His Mother Still Calls Me Beta
The marriage ended, but his mother never signed the papers.
Every Sunday at nine in the morning, my ex-husband's mother calls me before she calls her own son. She has done this for six years, which is two years longer than I was married to him.
Her name is Pushpa, but I have never once called her that. She was Mummy ji from the day of the engagement, when she caught me sneaking a second helping of rasmalai in her kitchen in Ambala and, instead of judging me, wordlessly slid the whole bowl closer. I knew then that whatever happened with the son, the mother and I understood each other at the level of dessert, which is the deepest level there is.
What happened with the son was this: eight years, two cities, one miscarriage we never learned how to talk about, and then a colleague named Ritika who he swore was just a friend right up until the Tuesday he told me she was not. I am past the anger now, mostly, so I can say it plainly. Sameer did not leave because I failed at anything. He left because leaving was easier than sitting inside our sadness with me, and he had never in his life been made to sit anywhere he did not want to sit.
His mother knew that better than anyone. She raised him, after all.
The divorce was civil in both senses. Lawyers divided the flat, the savings, the wedding gold. Nobody tells you that the paperwork divides the people too. His friends became his again. My friends closed around me like a bandage. The wedding photos went into a suitcase that lives on top of my cupboard, too heavy to look at, too heavy to throw.
Everyone got sorted into columns...
Except her.
Nine days after the papers were signed, my phone rang with the number I knew by heart, the Ambala landline. She still uses the old rotary phone in her hallway, black and heavy as a sleeping cat, because she does not trust telephones you cannot slam.
I stared at the screen and my whole chest went tight. I was certain she was calling to return me, the way you return borrowed utensils after a function. I picked up ready to be dismissed politely from the family...
"Beta," she said. "Did you eat?"
I sat down on my kitchen floor and cried with the phone pressed to my ear, and she stayed on the line the whole time, clucking softly, the way she did the year my father died. When I finally got words out, they were, "Mummy ji, you know we are divorced?" and she said, "I was there, beta. I wore the blue saree. Did you eat or not?"
That was the first Sunday. There has been a Sunday every week since.
We have rules we never agreed on out loud. She does not report on Sameer, and I do not ask, though information leaks through her like light through an old curtain. I know Ritika became his wife. I know their daughter was born two monsoons ago. I know his knees have started troubling him, which his mother relays with the satisfaction of a woman whose warnings about his running shoes went unheeded for a decade.
In return, she demands the full audit of my life: what I cooked, what my boss said, whether the maid is stealing sugar, and why I have not yet been to the doctor about the thing I mentioned three Sundays ago.
She has never asked when I am remarrying... Not once. In our community that is not restraint. That is a love language with its own grammar.
At her niece's wedding, two years after the divorce, she introduced me around the hall as "my daughter," with no footnotes and no asterisk. An aunty with strong opinions and stronger perfume tried to correct her. "But isn't this the ex..." she began, and Mummy ji looked at her the way you look at a fly deciding where to land, and the sentence died of natural causes.
For a long time I did not examine any of it too closely, the way you do not question a warm room in a cold house. Then last spring, her cataract surgery. It was Ritika who called me. That alone nearly stopped my heart, the new wife's name glowing on my phone. Her voice was careful, rehearsed, kind. "She is fine. The operation went well. But she keeps asking for you, and I thought, I mean, I think you should come."
So I stood in a hospital corridor in Ambala that smelled of disinfectant and marigolds from the shrine near the lift, sharing a bench with my ex-husband and his wife, the three of us taking turns to hold the same steel tumbler of tea nobody drank. Sameer looked older around the eyes. Ritika kept smoothing her daughter's hair. The little girl stared at me, unafraid, and asked her mother in a whisper who I was. I waited to hear the answer with more fear than I have waited for most things in my life.
"That is Dadi's other beta," Ritika said.
Inside the ward, Mummy ji was propped up with one eye bandaged like a small pirate, dictating instructions about the plants at home. When she saw me she stopped mid-sentence and put out her hand, and I took it, and she said the thing I have carried in my pocket ever since.
He divorced you, beta. I did not. Nobody brought me any papers to sign, and if they ever do, I am an old woman. I will lose them.
I laughed so I would not cry, and managed neither, and did both.
On the train home I finally understood what she had been doing for six years with that heavy black telephone. Family, in her arithmetic, is not who the law assigns you. It is who you keep feeding after the reason has expired. She could not undo what her son did, and she has never once apologized for him, because she is too honest to apologize for another adult. What she could do was dial ten digits every Sunday, her arthritic finger dragging the dial around, the long whirr and click, whirr and click, a small ritual of refusal. She could not give me back the marriage...
She gave me a mother instead, and let me tell you, of the two, I got the better settlement.
Last winter I wrote a poem about her. Not about the divorce, and not about him. About her hallway, and the phone, and a bowl of rasmalai sliding across a kitchen counter towards a nervous girl. I worked on it for a month, then I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so it would exist somewhere outside my drawer. It did not win. When I told her, she was outraged on my behalf for a full five minutes, demanded the names of the judges, and then said, "Read it to me."
So I did. Down the line, into the crackle, to a woman holding a receiver in a cold hallway four hundred kilometres away. When I finished there was a long silence... and then the sound of her blowing her nose with great ceremony, and then: "The part about the rasmalai. Read that part again."
People ask me sometimes, carefully, why I keep tending a bond that grew from a marriage that failed. They ask if it keeps the wound open. I never know how to explain that she is not the wound.
She is the stitch.
It is Sunday tomorrow. At nine, in a hallway in Ambala, a finger will pull a dial around ten times, and a heavy black phone older than my marriage and my divorce put together will do what it has always done.
It will ring through. It always rings through.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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