Free A Sister's Promise by Renita D'Silva Page B

with Ma for keeping such a big thing to herself, not sharing it with me. Especially when she has always stressed the importance of truth, taught me to prize honesty, and to live my life by it. Especially when I have always believed there were no secrets between us, that she was as transparent with me as I have always been with her, which is why I pretended to be asleep just now, so I didn’t have to lie to her, by having to show a composure I do not feel. I did not want to show her how terrified I am, and for her to have to deal with that as well as the fact of my accident, and the frantic rooting around for funds to pay for my dialysis, and the desperate search for a kidney donor and the very real possibility of my considerably shortened lifespan.
    Now though, I am relieved that there is something to divert me from this living nightmare. I am pleased to have something else to focus on other than my uncooperative, wrecked body.
    I pick up the first letter, written in Ma’s elegant handwriting.
    ‘Ma, I know you wanted to be a doctor but you would never have passed muster, not with this beautiful handwriting,’ I had said once.
    She had looked up at me, her eyes puzzled, scrutinising me over her glasses.
    ‘Aren’t doctors’ notes notoriously illegible?’
    And she had laughed that cascading laugh of hers.
    She has told me she had to give up studying medicine when her parents died, as she was unable to concentrate on her studies and failed her exams. Is that a lie too?
    I suppose I will find out; the answers to all my questions right here in these letters, in her words. I remember her holding my hand and helping me form letters as a child. She had sat with me patiently every day until my handwriting became neat enough to pass muster. The teachers at school would mark my work but she would make me redo it until it was up to her standards.
    ‘Presentation is important,’ she said, again and again, ‘whether you are cooking, or dressing up to go to school, or writing. Your handwriting says so much about the person you are.’
    My fine handwriting, (although not as lovely as hers), is thanks to her.
    I look at the first letter, my eyes burning. These are letters my ma has written to her mother.
    I balk, not wanting to go further than ‘Dearest Ma’, but my eyes drag down the page, swallowing her words like brinjal soaking up oil in the cooking pot. She has given me permission after all.
    Feeling like a voyeur, I lean back, my head nestling amongst the drug-permeated, linctus-scented pillows and start to read in earnest.

SHARDA—CHILDHOOD
RECIPE FOR A HAPPY FAMILY
    Extract from the school report for Sharda Ramesh, Upper Kindergarten, Age 4.
    Sharda is a quiet, shy, eager-to-please child who is a delight to have in the class. She is very hardworking and extremely bright also, being proficient at reading and writing, and showing a natural aptitude for numbers.

    Dearest Ma,
    When I think back to my childhood, this is what I remember:
    The dark hut, which Da had to bend to enter, with its soot-etched kitchen and the one room where we lived and ate and slept, the mud walls which cracked in summer and leaked during the monsoons, the hay which dripped in the rains, and we had to keep pans throughout the house to catch the drips, the tangy odour of disintegrating manure, the rotting stink of the woodlouse-ridden beams barely holding the thatch up. We would eat our meals to the music of the rain tangoing on the roof and drumming onto the pans. The smell of wet hay tickled my dreams.
    The toilet and the cramped cubicle where we washed were in a lean-to outside—that coconut frond topped and walled shed—where the dog slept and where the coconut husks and twigs were stored. If I close my eyes now, I can almost inhale the smell of hot water and soap and dog and kindling and contentment as you lobbed warm mugfuls of water onto my wriggly body and scrubbed it clean of the adventures of the day.
    Every once in a fortnight or so,