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, remaining there until she is safe in her room. That my daughter’s accusations of my love for her are 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. Days as well as nights, I stayed close to her, looking after her, feeding her, and helping her with medicine. There was also a little verandah in front of her room overlooking a garden full of blooming poinsettias. 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 was atmospheric. Evocative, even; the song, the heat, the fledgling poinsettias, and the quiet afternoons filled me with a half-empty sense of sluggishness—of the mind, of the soul.

 

Decades later, I still walk hospital corridors, but my role has shifted. Now, my job is to heal, to help distressed people through their own 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 is not my place to ask. It is irrelevant. Yet, when they get better, they pretend not to know me. They do not even look at me. I know then that they have healed, that their physical pains are gone. But the cure is incomplete, because I cannot 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. My daughter’s accusatory love is tied to my little girl in the exact same way—a genetic strand of a broken link. It is not at all delible, just as those nostalgic moments are not. They permanently remain to impress upon me as half-circle emotions, like those half-baked poinsettias.