Far from Home

Ammamma’s dementia has progressed. That’s all the doctors tell us after her latest admission. Even though she fell from standing and hit her head, medically she’s fine, no water infections, no broken bones, no bleeds. Psychologically however, she has never been worse. She’s been no more than ten feet from me for the majority of my life, but in all those twenty years, I have never heard her talk so much about her old life in Jaffna, even though she hasn’t even seen Sri Lanka in decades.

  Amma and Appa sit me down after she’s discharged home. The dining room chairs feel like steel against my back and legs.

  “We can’t cope,” Appa says, blunt as a sledgehammer. With his ongoing thyroid problems, his hair is already thin, but this recent episode has made what was left come out in serious clumps. “That woman is a law unto herself now. She can’t do anything without constant supervision. She doesn’t even eat!”

  Amma sighs, dark circles pulling at her eyes.

  “Don’t be so dramatic, she just needs encouragement. She still knows who we are, she’s not that lost. We just need to talk with Occupational Health and try and get better railings in so she can grasp them.”

  “You can’t be this stubborn. The woman is on a downward spiral and we all know it. Look at you, Indrani, you’re exhausted from chasing after her. We need to think of other options.”

  That very word, options, raises Amma’s hackles.

  “I’m her daughter. She raised me to care and care I will. I know her better than anyone, I’m not having some person from the street come in and mess around. On the wards, I had to get water for her, imagine how bad they’ll be out of hospital. If it means I need to take more time off work…”

  “For fuck’s sake, this is not about you! This is about all of us!”

 As voices rise for what must be the thousandth time, I wonder how sincere Appa’s concern is, if part of him is secretly relieved all this has happened. Ammamma never really approved of him as a match for her daughter. When the illness took her sense of self-control, she would insult him directly, the kind of things she would previously whisper to her daughter only to be ignored, comments on how he never went to the right school or never had the requisite old money to be worthwhile. For all his altruism now, no doubt he remembers how viciously he shouted when he heard what she’d concealed for so long. I wouldn’t blame him if he saw her deterioration as some sort of karmic retribution for her prejudice.

  “Look,” I say, standing up from my chair to silence the developing argument. I feel the weight of the eyes of the room, the ancestors and friends memorialised in frames that hang from every wall. I’ve been on the sidelines of too many conversations like this over the years. I can stand that no longer. “Amma, Appa is completely right, you are running yourself into the ground. No matter what you do, Ammamma is going to keep getting worse. You need a break, and you need it now.”

  Amma looks at me with wide-eyed fury, crow’s feet taut at the edges, bags bigger than the eyes themselves. She spills into Tamil.

  “Don’t presume to tell me what I can or cannot do, Gayatri. Know your place.”

  “Then I’ll do it for you.”

  “Mahal, please,” Appa tries to say, but I raise my hand.

  “I know Ammamma better than you think I do. I know I have exams but we can’t keep using that as an excuse any more. It’s always been, you have school, you have Uni, focus on that, but I’ve seen Ammamma suffer for as long as you have and I’ve had enough. I can be here for her. I can take over when you two need to rest. I know you don’t want her anywhere near carers and she won’t have to be. Trust me. I can do this.”

 My parents are not quick to accept my outburst. Tamil elders are as stubborn as it is possible to be. Stubbornness served them well when they came here in the 80s. It kept them safe. It preserved their idea of home. It gave them a livelihood in a foreign land when those of their countrymen were being torn apart.

Over 30 years have passed since then.

I stand ramrod straight as they look me in the eyes. The standoff feels infinite, like we’ve taken a photograph of the moment and trapped ourselves in it, refusing to budge in case a sudden edge will appear out of the floorboards and cast us over it into the abyss. Eventually – whether it’s because I’m right or because Ammamma is sleeping next door and could have been disturbed by our racket or simply because they realise they’ve been run to the end of their tether, it doesn’t matter – my parents stop talking and turn their eyes to the tablecloth. We say nothing to each other for the rest of the night, a silent acknowledgement that I’ve gotten my way.

  The thing with dementia is that you never know what it will make of its victim. People’s brains deteriorate in different ways for different reasons. As caregivers, that means every day becomes a minefield. If you look online, Ammamma - who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s - is supposed to steadily deteriorate over time, first forgetting what she’s done, then faces, then words altogether. Nobody tells you about the wandering. The screaming in the depths of the night, where she thinks a man has come to rape her. The walking out into the snow where she trips and tumbles over unseen obstacles, circling doggedly back and forth as she tries to find a way back to her real home. I wonder sometimes what it would be like to take her there, if perhaps she would feel more at peace than in the confines of a land that is becoming more foreign by the day.

  It doesn’t take me long to realise that in taking on the responsibility of looking after her, I cannot make assumptions. Literally anything could cause her trouble at this point, so life needs to be made as simple as possible, for all of us.

  My first point of call is to make the next day’s meals for her the night before. Ammamma has dentures to compensate for her many lost teeth, but she has a sensitive palate. She didn’t like the hospital sandwiches, the bland chicken, chips and soup. She is as many of us are, born and raised on spice. As such, I set about making a great big batch of kool, a seafood soup with vegetables and odiyal, the ground-up roots of palmyra. Washing and boiling cups of brown rice, I cut and clean the fresh prawns, kingfish and jak seeds before chopping them up with beans and tapioca (Appa’s family don’t seem to like the latter, but Amma’s swear by it, so in it goes). Tamarind, water and odiyal are thrown into a separate dish with dried chilli before I put everything on the stove and let the song of sun and sea echo in my nostrils. After heating it and bringing her dish out of the kitchen the next afternoon, I watch Ammamma in her chair, thin like a bird, her smile wrinkling her face with stainglass cracks as she sways from side to side, a far cry from the woman that Appa once knew.

  “Uncle Mohan is coming next week, I need to get ready,” she says in Tamil as I place the kool in front of her. “He is very important. I need to get ready.”

  I have no idea who this is, but I play along anyway.

  “I know Ammamma, but before that, you need to be well-fed no?”

  She looks at me for a long moment. It’s so tempting to predict what she is going to say, to tense up, ready to direct her. She could so easily touch the wrong thing, burn her hand on the food or the plate. Add another injury to the haphazard scars that now litter her arms and legs.

  “You would like Uncle Mohan, Gayatri dear, he is very important in the city authority. I will tell him what a good girl you are. Maybe he can get you a job.”

 The steam of spice and seafood, having had time to really mix in, finally centre her thoughts. I too manage to calm down, no longer needing to guide her quivering hand as she settles it on a spoon. One by one, entirely undistracted, she lifts morsel after morsel between her lips, before finishing with a satisfied slurp.

  This is one of her good days, I realise. I tell myself afterwards to make a note of them, so I can reminisce after they no longer occur.