A Different Keepsake

Flash fiction by Shanti Chandrasekhar

You’re in a temple, seeking solace. You reach into your tote bag for your checkbook, for the habitual hundred-and-one-dollar offering. You drop something; the five-thousand-dollar voided check your brother sent back.

You find yourself in Delhi again. It’s five weeks since you returned to Chicago, but it happens often. Delhi.

Images flash, words echo. Your mother in bed at home, waiting for someone to sit her up, to talk to her. Ma is ninety-one, and not likely to recover from the stroke.

Ma’s face lights up when your brother arrives from a neighboring state. Your presence is not as important as her son’s. It doesn’t bother you. How could it? You’ve always been your father’s daughter, unaware of your mother’s strength, her stoicism.

Your brother’s wife combs Ma’s hair. The two of you sing to her. Ma starts to sing, too. Your voices ebb and flow on different scales. Yours a little higher than your sister-in-law’s, your mother’s low and hoarse. You sing together, devotional songs from years ago you’re surprised you still remember.

#

Having lost the concept of time, Ma demands food minutes after she has eaten, only to be scorned by those who have their faculties intact. She plans the menu for all meals even in a state of half-consciousness, much to the annoyance of those who handle the household chores now.

Shop, plan, cook. That’s all she has done all her adult life. Given, given, given.

She craves something spicy one evening. That savory mixture snack. You bring a pack from the corner store.

Your niece’s four-year-old daughter snatches the packet. “I want that!”

You look from her to your mother. From one stubborn girl to the other.

“She shouldn’t be eating spicy things,” your niece says of your mother.

“Mixture?” Ma gives you an impatient look. “Mixture!”

You look away.

#

Before leaving for the airport, you sit on Ma’s bed. She’s in a blue-and-white printed nightgown. You find it odd and charming at once. Until now, you’ve never seen her in anything but a saree.

She drifts in and out of sleep, or consciousness, you’re not sure which. “You’re in the airplane,” she says.

You hold Ma’s frail frame in a gentle embrace, afraid to hug her tight. She kisses your cheek. Twice. Something you couldn’t have expected. You recall her pat on your back in response to your goodbye hug. Every time.

Memories from your childhood run in your mind like some old videos you haven’t watched in a while. Ma telling you God-stories, teaching you prayer songs, showing you how to draw a lotus flower. You remember it all. Except being kissed by your mother. You wonder if she ever did when you were a baby. Display of affection has never been part of your family.

You leave behind a check for Ma’s care and fly back. At Frankfurt, while you wait for the connecting flight to O’Hare, you get that phone call. The one you knew would come, but not this soon.

#

“Stop sending checks for Mother’s Day, what will I do with all that money?” Ma has always said. But this time, when she must’ve sensed she wouldn’t be around until next May, you wonder why she says, “You’ll continue sending me that check?”

#

You crumple the check marked “void.” The one your brother never got a chance to use. You slide a five-hundred-dollar check into the box before Goddess Durga’s statue. The one you would’ve sent to Ma this Mother’s Day.

The scent of incense is identical to the one that always drifted out of Ma’s prayer room. The temple priest chants prayers in Sanskrit you barely understand. From the brass plate in his hand, he gives you a carnation. You touch the red flower to your forehead and cheeks, a gesture of accepting the goddess’s blessings.

While you drive back home, the softness of the petals lingers on your cheeks.

Every time, you return from India with the image of your mother’s face, that last glimpse you catch from the car driving you away to the airport. And every time you’ve wondered if that’s the image you’d live with forever. This time, she couldn’t be on the front porch waving goodbye. This time, she kisses you; twice. This time, you return with your mother’s kisses.

---

Shanti Chandrasekhar is a Maryland-based writer whose work appears in The Gravity of the Thing, Please See Me, Persimmon Tree, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Literary Mama, among other publications. Writing gives her a deeper understanding of life, human relationships, and her own self.

Image:

Smoke by Dibakar Roy