Ancestral Bones

Chapter 3

Meenu stared at Ma's face. At the brittle skin thinly streched over her skull. At the dark shadows playing across her hollowed out cheeks. Her eyes traced over the fine network of blue veins that fanned across both sides of Ma's face. She knew that the same could be seen throughout the whole of her Ma's body, a blue print tracing the spread of the disease eating away at her body. Spots of ugly bruises, their colour ranging from yellow, green and to bluish black dotted her skin here and there. Meenu had no idea how most of them came to be as she tried her best to be careful when handling Ma. Except for those occasions when Ma had her episodes of spasming fits or when Meenu was having a particularly difficult or exhausting day and she just couldn't quite muster up the patience to handle Ma like one of those gleeming white tea sets with swirling flower patterns that the village chieftains' wife adores so much. Meenu had slowly learned to live with the stab of guilt which comes along with every little new bruise that seems to appear out of nowhere on her Ma's skin.

Short, thin, wiry tufts of dull grey hair spanned around Ma's head towards every which way. Meenu's fingers itched to run her fingers through those brittle locks and to smoothen them out flat against Ma's scalp, though she swallowed the urge to do so knowing that it'd just lead to clumps and clumps of hair being pulled out clean from the scalp. There was only this little bit of hair at the crown of her head and on either sides that still remained. The back of Ma's head had gone completely bold by now. Meenu was loathed to even touch the remaining hair on Ma's head, fearing that they'd crumble away into ashes and get blown away in the wind, blowing away the last vestiges of any resemblance that this waif of a person bore to her Ma, along with it.

Meenu remembered that Ma used to have thick, long and wavy hair just like she did now. Ma used to sit on the front step of the shack with little Meenu sitting in between her bent knees, a polished coconut shell half filled with coconut oil beside her. Ma would dip her finger tips in the oil and then run them through her gleaming raven tresses. She would repeat the process of finger combing her hair with oily fingers, until all her tresses stuck together in one oily mass. Then she'd braid it into a tight rope running down her back and secure its end using a strip of red cloth. It was always a red strip of cloth and never any other colour. Then she'd repeat the same process on Meenu's hair minus the red cloth strip. She'd just leave the ends of Meenu's braid loose without tying it off with a cloth strip. Ma would always tell her village folk tales or hum along to a tune in her head while working on her hair and Meenu always loved listening to the low,husky tone of her mother's voice. When Meenu got older and her younger siblings came along, these mother-daughter moments became few and far between and came to a complete stop once Ari was born.

Ari's birth was the starting point of the gradual decline of Ma's health. At least, that was it according to Meenu's memory. Try as she might, Meenu just couldn't recall a single moment of ill health Ma displayed before Ari's birth. May be she's unconciously trying to put the blame for all of her ill fortune that started with the day Ma collapsed, on some easy target that she could get angry at and lash out if she ever felt the need to. She knows that targeting her anger and displeasure on Ari is unfair, but even so, more than a little part of her couldn't quite let go of the idea that Ari is partly at fault for her misfortune.

A strangled groan followed by a fit of wheezing cough jolted her out of her musings.

Carefully rubbing her Ma's chest with her fingertips, Meenu continued the soothing motion till her mother's agitated self calmed down to shallow, wheezing breaths.

Focusing on the task at hand, Meenu leaned over and carefully grabbed the side of her mother's body furthest away from her and rolled her over, so that the front of her body now lay partially on Meenu's lap. Meenu ignored the sound of distressed whimpers that now joined the sound of wheezing breaths and hurriedly grabbed and dragged away the banana leaf soiled with feces and urine that layed beneath her Ma's lower body, away from the sleeping palette beneath it. Grabbing onto a cloth strip from the pile next to her, she dipped it in the salt water in the bucket and did quick work out of cleaning Ma's backside caked with a mixture of urine and feces. She payed close attention on carefully cleaning the areas of bed sores on Ma's body. Then with a clean, dry cloth she patted dry the moisture on Ma's body. Placing the newly cut banana leaf that she brought in with her on the palette, she again rolled over Ma's body on top of it. Then she adjusted the leaf so that it lay directly below her mother's bottom. Ma's body was shaking by now, incoherent sounds leaving her lips. Taking the corner of her skirt in her hand, Meenu wiped off a trail of saliva dribbling down across the side of one of Ma's cheeks.

She then rubbed Ma's chest until she seemed to settle down a little. Trailing a hand down one of her arms, it came to a stop at the spindly fingers tipped with yellowed, broken nails. Gone were the healthy strong fingers that once held Meenu's hand and lead her around the village. The comforting weight of that hand reduced to almost nothing. The healthy pink crescents of finger nails all but a distant memory.

Meenu had yet to meet her mother's gaze. She almost always avoided her Ma's gaze during her morning routine of taking care of her. Though she knew that, that gaze was often clouded by pain and suffering, sometimes it was full of clarity and awareness with a slight note of accusation to it. Though she didn't believe that she had done anything wrong towards Ma for her to give her such an accusatory look, except for that one time when Meenu just couldn't deal with the mass of Ma's slowly thinning hair and the infestation of lice that took residence within it and decided to hack it all off using the kitchen knife. Ma's weak limbs could only put up so much of a fight against Meenu's much stronger ones and in the end Ma just wept bitter tears, unable to stop Meenu from cutting off all her hair. Though the act must have hurt her Ma's feelings, Meenu didn't do it out of spite or bearing any other ill will towards Ma. She simply did it to take care of Ma the best she could. Surely, Ma must know where her heart lay when she did it, right?

Meenu met her Ma's gaze now. The yellowed whites of her eyes with burst capillaries surrounded a dull muddy brown iris on one eye whereas the other circled around a pale yellowish green iris. Only a reflection of its former vivid colours of earthy brown and bright forest green now. A weak reflection of the beautiful trait that branded Meenu as her mothers' daughter. They were clouded with pain and stared unseeingly at her. She released a breath that she had been unknowingly holding onto, in a long woosh of exhalation. Her Ma wasn't giving her one of those accusatory looks today. Meenu felt relieved.

Dusting herself off, Meenu stood up and walked over to the kitchen area to get things ready for breakfast.