it was clouded by tiny motes of betrayaclass="underline" his mother had worked so hard to ensure that the boys didn’t fall prey to the bad habits that so characterised her brothers and here he was, indulging in the very thing she had tried to protect him from, to score cheap points. The cigarettes left a woolly burn along his throat and lungs. He had a taste of the futility of her life and his heart turned over.
Ritwik carefully folded away the very short encounter with the doctor the next morning in the hope of deliberately expunging it some day in the future. Everyone assembled at the hospital awaited the doctor’s arrival with varying degrees of apprehension. They had all been told who the doctor was and their irritatingly frequent questions — when will he come down? when will he let us know? will he be long? — had been answered with exemplary patience.
When the self-possessed doctor did arrive, everyone rushed to him like pigs to the feeding farmer. Ritwik composed his face into an expressionless nothing as the doctor said, ‘We can’t say anything with absolute certainty at the moment except that we have to keep her under observation for seventy-two hours. She’s in a coma and we can’t say when she will come around. Obviously, the cerebral stroke she has suffered is huge and extremely serious. Both sides of her body are completely paralysed and even if she does recover, she will remain paralysed, in all probability, for the rest of her life. Of course, that might well change. . We need to conduct a few more tests — an MRI scan of the brain, a CAT scan. .’ Fluent, articulate, utterly detached.
Ritwik nodded impassively as the onslaught of information battered through his insides. He recalled Dida, his grandmother, another semi-paralysed stroke survivor who had hobbled her bitter way around the flat, skulking in corners and shadows, occasionally beaten up by her own sons, a twisted and hating figure, till her second cerebral stroke had sent her into a two-month coma from which she ultimately never recovered. The doctor’s words burnt out a clearing in his head: like all clearings, it contained both ash and space.
The next day, during visiting hours, he took the lift high up to his mother’s room. She seemed conscious, her eyes opening wide as if she had just woken up from a long sleep and was having considerable trouble easing herself into the unfamiliarity surrounding her; the world of her sleep still inflected the hospital room. She struggled to get up, looked at her son, and said, ‘Home, I want to go home. Why am I here? What is this place?’
Ritwik answered, ‘Yes, of course, you’ll go home, but you’re not very well at the moment, Ma. As soon as you’re better, we’re going to take you home.’ He spoke very slowly, articulating each word separately and distinctly, as if he was simplifying something complex to an inquisitive child.