Homeland Elegies(68)

I would sit beside her as she dozed and wonder what, if anything, was haunting her beyond the body’s torment, beyond the pain and the fear of more pain. I wondered what unresolved questions about her life dangled in that narcotic darkness. I read into the subtlest shifts of her expression and sought to redeem her inner life as if it were that of a character in a book. Such was my habit, imagining the inner landscapes of others and drawing their portraits—ultimately—from the model I knew best: myself. I knew I was mostly staring in a mirror as I watched my mother die. I knew it was mostly futile. I did it anyway.

Mostly futile, but not entirely. For all the literary speculation about her secret summations brought me to see how little I really knew her and confronted me with the deepest resentment of my life—that despite the daily demonstrations of love, the doting, the sacrifices, the unceasing maternal care, I never truly felt loved by her. I’d never felt loved because I’d never known who was loving me and never felt certain she knew whom or what she was loving. She complained so often of my remoteness over the years, my difficulty showing affection or speaking about my life and feelings with her—her diaries were filled with observations about how bottled up and laconic I was, how endlessly it frustrated her. I never felt she saw me; or, rather, never felt certain the person looking out at me was really and truly her and was really and truly looking out at me. I saw now that the source of my life’s work—reading, literature, theater—was in part the pursuit of something as simple as my mother’s gaze, a gaze she gave happily to books. Was it a coincidence I, too, had sought the comfort of books as a child? Wasn’t I seeking her attention? Isn’t that what I really wanted as I would sidle up to her warm body on the couch as she read, a book of my own in hand? So many times, I didn’t even read, I just pretended to, wanting to be close to her. I vividly recall one snowy afternoon, the bright winter glare reflected in my mother’s eyes as they scanned page after page, and me, watching her sidelong, jealous of the object that so commanded her being, wishing I, too, could find some way into the rapture of that avid gaze. Is it really a surprise that even words on the page would end up not being enough? That even these I needed to impose on the countenances of countless others by means of the stage? This was not about neglect or disregard. It was about access. I never felt like I had access.

Except when we were in Pakistan.

One of the final proper conversations I had with her while she was still mostly in possession of all her wits—and with her habitual reserve softened by the approaching end—was about Pakistan, or our respective relationships to it. She was sitting up, nibbling on a piece of freshly made laddoo from the sizable new Indo-Pak grocery that had opened a couple of miles west of us, in a strip mall behind the new casino that now sat where, when I was a child, there’d been a middle school. (It was astonishing to me that there were enough of us now in the area to justify the new grocery store’s generous square footage, its aisles and aisles of packaged naans and dals and sacks of basmati, the masalas, the pakora mixes, the biryani mixes, the dazzling mounds of cayenne and turmeric and ground cardamom, the tins of ghee and bottles of bitter pickle, the rows of fresh mint, coriander, methi, of our native fruits—mangoes, guavas, lychees, Punjabi kinu—and, as one approached the registers, the prolonged counter of Desi sweets of every known form, the barfi and laddoo in particular, Mother thought, as tasty as she’d ever had them, even “back home,” and which Father would dutifully fetch a few times every week, the last of her edible pleasures.) She was munching on that piece of besan laddoo, its beige crumble adhering to her lips, when suddenly, she stopped chewing. Her mouth sagged; her eyes welled; her voice quivered with sudden regret: “I’m so sorry, meeri jaan.”

“For what, Mom? You don’t have anything to be sorry about—”

“You were so happy there.”

“Where?”

“Back home. You were always so happy back home.”

I paused, moved. With her end in view, her emotions had never been so clear, her face never as radiant; in moments like these, her beauty was heartbreaking.

“Why are you apologizing?”

“I never saw you like that here.”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“No, no,” she said with an endearing firmness. “I never did.” And then, all at once, shifting. “You didn’t know that?”

“What?”

“That you were happier, when you were there?”

I smiled to hold her attention as I considered. The most vibrant of my childhood memories were those of life in my father’s village and of the interlocking rooms in my mother’s family’s sprawling Rawalpindi bungalow. I loved being there, but I never pined for it when we returned. Not like she did. As a young boy, I often remarked how much happier she was when we were in Pakistan. I used to pray to God for her to be happy like that in America, too. “I was happy you were happy, Mom. It was nice to be with family.”

“It was, wasn’t it?”

“And it was nice not to be in school.”

“You didn’t like school,” she said, frowning playfully.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That you made me go to school?”

“No,” she moaned, her face collapsing with sudden despair.