A Sweater for You

Abstract

A Sweater for You Meghana Mysore (bio) It is a terrifying thing to lose your body, I thought as my son Srinivas kneeled before my feet. He was scrubbing my toes because I had become useless and could not wash my own feet. He scrubbed around the gold ring around my big toe, which had become faded. My husband Keshav bought it for me when we first married. Those days were still vivid to me though he was gone now and I was no longer young. I tried not to think too much of those days. It was unbearable before Srinivas arrived. I could not stand to see myself and only myself in the mirror each morning. All I did was make coffee again and again, even at night. Sometimes I ate bare slices of bread. Once, I turned on a burner and left it on. I went to sleep and my next-door neighbor Pooja smelled the smoke. I only turned it off when she came knocking. I didn't know what would've happened otherwise. Sometimes I dreamed it raged on, the burner, and I slept with my blankets wrapped tight around me. In the dream, I couldn't release myself from them as the smoke crept from the kitchen to the bedroom, and I coughed as the smoke grew until Keshav covered my mouth so hard that I stopped breathing altogether. I didn't tell Srinivas about these dreams, and my other son, Karthik, barely called anymore. When I messaged Karthik, I received only a few words in response. "Busy now amma, Ananya has recital. will call later." Most days, he never called. One morning I was trying to call him and he didn't pick up. That morning, I felt like eating—a rarity since Keshav had died. The guavas on the tree outside had begun to ripen. I walked outside to pick some fruit and saw a beautiful glistening guava up on the branches. I reached for it but missed it, even on my tiptoes, and the next thing I knew I was on my back on the hard ground. I tried to move, but each minuscule motion felt like needles thrashing through my spine. I stayed on the ground for some time until the spring heat subsided and wind brushed through the trees. The crickets began to sing their monotonous song. I somehow made my way back into the house, slowly, holding onto my hip the whole fourteen steps inside, then collapsed on the cot and stayed there for the rest of the night. When I woke, I called Srinivas and told him what happened. He had become my reliable son. "I'll come, Amma. I'll find a way to get a week off work. I can come. Don't worry." He had stayed for months; his job allowed him to work remotely. I wished for him to be selfish like his brother, to not leave his family for me, but if he hadn't, I might have been dead. I suppose somewhere inside I still wanted to live. It had been a week since the hip replacement surgery. The recovery had been slow. Srinivas rubbed calamine lotion onto my feet. "Your feet have become very cracked," he said. His feet had been cracked like this too when he was a child, and I used to rub calamine lotion all over them after he returned from playing in the cricket field with Karthik. [End Page 208] I've become you as a child, I thought. I didn't speak much these days because most of what I said was interpreted by Srinivas as a cry for help. I must have seemed too crazy or sick to say anything normal. "What, Amma?" he asked. I knitted my lips together tight. He went back to scrubbing the lotion on my feet. As Srinivas grew into an adult he spent his days trying to get away from the house and his father. I understood his impulse, though I would never say it out loud. Karthik, the older of my sons, was often at school late, so I would be left alone in the house with Keshav...