How it dawned on Mother that massaging her mother-in-law’s head was exactly what she would need, it wasn’t clear to her. It wasn’t like the random thoughts that often interrupted her in the middle of her morning bhajans, nor was it the sort of thing that came to her mind when she watered the plants she had been neglecting in the pots on the windowsill. She was watching one of the random serial reruns on Doordarshan, and her mother-in-law was sitting there in her wheelchair. Her mother-in-law’s face was completely blank. No movement in the eyes, no sudden tension in the face when one of the maids passed her while cleaning. Nothing. Her mother-in-law kept her face tilted, not out of desire but because she no longer had the energy in the muscles of her neck to keep it straight. Her eyelids flickered between open and shut. Drool hung out of her mouth and stained the neckline of her kurti.
Mother didn’t have the best relationship with her mother-in-law, and she often thought about this during the long moments of the day when they now had to interact. When Mother’s marriage was being arranged to Father, her mother-in-law constantly made comments about the acne scars on Mother’s face. When Mother gained weight during her pregnancy, her mother-in-law referred to her as ‘the elephant’. And once she had had her child, her mother-in-law constantly interrupted Mother, carrying the child without even asking her, taking the child without Mother to random parks in their suburb or random neighbours’ houses to meet whenever Father and Mother visited them in Baroda. And whenever her mother-in-law phoned, she would barely talk to Mother, and if she did, it was always criticism.
Your dhokla isn’t moist and wet. When dhokla comes into the mouth, it should be soft like cotton. Yours hits the back of the throat like mud.
Mother knew it was normal for mothers-in-law to be hard on their daughters-in-law, and so whenever Mother prayed, she worked hard to forgive her.
At the same time, she couldn’t help but look at the way things had turned out. She wanted to punish her mother-in-law by leaving her in her faeces rather than cleaning her the moment the smell of her dampening diapers wafted through the halls.
This had been Mother’s state of mind for the past few weeks. Either Mother or the house-help took turns feeding her mother-in-law, changing her mother-in-law, wheeling her around the park right outside of their apartment complex, or parking her in front of the television, where she would watch the serials for hours and hours with no discernible thought. Mother could not help but imagine how high the electricity bill was going to be this month. The television was constantly on, and it would certainly add a thousand or two more rupees to the bill. Father would get mad and complain where all this extra expenditure was coming from, and Mother wouldn’t have the energy to remind him that it had been his decision to bring his mother-in-law home and park her in the house with Mother all day, while he went out and worked.
Mother observed the bald spots on her mother-in-law’s head, noticing how much weaker her hair was. Mother felt bad for her mother-in-law, especially given that, in a decade, Mother’s hairline was going to look very similar to hers. Mother’s own hair had already started falling out in patches whenever she combed. She arranged it as best as she could when she was in front of the mirror so that it would look long and wavy, but there were many hairless patches on her scalp no matter how much Himalaya shampoo she used or ayurvedic hair treatments she tried.
‘Janvi,’ Mother called the youngest maid’s name. ‘Get Auntie’s wheelchair. Put it in front of me.’
Janvi bobbed her head to affirm, though when she brought the wheelchair, she put it to the side of Mother, by the empty space on the couch where her feet had been resting, not directly in front of her. Mother yelled, ‘Janvi, I said to put it in front of me. Put it in front! Right here. Haan.’
Janvi did as she was asked. Mother put one foot around her mother-in-law’s wheelchair and sat up so that her body encompassed it.
‘Now, get me the coconut oil from my bedroom.’
Janvi went up the stairs and then yelled, ‘Auntie, I am not finding it.’
‘It is on my bathroom counter! Look next to the blow dryer.’
Janvi did not respond for some time, which did not surprise Mother. Either she was inefficiently looking, or she was paying attention to the text messages in her phone. Mother yelled, ‘Janvi, what are you doing?’
She heard the sound of some things being thrown around, which only worried Mother as her coconut oil was in a very obvious location.
‘Janvi, I am coming up!’
Just as Mother was about to go upstairs, Janvi came down. She handed Mother the blue bottle of coconut oil.
Mother was so annoyed she could have thrown it at her. But Mother knew from past experiences that throwing things at Janvi did nothing. The girl was only fifteen, a Kutchi girl who had moved to Ahmedabad with her significantly older husband and had no idea how anything outside of small village life worked. No matter how much Mother scolded her or hit her, none of her bad behaviours changed.
Mother returned to her previously assumed seated position. She squeezed some coconut oil into her hands. She pressed her hands together, rubbed them to the point that they felt hot. The white, thick, viscous oil melted in her hands and became transparent. She rubbed her hands into her mother-in-law’s scalp.
At first, her mother-in-law seemed anxious, violated. She turned her head, muttering something in a broken sputtering of Gujurati Kachhi and Hindi. She raised her hand up like she was protecting herself from a beating. As she did so, her fingers tensed, clawed, then vibrated, still up in the air.
Mother focused on how she was rubbing her head. Hair fell out at her touch, but she knew that oil would stimulate hair growth. She pressed the oil into the scalp andkneaded her fingers back and forth in a circular motion. She went up and down, down and up, in the way that her mother had once done to her.
Her mother-in-law started to relax. The tension in her face started to ebb. Her upraised hand still vibrated, perhaps because the part of her mind that controlled that response was no longer responding. But the air around it changed; it was no longer reacting to anything.
Her mother-in-law started to speak.
‘Bah-bah. Bah-bah.’
It was just those two syllables, said over and over again, in different tones. Mother tried to answer.
‘Do you like my massage sasu? Does it feel good?’
‘Haan,’ her mother-in-law said, and there was a sudden warmth in her energy. Her face was not smiling, but Mother felt that her mother-in-law was emoting the happiness of a smile, at least through her body.
Her mother-in-law tried to coo some other sentences. Mother felt like she was trying to tell a story, but she lacked the language to communicate. The random sputter of attempted words continued for some time, but eventually her mother-in-law gave up. The massage was probably too relaxing. Her eyes closed slowly. Her mouth drifted fully agape. Mother heard snoring. That was when she stopped the massage and parked her mother-in-law’s wheelchair back at its appointed spot in front of the television.
Her mother-in-law was sleeping, her face fully at peace. Mother could not help but smile. It reminded her of the way her infant son had looked when he tired himself of crying, resting at the end of his tirade with the deepest of sleeps. How interesting it was to Mother, this full circle, that the human being started so helpless as a baby and ended life equally as helpless in their last years on Earth. This was why it was important that, whether one liked it or not, one had to do their service to their elders once they reached that time. Someone had helped Mother, after all, when she was too young to be aware of who she was. And now that the mother of the man she loved the most had become that way, big in the body but tiny in the mind, she had to pay it back.
Mother went to the kitchen to work on her cooking for the evening. She hadn’t made any prayers to Bhagawan, and yet she felt a strength in her mind, an assurance that she would be of good service to her mother-in-law even if she didn’t like her that much. It was of importance to ensure that she reached this final stage of life as peacefully as she was entering it.