Mother, False

The girl grows overnight after her mother dies–two extra hands emerge from her back, like the Hindu goddess Durga. Her forehead is lashed with lines, her mother’s curses roll on the surface of her tongue. They fall and clog the drains. The girl’s extra hands work as a plunger, extend to the fridge to pick items, fan air on humid days. She starts wearing her mother’s clothes–oversized skirts and blouses and a stained apron, her eyes deliberately keen like a hawk’s. From the park bench, she watches her siblings: the six-year-old and the toddler on the swing, up and down the slides, the teenager on the monkey bars, his scrawny arm barely strong enough to hold on, his fingers slipping. They laugh and run. There’s love in their voices but not enough to call her Ma.

Before her mother died, the girl considered herself an atheist, but now she lights an incense and an earthen lamp every evening, bows her head in front of the metal idols of Krishna and Vishnu lit in orange glow. She whispers OM a hundred and eight times like her mother used to. She wipes the dust off her mother’s framed photo taken at her wedding–her chin lowered, her eyes gazing into her hennaed palms lifted close to her face, the light coming at a slant on her cheeks and forehead, reflecting from the edges of her fingers. She looks radiant unlike how the girl remembers her when she died. But the girl decides this is how she’ll think of her mother, beautiful, confident like she knows her mind.

Most nights, her father falls asleep on the couch, an empty bag of potato chips crunching under his frame. Double chinned and balding. TV on, volume down. Documentaries on wars and planes. Natural disasters. Sometimes he pours a double scotch, sips, and watches the twisted branches of the banyan in the patio, the hinged wings of the warbler, a slow grief accumulating on his face. Then he takes out his handkerchief and wipes his brow. The front door is always unlatched because he goes out and comes in at odd times. The girl starts calling him by his name.

Days splinter. Her hands smell of garlic and garam masala, fingers curved inwards because of constantly holding things. Sometimes, the girl feels she was born a mother. The feeling is so old that her young reflection in the mirror reminds her she is still a girl. Her transformation strange as the fact that they haven’t been out of monsoon, but the wind only brings in the dust and debris through the cracks of the windows and the space below the doors. The sky is crowded with clouds like an unmade bed and rain has left them as all breathing things do. To conserve resources, the girl showers once a week, the water muddy as it drapes around her. The toddler sleeps curved like a bean, his nose pressed into her neck, trying to sniff the semblance between their mother and her. When the teenager plays the violin, suddenly off-key, she reminds him to keep the music simple, carve out the sour notes and start again. At night, her extra hands shuffle through the dark, reach the faces of her siblings and run fingers through their hair, feel the rush of their breath blowing north, press their foreheads with blessings. The girl has varicose veins because of standing too long in the kitchen preparing dal and rotis, scrubbing the greased pressure cooker and the karahi. She chases the kids in her dreams.

Sometimes the girl’s mother appears in the doorway between the kitchen and the patio. “No help will come for you, you’ll only grow hands, one pair from another, light year after light year, and still, it will never be enough,” she says in her usual high-pitched sing-song voice, continues with her tense sips of air as if she’s still breathing.

The girl massages her mother’s scalp−there are dead insects, dried leaves, dirt, as if it’s a little ritual to make her feel at home. Her extra hands swat the flies. Steam from a pot of boiling rice curls in their hair like cobwebs. She offers her a bowl of stir-fried veggies, boiled eggs. Her mother’s mouth opens like a dark, wide hole where all her children can fit in. She swallows the food without chewing. “In afterlife, there’s no metabolism, only hunger,” she says. From the drawn curtains, the sun pokes their eyes. The girl touches her mother’s blue-cooled skin, love handles around her waist, a rice-bowl cavity of her chest and senses a pulse−not enough to be a heartbeat, only a memory of a life that once was.

 “I’ll never be whole to reincarnate as long as all my kids are living,” complains her mother, her fingers fluttering like wings. For a moment, everything is quiet, then a hush of her mother’s sigh like a day turning over a page. Her father walks into the kitchen, “You are talking to yourself,” he says and stares at the girl. Her mother half-smiles listening to the sound of her husband’s deep-throated voice, the slight dark between his lips that separates memory from loss. She watches him walk into his room and close the door behind him. Then she plucks the girl’s extra, worn-out hands like two bad teeth.

“What would I do after the children grow up and leave,” the girl asks her mother.

“You will raise your shortcomings as your own child, one that will always stay,” she claims.

The girl looks at her mother’s glinted eyes. She has so many questions, but is unable to find the right words.

“Women have a hard time in this world, but I have high hopes for you,” she says and pinches the girl’s cheeks for good measure before she disappears. The girl feels all the tears inside her rocket like bubbles in a soda bottle. She lets herself weep, needful and gasping. Until she is left with hiccups. Until her face is glazed milky in the moonlight. She wipes the snot from the tail of her apron and unties it. The holes her extra pair had left feel hollow like a contracted womb of a hand-me-down-mother-who-never-birthed-a-child, who craves her mother. She wraps her discarded hands in an old towel and places them under her bed. At night, she hears them scratch the floor, crawling back and forth as if unsure what to look for. How to search another source of blood, another body, another mother to mobilize them.

Originally published in Post Road and Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc 2024).