“Do I look so old that I need a wheelchair?” asks Ma, my eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law, dodging the well-meaning grabbing hands at the hospital gates on a May morning in Bangalore. Another steel-haired old woman is ensnared by the wheelchair assistants, and we shuffle backward to let them pass.

“I do look like a patient,” it dawns on Ma. “I look like that lady, no?” she says, in a version of the whispered Do-I-look-as-fat-as-that-woman? query mothers often pose to their daughters.

Ma’s bony hand grips my forearm as we do a sort of unintentional three-legged walk. Our excruciatingly boring pace makes the corridor to the emergency room more interminable. I imagine Ma as a young doctor in the ’70s—long black braid, spectacles with looping silvery cords, crisp saree and coat—having not yet encountered her future husband, also a medical resident, in a morbid meet-cute over a dead body at a hospital much like this one, but in New Delhi. Half a century later, her husband, my father-in-law, Baba, already wheelchaired to the end of this hallway, is not a charismatic orthopedic surgeon in his operating theater anymore, but a frail old man in an ER.

My husband and I have become sudden parents to elderly toddlers. If we leave the kids alone long enough, they invent new and creative ways to hurt themselves: by refusing to drink enough water, or not showering without coaxing, or by secretly contracting a UTI and becoming so confused that they wake us in a panic in the middle of the night wondering who the strange person next to them is (as Ma did last night), or slipping and bumping their head on the way to the toilet and have to be rushed to the ER (as Baba did this morning). So, we take turns; I’m on Ma-duty, while he’s got Baba.

And then, we exchange our charges. I smile reassuringly, but the young mustachioed man’s verbal efforts to get Baba up from the wheelchair and onto the motorized cot awaken the ego slumbering behind illness and pain.

“I understand you. I speak English. I also know Hindi, Bengali, and Sanskrit,” challenges Baba, rising proudly out of the chair. He’s insistent in a way that confounds the poor assistant. It’s a familiar script; I can handle it, so I settle him in bed with the back raised to a comfortable angle.

The air here is sanctified with soporific pings and beeps, hushed medical discussions between uniformed nurses and plainclothes doctors, cushioned footsteps and rustling fabrics, patients arranged in elevated, white-curtained rows, reverently awaiting their turn. Preempting combative questions, I remind Baba about the half-a-golf-ball-sized bump on his forehead: all we’re here to do is get a scan to rule out any internal injuries. Someone comes by to ask his name. He hears this and wants to know mine.

“Indu, what?” he presses encouragingly, like a kindly gentleman asking after a new acquaintance at a party.

“Same as your last name, Baba,” I lie, having never changed my maiden name. “I’m your daughter-in-law, married to your younger son. He’s filling entry forms just outside with Ma. He will be back soon.”

A squat, round-faced woman asks me to leave. “No attenders allowed inside the ER. We will call you.”

I don’t move, panicked at the prospect of leaving Baba alone and confused. Sticking to her cause, the manager lady invokes some nurses to her aid. I stand my ground, but I don’t know how to do it without sounding small and mean and entitled. My husband would have charmed them.

“He has dementia,” I repeat, apologetically. “He needs someone familiar to keep him calm.”

We negotiate for a bit, and I’m awarded the concession to wait with Baba until my husband returns, before they start any procedures. I narrate the fall story a few different ways to pass the time, aware of the eyes on me, and each time Baba is mildly surprised.

My husband and I exchange charges again, and to my relief, I’m back in an unperformative corner with Ma. The waiting room is a hasty addition, a glass and aluminum outcropping with a false ceiling attached to the side of the ER entrance, to belatedly enclose the anxious hordes they forgot to account for when a paying customer comes unwillingly in.

We’re seated on one of those triple seats attached together in a row, our toes gripping the tiled floor. I have already offered Ma drinking water, hurriedly packed snacks, and an anticipatory trip to the restroom, and been indulgently refused. She’s all held-breath and taut, so different from her usual humming, rocking, chatting self.

Twenty minutes later my husband reappears—my teddy bear wading through a collection of some other child’s rag dolls—with updates. Paperwork done, payments made, medical history shared, IV drips started, CT scan soon. He includes Ma in his calm delivery, but his voice is heavy, as if we’re the parents shielding our children from the terror of mortality.

We settle into the torpid uncertainty of the waiting room. Each face here distinct: the shape of the eyebrows, the color of the skin. Each pair of shoes—rubber, plastic, leather—contributes to a confusing clash of patterns and mismatched T-shirts. Everyone so separate that I cannot imagine them to be a crowd. Each immersed in their own narrowed world, connected to their person inside by an invisible thread; some perched at the mouth of the room and strung on the edge of their seats, others against the farthest wall, heads thrown back in slack-jawed repose (or surrender?), and finally, the middle benchers clenched around their phones, bent necks waiting to snap up at their cues.

Every time an “attender” is summoned, we all perk up like dogs called the wrong name and uncertain how to respond. A shuttle game of eyes ripples through the not-crowd, scanning for the missing one, the one too slow to respond, the one lucky to be called while the rest of us are still in purgatory—until the chosen one suddenly stumbles upward from a catatonic reverie.

Opposite us, against the wall closest to the exit, a small woman with flashing gold piercings—wearing the kind of painfully bright yellow that mothers of dark-skinned daughters warn against—takes up a whole three-seater bench, sitting cross-legged on the middle seat, bags on either side, footwear kicked off below. She’s profoundly unperturbed, like a marigold floating at the edge of a collected pool of storm-drain debris, the soft ink of her skin stealing the light of the whole room like a black hole and shining it back through the burning paper wrapper of her saree. I imagine she would look the same if she were seated at the boarding gate for a delayed flight to visit her daughter in a foreign country or summoned to the local police station to give key evidence to solve a murder investigation.

“Atindraswamy attender!” the squat, round-faced lady calls, scanning our faces.

We flinch, but that’s only half of Baba’s name. The other half is made up or mixed up with someone else’s. A few minutes later, possibly after some backstage consultations, she returns—

“Atindranath attender!” There it is. My husband leaps up, even though he’s running on a few hours of sleep and fumes; he disappears behind the ER doors.

Ma and I make for an alleged café somewhere in the building, hoping for something hot and sweet to stanch our worried hungering as the hospital clocks creep to noon on a day too rushed for breakfast.

I escort her like a gondolier steering a crystal boat through the peopled canals, ever mindful of the buffeting wake of gurneys and wheelchairs. We glide carefully into the café area. A senior doctor discusses patients with a gaggle of residents and interns. A school of women in trilling anklets and clinking glass bangles swims by, speaking into tiny cellphones fished out from woven-
plastic baskets. A sweaty clutch of men in rubber chappals sips moodily from short paper cups. The many rows of conjoined steel chairs are Sunday-empty, save for a few draped with barefooted bodies who are sleeping despite the intervening armrests. They are no doubt attenders who are either passed out in relief with their first or last sleep of the day or shut down by apprehension. I dock Ma in a chair close by and turn to the bakery display filled with buns and doughnuts and sandwiches and cakes. I school my greedy face, but the unsmiling woman behind the counter seems accustomed to the way everyone’s eyes lean into the glass like shipwrecked sailors finding a log at sea.

“Aloo bun,” I slobber, my mouth closing anticipatorily around the fluffy soft-cornered triangle of potato-y goodness. “And coffee. And lemon tea.” She doesn’t nod and speaks only to tell me the bill amount—she’s more bored by people than someone so youthful should be. I imagine that she’s been here since the invention of hospitals, wearing different faces, watching everything, ageless and always bored.

The aloo bun comes microwave-nuked and sliced in four, pinched fashionably around the cuts like those Korean buns on Instagram. I reach for the ketchup packet, sticky on the outside from many eager hands before mine. Ma and I juggle machine-made beverages in paper cups, scalding and white, and eat in one breath before we’re summoned next door for Baba’s scans.

The waiting room of the radiography department is ominously unpeopled. Skull signs warn of radiation; mysterious machines buzz within. But a few hours later, we’re told Baba’s CT scans are free of anything troubling. The wait is over, for now.

Back at the hospital café and feeling vaguely accomplished, we are just the four of us again. Much like we’ve been the last three years, since my husband and I began living with Ma and Baba.

That caregiving journey had begun in a waiting room in faraway Sydney. Ma had been abruptly ambulanced to the ICU, fought certain death that night and lived, with my husband keeping sleepless vigil over her fevered hours. Baba and I were suspended with anxiety in the downstairs waiting room, having tailgated by taxi, when he turned to me unsure of who I was: “My son is upstairs. And your husband is also there?” We think he imagined I was some family friend, until I reminded him—for the first time, but not the last—that I was his daughter-in-law. The stress of his wife’s illness had unmasked his cognitive decline, and he was diagnosed soon after with Alzheimer’s.

Triumphant baked goods in silvered paper plates on our laps, celebratory double-cupped beverages in our hands, we aren’t to know just then that in a few days Baba would be back at a different hospital, for different reasons, and that we would be waiting again.

This time, to visit Baba high above the greened city, in a sunlit private room. Our little foursome would feel like a crowd in the glass capsule cabin, with the automatic bed and IV lines hanging like half-cooked noodles from balloons forked on a metal stand. Baba, stoic and sweet, would be half swallowed by bedclothes, enclosed in a cloud of his own as if it had found its lonesome way in, leaving the others clamoring at the blue window to see what the fuss is about.

But for now, let’s get the kids home to sleep off today’s adventure. And maybe (please, God) get some sleep ourselves.

Share This: