On the morning Ma forgot my name, she remembered everything else: the price of onions in 1998, the exact shade of blue Baba wore the day he proposed, the smell of the sea on her first and only trip to Digha. She stood at the balcony, gripping the railing as if the city below might drift away without her weight.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the Kolkata skyline. “The tide is coming in.”
There was no tide, only the neighbour’s laundry stiffening in the winter sun. But I didn’t correct her. I had learned that truth was a fragile thing around Ma.
She had woken early, asking for her mother, long dead. “She said she’d come today,” Ma insisted, smoothing the bedsheet for a guest who would never arrive. “I should have saved some fish curry.”
I boiled rice, salted it the way Ma once taught me, three pinches, never a fourth, “too much salt is arrogance.” When I placed the bowl in front of her, she smiled politely, as if I were a stranger offering help on a train. “Your kindness reminds me of my daughter,” she said. “Poor thing. She takes on too much.”
I swallowed the sob that rose, sharp as a fishbone.
Later, she asked me to take her to the river. “Not the Hooghly, the big one,” she said. “The one that takes things away but sometimes returns them.”
“We’ll go in the evening,” I lied. The doctor said outings confused her. The river would be too much, too loud, too bright, too full of memories she could no longer hold.
Ma nodded, then drifted toward her cupboard, rummaging through old sarees. She pulled out a cream Tangail, its border embroidered with tiny red fish. Baba had bought it for her twenty-seven years ago. “For your birthday,” she said, pressing it into my hands. “You looked beautiful in it.”
“I never wore this, Ma.”
She frowned. “Are you sure? I remember you spinning around the living room.”
She was remembering herself.
That evening, when the city turned gold, she called out again, hesitant, unsure. “Didi? Can you stay a little longer?”
Didi. Not daughter.
I sat beside her anyway. Held her thinning hand. Felt the small tremor running through it, as if somewhere inside her, a tide truly was coming in and with it, the last, tender ruin of recognition.