Healer

by Mehreen Ahmed

How a mother pretends to love her own children depends on her manipulative nature. To pretend, when there is no love? How does one do that? Anxiety fills me up when my little girl is ill--I cry through the night. Anxiety tightens my chest every time she goes out and comes home late. I wait anxiously by the gate for her to come home from school. Until she is safe in her room. That my daughter’s accusations of my love for her is a pretence, reminds me of the summer afternoons of nineteen seventy.

In the summer of 1970, Grandma was admitted into a local hospital in Dhaka. I was chosen by my elders to stay with her as her attendee. Day as well nights, I stay close to her looking after her, feeding and helping her with medicine. 

There is also a little verandah in front of her room overlooking a garden full of blooming poinsettia. Every afternoon, a Bangla song was played on someone’s Radio by Suman Kalyanpur--mone koro ami nei—imagine, I’m not there… In the quiet heat of sunny afternoons, in the midst of these flowers, the tune is atmospheric. Evocative even; the song, the heat, the fledgling poinsettia, and the quiet afternoons fills me up with a half-empty sense of sluggishness—of the mind—of the soul.

Not just my daughter and my grandmother; my job is to heal, to help distressed people through dark days. In the thick of it, they ask for my help to rescue them and to offer them respite. I never question what I receive in return. What my rewards are, isn’t my place to ask? Irrelevant. When they get better, they pretend not to know me. Not even look at me, ever. I know then that they have healed; that their pains are gone. But not completely, because I can’t heal them enough to uplift their unloving and unkind spirits.

I remember in the aftermath that song I left behind in 1970, remnants of a lazy afternoon tied up to my fractured memorabilia. As my accusatory love is tied up to my little girl—a genetic strand of broken link. No, not at all delible, as those nostalgic moments aren’t either. They permanently remain to impress upon me as half-circle emotions like those half-baked poinsettias.