The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories by Susan Nisha

Author:Susan, Nisha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westland Publications Private Limited
Published: 2023-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Missed Call

Last night two squabbling cats leapt on to my son’s chest. They bounced out of the corridor and landed in the dark on Vijay, who was sleeping with his head in the room and the rest of his body in the corridor. He nearly shat from fear and was actually burning with fever by the morning. I told him to stay home from school, but also couldn’t help ragging him a bit. He’s very tall now, nearly six feet, and working at a gym after school so that he can body-banao for free. He didn’t fancy my teasing him at all.

It doesn’t help that his younger brother is scared of no living creature, and is constantly catching scorpions and strange insects and making kissy noises at the baby shark that’s growing at an alarming speed inside our fish tank. The fish tank, too, has grown at an alarming pace in the house. At first we had the little one that Ritu Madam had given us when she left Delhi and moved to a Pune school. Manu was six then. Some of the staff had looked peculiarly at her, no doubt thinking, ‘Do you really need to give the cafeteria cook who lives in some slum a fish tank?’ But Ritu Madam understood Manu even then. Today, the fish tank is almost a third of the room. When we bought our TV, it had to be a size and shape that would allow space for future baby sharks or whatever other godforsaken creature Manu would bring home.

Manu himself wouldn’t have teased his elder brother about the cats. It’s just Vijay’s pride that’s a bit hurt. In these last six months, he has grown into thinking of himself as a man. He’s almost sixteen. Vijay told me in as many words when I had my accident: ‘Now, Ma, you be our child for a while.’ No one knows that, in the first month after the accident, he had to wipe me down, help me walk across the corridor to the loo and steady me as I squatted. He even washed my blood-stained underwear for a week. Funny now that I think of it. Radha, who went to work at the parlour, even the day after my accident, never thought to ask how I managed all day. She must have thought it was a good thing her brothers were home from school to help me and left it at that.

Everyone in Begumpur told me, ‘You’re so lucky that, when the car hit you, the driver stopped. Who takes responsibility these days? Who takes someone to hospital and pays for all the treatment?’ I never disagreed, never let on that I didn’t feel grateful for two broken collarbones and a cracked hip, though I did feel grateful for my good, smart children who took care of me. I kept smiling as I had smiled a few years ago when people told me that a widow shouldn’t be splurging on renting a second room. I smiled when they told me I should save money for my daughter instead.

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