Dinner time and death

Dinner time is the only time Maa gets the scope to speak to me.
About what she did that day.
Which family member called and delayed her Namaj.
What Feefee did or didn’t.
The little things that somehow keep escaping me.
Doomscrolling through Instagram with my right hand,
a Band-Aid wrapped around my “shut up, shshhh” finger.
Mile after mile of philosophical quotes.
Camus. Merleau-Ponty. Beauvoir.
One post, crowded with heavy vocabulary, about smiling and self-care.
Before the question has the chance to recognize me, I ask Maa,
“What’s the one day you felt the happiest?”
..............
A long pause. From the corner of my eye,
I watch Maa raise her “wait-a-minute” finger
to push her glasses back into place.
They refuse every instruction.
A lonely mound of rice sits at the center of my plate,
I add some laal shaak,
a piece of fried fish whose name I never bother to remember,
and a spoonful of daal, just enough to seep into the rice.
Still walking mile after mile through the Gram,
I ask again,
“Anything that still makes you smile?
Laugh hard whenever you think about it?”
.........................
The pause is longer.
my eyes decide not to look at her, not even from the side.
I put my phone away and eat.
Three or four bites in, my stomach feels swollen.
My cheeks are fuller. My double chin climbing another step.
I stop.
With static-filled thoughts and blurry eyes, I ask
“Is there any day when you thought life couldn’t possibly get any better than this?”
…………………………..
Only then do I return to the present and actually look at Maa.
She looks sad.
The kind that has no language and cannot be compared
to any sadness I have ever known.
Her face map says it all, she wants only one thing.
To live long enough to see me happy.
To watch me stop swallowing fistfuls of pills
To stop seeing me walk into doctors’ offices
for “the mads and the crazies.”
To believe, even for a moment,
that whatever is wrong with me has finally decided to leave.
And then, whenever God thinks it is time, she can leave peacefully.
Not because she wants to die. Because she is tired.
Her eyes blink too fast, trying to forbid the tears from falling.
God forbid my curiosity teaches her
to become curious about her own grief.
Her nostrils flare slightly, trying to hold everything inside.
As though she could disappear behind a closed door and cry for hours.
……
One thing becomes painfully clear during those twenty minutes.
She has been suffering. Perhaps forever.
But there is a before. And there is an after.
19 May 2024.
The day the love of her life died.
It was around ten that night, when Baba died.
And whatever peace Maa had left, died with him.
I guess some emotions survive
only because no one asks them their name. 
Nayer Sultana connects bridges between poetry and prose. When she’s not being her lecturer-self at North South University, she’s stitching together a non-fiction memoir that refuses to stay in one genre. Her work wanders through belonging, becoming, and the shifting idea of home.

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