The Phone Call I Dreaded Every Sunday
Now the phone stays silent on Sundays, and I would give anything.
My mother called every Sunday at four o'clock, and for eleven years I treated it like a tax. The phone would light up, MUMMY in capital letters because she had typed her own name into my contacts and did not believe in lowercase, and something in my chest would sigh before my hand even moved.
It is a terrible thing to admit.
I am going to admit it anyway, because I have learned that the admissions we sand down are the ones that rot.
The calls were never short. That was the crime, in my accounting of it. Forty minutes minimum, sometimes ninety. The agenda never changed: the neighbor's son who had bought a flat, the price of bhindi, which of my aunts had said what at which wedding, her knee, the weather where she was, the weather where I was, as if weather were a thing happening to our family personally. I would put her on speaker and wash dishes. I would mute myself and answer emails. I developed a repertoire of sounds, hmm, achha, really, that could be deployed without listening, the way a pianist's hands can play scales while the pianist thinks about lunch.
Some Sundays I did not pick up at all. I would stare at the screen until it went dark, then text: In a meeting, call you later. It was four o'clock on a Sunday. She knew there was no meeting... She never once said so.
She called the following Sunday anyway, at four o'clock exactly, and opened with the bhindi report as if nothing had happened, because for her nothing had: her daughter was busy, her daughter was important, her daughter had a life so full it could not always fit a phone call. She was proud of the very thing that was starving her.
My mother died on a Tuesday in March.
An artery, a floor, a neighbor with a spare key. The doctors said even if someone had been standing next to her it would not have mattered, which is the kind of sentence doctors hand you like a receipt, and which does not survive contact with 2 a.m.
Here is what I want to tell you about, though. Not the funeral. The Sunday after it.
I flew back to my flat, and at four o'clock my body did the thing it had done for eleven years: it braced. I actually looked at the phone... The screen stayed black.
And I sat down on the kitchen floor, between the dishwasher and the bin, and understood for the first time what I had been given every week and what I had done with it.
You do not miss the phone calls. You miss being someone's four o'clock. You miss being the appointment somebody's whole week bent around.
A month later my aunt gave me my mother's handbag, because that is a job grief assigns to aunts. Inside it, along with reading glasses and a pharmacy's worth of mints, was a small notebook with a rubber band around it. I assumed it was accounts. My mother kept accounts the way other people keep diaries.
It was not accounts. It was Sundays.
Every page had a date, and under each date, a list in her sloping Hindi-English hybrid: things to tell Ritu. Sharma aunty's cataract operation. Ask about her cough from last week. The mango man is back, tell her, she loved the mango man as a child. Do not mention the flat prices again, she gets irritated. That last line is on four separate pages. She had noticed my irritation, filed it, and legislated against it, and I had never noticed her noticing.
The final entry was for a Sunday she did not live to reach. Three items. The winter quilts had gone into storage. The lady upstairs had a new grandson.
And then, at the bottom, in English, in letters more careful than the rest... Tell her the gulmohar tree is flowering early this year. She used to sit under it and write her poems.
I had to put the notebook down and walk around the block twice.
Because here is the thing: I had forgotten the tree. I had forgotten that I was ever a girl who sat under a flowering tree with a school notebook, writing verses about whatever a twelve-year-old aches about. My mother had not forgotten. For eleven years, while I rinsed plates and muted the microphone, she had been keeping the inventory of who I was, updating it weekly, carrying it in her handbag between the mints and the glasses in case there was ever a Sunday when I wanted it back.
The bhindi was never the content. The bhindi was the carrier signal.
What the calls actually said, every single week, at four o'clock, was: I am still here, you are still mine, the world has not changed so much that this cannot stay the same. And what my sighs said back... I cannot fix now. That is the true shape of this kind of grief: it is not only that the person is gone, it is that your last thousand chances to do better are gone with her, all of them stamped and dated.
People kept telling me to write about her. I write for a living; everyone assumed the machinery would simply accept the new material... It did not. For most of a year I wrote around her, essays about mortality in general, safely uninhabited. Then one Sunday at four o'clock, out of some instinct I still do not fully understand, I opened her notebook, copied her last three items onto a fresh page, and answered them. I told her the quilts in my flat were still in the cupboard because it never gets cold enough here. I told her about the grandson upstairs, whom I had never met, but I invented him a face I thought she would like. And then I wrote about the gulmohar tree until the page was wet.
That piece became the first honest thing I had written about her. I posted it on a community wall for poets, half hoping nobody would read it. Strangers wrote back about their own four o'clocks: a father's 7 a.m. calls about the newspaper, a grandmother who always rang during the cricket, a brother whose weekly call was just breathing and a shared TV show. It turns out the world is full of people who groaned at a ringtone and would now crawl across broken glass to hear it. Reading them felt like standing in a room of people all holding the same disconnected receiver, all of us learning that memory is the only network that still routes those calls.
I still keep her notebook in my own bag now, between my glasses and a roll of mints I bought for the symmetry. And I have kept the appointment. Sundays, four o'clock, I make tea and sit with a pen, and I tell her the week: the neighbor's renovation, the price of tomatoes, the weather where I am, as if weather were a thing happening to our family personally. It turns out the agenda was never boring. It was just love wearing its everyday clothes, and I was too dressed up to recognize it.
The phone stays where I can see it while I write. It never rings at four. But some Sundays, when the light comes through the kitchen window at a certain slant, I let myself believe the line is open anyway, and that somewhere on the other end a woman in reading glasses is un-snapping a rubber band, smoothing a fresh page, and writing at the top of it: things to tell Ritu.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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