Symptoms Of A Mother’s Love
By: Paroma Sen
Tags: Fiction Friday, Mental Health, Fiction, Suicide, Love

My eyes opened to a green curtain. There was something uncomfortable about my mouth; I couldn’t bring my teeth together. I brought my arm up and felt a tube in my mouth, going down into my throat. I was wearing a strange yellow nightgown. It was my mother’s. Something else felt weird. I realized I was not wearing any undergarments. I turned my head to see my mother, dear, wonderful mother, sitting next to me in her pink sari. My father was giving the nurse a new box of syringes.

The nurse went away and a policeman in a brown and white uniform came to talk to my dad. “You want to register this as a food-poisoning too?” the policeman asked. “The other two suicides have done the same.”

“Who are the others?” my dad asked.

The policeman pointed to the bed on the right, and the one beyond it, to its right. The woman nearer me was in her forties. Two men were sitting near her, probably her husband and son, I thought. She wasn’t talking to either of them. The bed further away was occupied by a girl in her twenties. An old woman sat next to her, holding her hand.

“That one is a politician’s daughter,” the policeman said, pointing to the girl. “They are going to move her from the ward into her own room soon.” The politician probably wanted to keep this away from the press.

“Both of them are cases of sleeping pills.” So, I was the odd one out, being the youngest at thirteen, and having used Baygon, a pesticide, instead of the tried and tested sleeping pills.

Why did I choose Baygon? Simple, it was the only thing available to me. I thought back to that day. For a week I had planned, regularly checking the level of fluid in the green metal container labeled ‘Baygon’ with the picture of a brown cockroach on it. I was waiting for the perfect opportunity and it presented itself that Wednesday evening when my parents went out and told me they would return late.

After they left, I went to the kitchen and poured the Baygon into the fat steel glass, the one with the ring around it. I drank it steadily, like I used to drink my milk with Bournvita every morning. It tasted like oil. I threw the glass out of the window. I didn’t want anyone else to use it and fall sick. Then I went into my bedroom, turned the ceiling fan on, the tube light off and lay down on my bed.

“So, what do you want to do?” the policeman said impatiently, pulling me back to the jarring present. “Do you want to register it as a food-poisoning?” He was expecting a bribe in return for keeping my record clean. My dad gave him some money and the policeman asked me to sign a piece of paper.

The paper had words, presumably, but I couldn’t read them. Everything was blurred. The black characters had all melted together and formed new fuzzy characters in some kind of alien language. I hadn’t realized until then, because I hadn’t been looking at things up close. My father put a pen in my fingers and pointed at a white spot on the paper. I scrawled my signature, adding another smudge, which immediately danced away with its new alien friends into the white haziness of the sheet of paper.

My vision wasn’t all the Baygon had affected. After the tube was removed from my mouth, I realized my lips were different. The sides of my upper lip had thinned out to flaps and had swollen so that I had to open my mouth twice as wide to put food into it. Also, I couldn’t even sit up on my own, let alone walk. The one time I tried, my legs shivered violently and collapsed under me. I was paralyzed waist downwards.

I was an invalid, at least for the next few days. The doctor had told my father that it would take about a week for the Baygon to pass completely from my system, and the symptoms would gradually decrease. Meanwhile I couldn’t walk or eat by myself. The worst thing was that I couldn’t even read to pass the time.

I didn’t know whether it was night or day; the ward was always lit with artificial white lighting. I missed sunlight. I got a sense of the time — it was probably evening — when my parents went away at the end of visiting hours, and I was left alone with nothing to do.

So, I looked at the other patients in the ward. The politician’s daughter was gone, but the other woman was still there. There was an old man opposite me, and a quiet old lady a few beds away on the left. She got moved into the spot opposite me when the old man died. This happened the first day after I regained consciousness. Maybe he had cancer or something.

On my left, a new patient had been brought in that morning. His wife and four kids stayed with him till the end of visiting hours. Later I heard the nurses talking about him. He was an electrician and had been severely electrocuted while working. His wife was from a rural village, and therefore unable to provide for the four children on her own in the city.

The ward was quieter now that the families had left for the night. The distinctive smell of hospitals was softer now. It smelt vaguely of disinfectant, spirit and floor cleaner, maybe Phenyl. A young doctor in a bright white coat walked into my cubicle and checked my IV drip. “How are you feeling now?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Did you have a lot of visitors today?” he asked.

“My parents were here,” I said. Why all this meaningless chatter? I was sure he didn’t care about my visitors.

“How about your friends?”

“It’s summer vacation now. They don’t know.” I wished he would go away.

“So, why did you do it? Why did you drink the Baygon?” His voice was carefully sympathetic. “You can tell me; I will not tell your parents.”

I looked at him. “No reason,” I said.

“Tell me, please. Was it a love affair?”

I was mildly surprised. Was this the kind of guy the hospital sent for counseling? He seemed more like a tabloid reporter looking for gossip. If a thirteen-year-old girl attempts suicide, it’s because she either failed an exam or has got her heart broken. He was brought up on a diet of ‘A plus B equals C’, and any exceptions would be beyond his comprehension.

He continued looking expectantly at me. This was like telling a child that Santa Claus didn’t exist. I almost wanted to concoct a love story, just for his sake. After a minute I said, “I’m sorry I cannot tell you.” He persisted for a while, but when he saw I was going to be stubbornly silent, he left. I was left alone again to drift into my own thoughts.