Back in November
Sita is sitting upright in her hospital bed, having just read the letter to her daughters. She folds it up neatly and sets it on her lap, satisfied. There is nothing more to say, but she clears her throat, only to fill the taut silence.
As she expected, Jezmeen is staring at her in horror. If it were up to that girl, everybody would live forever and growing up would be unnecessary. Jezmeen belongs in a movie, preserved within the confines of a screen and replayed over and over again, so that in ten, twenty years, she won’t have aged at all. Rajni, on the other hand, is nodding. Sita takes this as a good sign. Even though she and Rajni have discussed this option privately before, she has been nervous about how Rajni would react once it became a reality. Shirina’s forehead is creased with worry lines and she’s looking back and forth between her sisters.
“You’re sure you have enough?” Rajni asks. She is speaking very softly, although Sita is quite sure that the woman in the next bed is partially deaf. She can tell from the volume of her radio every evening at 6 P.M., when she listens to the BBC news.
Jezmeen turns to Rajni. “You’re not actually going to let her go through with this, are you?”
Rajni and Sita exchange a look, which Jezmeen catches. “Jezmeen, she’s suffering,” Rajni says. “She wants to put an end to it. We—she—has clearly been thinking about this for some time.”
It’s that small slip that Jezmeen catches. Sita winces, but not with pain. She knows now that Rajni will have to explain what she meant by “we.” She will have to explain that once Sita was given the diagnosis, she knew what kind of suffering lay in store for her and she was not interested in clinging on to this life while her body deteriorated. “What can I do?” she had asked Rajni, and Rajni had pulled up some websites, did some research on places in Europe where Sita could go to end her life with dignity. They downloaded brochures and made a hopeful project of Sita’s assisted suicide, until reality sank in. The costs would be astronomical. The small sum from the sale of her London home that Sita wanted to leave behind for her daughters and her grandson would be swallowed up by this final act, and she didn’t want that. She had spent so much of her life scraping by, and there was no reason to splurge on her death. “Isn’t there a simpler way?” Sita asked Rajni. How did people end their lives peacefully if they couldn’t book into a clinic in Switzerland? Even before her diagnosis, Sita had always thought of death as a wave washing over the person, lulling them to sleep. The thought of settling into her bed and sinking into a deep, tranquil state was even more enticing now that the pain kept her awake most nights.
Then she remembered the sleeping pills! The nurses gave them to her before bed each night. Sita could stockpile them, put up with agonizing sleepless nights for an eventual reward of eternal peaceful sleep. She is only telling her daughters about it because she doesn’t want it to come as a shock to them. She also needs them to keep a lookout for anybody who might stop this from happening. It’s important that they are uninterrupted.
“Try to understand, beti,” Sita says. She reaches a trembling hand out to Jezmeen, hoping to connect with her. “I’m not getting any better.”
“They haven’t said all hope is lost. Nobody actually said that you’re going to die,” Jezmeen says.
Sita and Rajni share the same sigh. It surprises Sita and she can tell that Rajni has noticed too, how they responded with an identical action. “They’ve given every indication that Mum’s not going to recover. The cancer is spreading and chemo has stopped being effective. That means—”
“It means there’s a chance of a miracle happening,” Jezmeen said. “You hear about people springing to recovery from the most dire illnesses—cancer, comas. There are people with paralysis who start walking again. It can happen.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Shirina says quietly.
Sita is thankful for her youngest daughter then, even though she has only just flown over, having been warned by Rajni that Sita’s days are numbered. Nevertheless, even she understands that Jezmeen’s hope is naive and it’s not based on any faith. Jezmeen doesn’t think God is going to help Sita. She’s hoping for a medical miracle, some unexplained glitch that works in Sita’s favor at the last minute. This is a foolish way to look at things, but wasn’t Jezmeen the one who struggled with her father’s death in the same way? Even though Sita explained that he was with God, Jezmeen repeatedly spent years convincing herself that her father hadn’t actually died. At age twelve, she devoted herself to a great deal of research about people who faked their own deaths for various reasons. Sita remembers getting upset with Jezmeen for telling her about a man in America who staged an accidental fall off a cliff during a family camping trip. Years later, his wife’s friend living in another town spotted him in the background of a picture in a news clipping about a local school fund-raiser. He had been alive all that time, and enjoying life very much with his new family. “Don’t be so stupid,” Sita snapped at Jezmeen. It was bad enough to be saddled with her husband’s unfinished business—it was quite another thing to imagine that he might be in another town somewhere, enjoying a redo of his life while Sita tried to figure out how to make ends meet.
“Why tell us, then?” Jezmeen asks. “If your mind is made up.”
“I don’t want it to come as a shock to you,” Sita says. “And I want you to be by my side when I do it.” She hesitates. “You need to make sure you do the pilgrimage in my letter, you take that bath in the sarovar, and you do a lot of seva.”
The wave of shame covering Sita is all-encompassing. What she wants to do, God will not be pleased about. Suicide is frowned upon in their religion. What kind of person throws their life away? She thought about this every time she put away another pill and she did her best not to let the guilt overcome her. Life is meant to be cherished, not carelessly wasted or ended, and she knows that, but isn’t her life already being wasted? Isn’t waiting to die as good as dying, and actually even worse because she’s simply taking up space on earth? She has many arguments to present to God when they eventually meet, and none fully satisfy her, but this she knows: her daughters will have time to absolve themselves. If they help her by keeping a lookout, they can spend their whole lives redeeming themselves in the eyes of God. They can start with the pilgrimage—service to others, cleansing themselves, taking an arduous journey to a spiritual peak. It’s all outlined in her letter.
“Come on, you guys,” Jezmeen is saying. “This is ridiculous. She must be loopy or something.”
“She’s not,” Rajni insists firmly. “She’s in pain but she’s got her senses about her. I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”
“But we’ll be—”
“We won’t.”
“—abetting a suicide.”
The word hangs in the air like a thick plume of smoke. Rajni crosses her arms over her chest. “And what are we if we stand by and let Mum suffer? I don’t think it’s that easy to decide what’s wrong and right anymore, Jezmeen. There are circumstances . . .”
“Don’t you want Mum’s suffering to stop?” Shirina asks Jezmeen. “It’s a humane and dignified way to go, if this is what she wants.”
Jezmeen looks cornered. Her eyes flit back and forth between her sisters and Mum. “Of course I do,” she says. “But this is wrong. It’s not the right way to go about it.”
“What’s the right way, then?” Rajni asks.
“Didn’t the doctors say they’d make you as comfortable as possible?”
“Does she look comfortable?” Rajni retorts. “She’s suffering. There’s only so much they can do when cancer is spreading through a patient’s body. It’s excruciating—they’ll give her enough morphine to stop the pain but that will be the quality of her life: depending on a drug to numb her just enough without killing her.”
“Jezmeen, please try to understand,” Sita murmurs, but she is half-hearted in her attempt to placate her daughter. The pain is beginning to build again and soon it will be surging through her like an electric current. She braces herself for it by clutching the sheets. All three of her daughters notice this movement.
“Mum?” Rajni says. She reaches out to stroke Sita’s hand but before she can make contact, Sita flinches. The worst thing somebody can do while she’s anticipating this pain is touch her.
“Leave me alone,” Sita whispers. “All of you, just go away for a while.” She shuts her eyes and listens to her daughters’ feet shuffling against the linoleum floors. A memory comes to her—little Jezmeen and Shirina creeping around the house in the early hours of a Sunday morning, trying not to wake anybody. Sita would hear the muffled noises and debate whether to get out of bed or simply stay where she was. It was always tempting to stay in bed, especially in those dark days after her husband died and then afterward, when rumors began to circulate. They’re not true, they’re not true, she wanted to scream, but who would hear her? Eventually something, like an invisible string, would draw her out from under the sheets and lead her down the stairs, where Jezmeen and Shirina would be giggling on the sofa or prancing about the kitchen.
Sita’s memory is interrupted by a short, sharp scream. She knows right away that it is Jezmeen, but she doesn’t open her eyes because the pain is roaring now, and about to shut out all of her senses. She twists and whimpers and presses the call button to summon the nurse. There is the pounding sound of shoes down the hallway but they stop outside her room. Hurry, Sita thinks. Help! She doesn’t know whose assistance she is invoking here—her daughters, the nurses, or God himself. The jewelry case is in her dresser. Jezmeen had shut the drawer as soon as she understood what Sita was asking of her. It is agonizing for Sita to lean toward the dresser and pull open the drawer, but after canceling the call for the nurse, she is able to do it. She touches the case with her fingers, and says a prayer for her daughters.