Free Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz Page B

mostly just a fashion statement. A turban is anti-fashion.”
    When Mama showed such startling awareness, it only made me more worried for her. For it seemed that her way of living, of always seeing the best in us, was more precarious than I could ever have imagined.

    At a certain point, if you had asked my mother, she would have said that she was lucky. She had lost her parents and her husband, and her dead husband’s brother regarded her as an interloper, and her world, which must have once seemed so open, so boundless and unpredictable, had soon narrowed to the domestic sphere of two inexhaustible little girls. Nevertheless, she considered herself one of the most fortunate people she knew.
    â€œI have loved and been loved, and every day that goes by, I am grateful to be alive.” She explained this to us with relentless patience over supper or during bathtime or while brushing out and braiding our long black hair. Before bed, she sometimes still pointed out her lucky star, that blinking repository of wishes we strained to see through the glass. “When you are all grown up, my own loves, you might find out how blessed we are.”
    In anyone else, it might have seemed as if they were trying to convince themselves. But Mama claiming her own good fortune was like a master artist declaring a work complete, one long, thoughtful pause after flinging the final blotch of paint at an abstract canvas. Saying it made it so, for who was there to say any different?
    But I thought I knew better. The older we got, the smaller Mama seemed, not only because we had grown, but as we needed her less and less, she, in turn, seemed to miss Papa more. She didn’t speak about him any more than she used to, but I could tell she was sad. Her narrative impulse had returned. Whenever she made her spiced tea after breakfast, she began to tell us stories about her parents.
    â€œThey were American,” she said. “Did you know that? From a little town in Florida, so humid you could count the droplets as they hung in the air.”
    â€œBut you’re from Ireland,” said Sadhana.
    â€œI am. They visited Galway on their honeymoon and decided to stay.”
    Mama described how her parents had bought an old house in disrepair and converted it into a tiny hotel they named the Quarry, since the yard was choked with stone. Mama’s father learned how to balance rocks, filling the backyard with virtuoso towers of stones, their massive weights improbably balanced end to end. Inside the hotel, the front and back staircases were lined with Mama’s mother’s clock collection. The floors were covered in multicoloured rag rugs she’d made during three Florida summers squandered inside by the fan.
    â€œI bet you miss it,” said Sadhana. She was better than I was at interjecting during Mama’s reminiscences. Whenever sadness clung to Mama’s voice, I became nervous and silent.
    â€œI do,” said Mama. “Almost as much as your grandmother’s roast chicken.” Mama never seemed to remember that we already knew everything about the chicken.
    The chicken in its ideal form, the sense memory as described by our mother, might have loomed even larger than our grandparents in our collective mythology.
    â€œAt least missing something means you remember it,” said Sadhana, and I looked at her in surprise.
    Mama pulled her close and kissed her brown cheek. “My wise little kittens,” she said.
    Sadhana and I decided to make it. It was my idea. It was going to be Mama’s cheering-up meal once she got back from a yoga retreat weekend she was leading in the country.
    The checkout lady balked when she saw what we were trying to buy. “This is a little out of the ordinary, isn’t it, girls?” Sometimes she teased Mama about how we bought vegetables she didn’t even know the names of. “I have all the normal register codes memorized,” she’d say.