Ithaca by David Davidar Page A

later, she still would not relent. She would stay on in the old house on the hill that Nirmal and she had moved to after he had retired – it did not matter to her that she was seventy-one years old and arthritic and diabetic.
    She had once told him about his paternal grandfather dying a few months after his beloved wife of fifty-two years had passed on. Apparently, local superstition had it that the surviving partner of a long-term marriage was most at risk of dying within a few days of the birthday or death day of the departed spouse. Sure enough, his grandfather had died three days after he’d marked his wife’s birthday with a nightlong remembrance ceremony of his own devising. That fact had stuck in his mind, and every year, for the next five years, he would become extremely anxious about his mother’s health three days before and three days after the birth and death anniversaries of his father. He set up an elaborate early warning system comprising neighbours, friends, and servants who would check in on her regularly and keep him informedabout her state of health. Last year she had negotiated the days that bracketed the critical dates on the calendar without setting off any alarms, but in the winter she was struck down by the flu and he received the phone call he had been dreading, saying he should get to Yercaud immediately.
    He found her listless and worn, and unable to move a few steps without becoming breathless. Her GP suggested moving her to the hospital, and she said she didn’t mind going but that he shouldn’t expect to see her back in the house again. He had brushed aside her fears, but within a day of being admitted to the hospital she took a turn for the worse. Her doctor was blunt with him: his mother was dying and he would have to start making his peace with that fact. He told the doctor that no expense should be spared to make her well again, she was tough and she could make it. He took one of the rooms at the hospital reserved for the family of patients, and spent every waking moment at his mother’s bedside; by now her condition had deteriorated further and she was drifting in and out of a coma.
    When you are keeping vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is seriously ill, the one thing that no one tells you about in advance is that you will be bored and frustrated by your inability to make yourself useful, and will often be regarded as an irritant because you get in the way of those who are trying to do their jobs. In large city hospitals nobody but hospital staff gets to attend on critically ill patients, but in the country hospital to which his mother had been admitted the rules were more relaxed and he spent hours trying to talk to her, stroking her face, badgering the nurses for updates on her condition.Finally, they could take it no longer, and the senior nurse ordered him out of the intensive care unit. He went upstairs to his room. The hospital was surrounded by low, humped hills capped with mist, and he looked out at them, his mind blank. He felt no grief; he could fix no thought or image of his mother in his head. For the next couple of days he was allowed into the ICU for an hour every morning and an hour every evening when he was allowed to spoon-feed her a few sips of porridge. One night when he was trying to sleep, his mind began to fill with memories of her and he knew that she was going to die; at three the next morning a nurse came up to his room and said she was very sorry to tell him that his mother had passed away peacefully a few moments ago.
    He had stayed dry-eyed when his mother died – he was so preoccupied with all the details he had to attend to that he was unable to grieve. When he returned to London his memories stayed bound tight within him. But now, in this strange city that he has fled to without really thinking, and at the end of an evening that has touched him in a way that he was not prepared for, the cords that he has used to tie the loss of his mother tightly