“HEY, Amma,” Raji said, lying on the lower bunk in the on-call room. She had ten extra minutes she could wedge into her day, she figured. “How are you?”
“Oh, fine,” her mother sighed, her thick Indian accent making even those words sound like music.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I don’t want to trouble you.”
Raji sat up on the bed and swung her legs around to the floor, ready to run and get on a plane to New Jersey if she needed to. “What is it, Amma?”
“I got a parking ticket.”
“Oh.” Raji laid down on the scratchy blanket. “So?”
“It’s fifty dollars.”
“Mom! You don’t have to worry about stuff like that anymore. Now that I’m a resident, I’m making some money. It’s no big deal. I’ll transfer the money to your account right now.”
“But you have had to take on so much debt. I don’t like asking you for money.”
“Fifty dollars is nothing!”
“It’s a lot to me.”
Raji’s mother had been an eighteen-year-old immigrant bride who had barely spoken any English and was illiterate in every language when she had arrived in America after an arranged marriage to a stranger. Eleven years later, Raji’s father had blindsided her with divorce papers.
After a swift divorce so that her father could marry his secretary who was pregnant with a boy, Raji’s mother had nothing. Her father had already moved most of their money and the house deed into his business accounts. She had trusted him when he had put everything in his name. After all, she had lived her whole life in India. She had never known anyone who had gotten divorced, ever.
Raji hadn’t seen her father since then because he had been too busy with his new, Indian-American wife and their son.
It had taken Raji years to figure out that her mother had been eating only one or two spoonfuls of rice for supper on many nights so there would be enough food for Raji, not because she was dieting. She had already been too skinny. She had been eating Raji’s leftovers in the kitchen afterward, if there were any.
Even now, her mother barely made enough to get by, even though every month, Raji transferred a thousand dollars to her checking account.
Raji put the phone call on the speaker so she could use the browser while they talked. “I’m transferring the money now. Any time there’s an expense, I need you to tell me right away, got it?”
“I don’t like to trouble you.”
She popped over to her banking website and transferred a hundred dollars to her mother’s linked checking account because she suspected her mother was minimizing the cost of the ticket. “It’s done. No more talking about it. Now, how was work today?”
“It was the same as always, Raji-ma. The scheduling was done. People did the things.”
“All right. I have a surgery in three hours, so I need a nap before that. I haven’t slept for two days.”
“Oh, poor darling. I don’t like that you work so very hard.”
Raji bit back any response like, it pays the bills. “It’s my dream, Amma. I want to be a heart surgeon.”
“Your uncle was asking again when he can arrange your marriage. One of his friends has a son who is a very nice boy.”
Over her dead body. “I’m not ready for that, Amma.”
“You are thirty years old, now. You should be married already. People are beginning to talk.”
“It’s important to me to get my education, first.”
“All right, then, Raji-ma. You let me know when we can go ahead with that. Maybe when you finish your residency.”
The education strategy always worked. Brahmins are suckers for everything educational. “Maybe then, Amma. Good night.”
“Good night, Raji-ma.”
Raji needed to video-chat with her cousin Aarthi in India, too, just to see if all of Aarthi’s pujas and prayers had worked and she had gotten knocked up yet, but she was so tired. She needed at least a quick nap before she cut open some guy’s chest and sewed in some new veins.
Passing out into the sterile field while operating, a faceplant into the patient’s open chest, would be so embarrassing.
Maybe Raji would call Aarthi tomorrow.
As Raji drifted off to sleep, she thought of Peyton, out there somewhere, probably still on a stage singing backup, and her body relaxed as happiness suffused through her.