The rain hasn’t paused all week. Mumbai in July gives up on the pretence of dry ground altogether; the pavements gleam, the gulmohars drip, and there is a particular grey light that arrives through the window at half past six in the morning and makes even the most dutiful of us want to turn over and pull the sheet a little higher.
Little Miss agrees entirely. Waking her for school this week has been an act of gentle diplomacy. She burrows. She turns her face into the pillow. She holds on to the last warm minute the way one holds on to the final page of a book you aren’t ready to finish.
I can’t fault her logic. I would stay in bed too, if the week allowed it.
It hasn’t. This has been a week of waiting rooms – of that particular hospital-corridor smell, antiseptic with something faintly metallic underneath, of chairs and numbers called out and the long hush between one appointment and the next. My mother had multiple check-ups, one folding into the other, each a small door opened before the big one.
Her chemotherapy begins on Saturday.
I have written a great many sentences in my life. That one was still difficult to type.
She is nervous. Of course she is, we all are. We are all trying to keep her spirits up, which sounds simple and is not. It means finding the thing that makes her laugh on a day when nothing is funny. It means talking about ordinary matters – the dog, whether the meal has enough salt, what we might cook on Sunday, because ordinary matters are a kind of anchor, and you throw them out and hope they catch.
Thirteen years of reading balance sheets taught me to look for the risk hidden between the lines, to price uncertainty, to hold a buffer against the thing that hasn’t happened yet. None of that training prepares you for this. There is no provision you can make. You simply show up, and then you show up again the next day, and that turns out to be the whole of it.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I have caught a wretched cold; the throat first, then the cough that arrives at two in the morning and refuses to be reasoned with. I’m powering through, as we say, because the week hasn’t offered an alternative. Though I’ll admit, in the interest of honesty, that powering through is a phrase I have used often enough to know exactly what it costs. Ginger and honey and rather too much resolve. Ask me again on Sunday.
The good news and there is good news, there always is, if you go looking, is Little Miss. Once she is up and out and past the sulk of the alarm, the days are hers. School is going well. Therapy is going well. She is enjoying both, and I can see it in the way she comes home: the particular set of her shoulders, the tug of her hand pulling me towards whatever she needs me to see. She tells me everything without saying a word, and after all these years I have become fluent.
So this is the week, laid out plainly. Rain and waiting rooms. A cough that won’t quit. A small girl who does not want to leave her bed, and a mother who is braver than she believes she is.
Saturday is coming. We’ll meet it together, umbrellas and all.
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