PART 1: The morning I told my mother she had to leave, the sky was the color of old newspaper — grey and used up, the kind of sky that doesn’t promise anything. I had rehearsed the words a dozen times in the bathroom mirror while shaving, watching my reflection mouth sentences that sounded reasonable in my head but felt like stones in my throat.“Ma, the kids need more room. Priya’s in high school now. Dev needs a study. The baby — well, she’s not really a baby anymore, she’s six and she needs her own space. You understand, don’t you?” I told myself it was practical. I told myself it was necessary. I told myself that reasonable people make reasonable decisions and that this was, above all else, a reasonable thing to do.
My mother was sitting in the chair by the window — the armchair my father had bought at a furniture shop in Lajpat Nagar thirty years ago, the one with the faded floral pattern that she had reupholstered twice because she couldn’t bear to part with it. She had a cup of tea in her hands. She didn’t look up when I walked in. She just kept looking out at the small garden below, at the curry leaf tree my father had planted the year they moved in, at the jasmine that climbed the rusted iron railing. I said my piece. I said it as gently as I could, which wasn’t very gently at all.She was quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that doesn’t ask for anything — not reassurance, not argument, not mercy. Just quiet.
Then she smiled. Not a broken smile, not a bitter one. A genuine, soft, unsurprised smile, as though she had been waiting for this conversation for years and had long since made her peace with it. “I will only take my plant with me,” she said. I looked at the plant on the windowsill. It was a money plant — the kind people keep in glass bottles of water, or in terracotta pots like this one. Unremarkable. Heart-shaped leaves, trailing vines. She had had it for as long as I could remember. As a child, I had watched her water it with the leftover water from washing rice. I had watched her talk to it sometimes, murmuring things I couldn’t hear. “Of course,” I said. “Take whatever you want.” “I only want the plant,” she repeated, and turned back to the window. I drove her around the city for two hours, asking her where she wanted to go. She sat in the passenger seat with the pot in her lap, cradling it the way she used to cradle me when I was sick with fever, the way she’d cradled each of my children in turn. She had her handbag on the floor by her feet, the same brown leather bag she’d carried for fifteen years, its handles worn smooth. “There’s a good place in Vasant Kunj,” I offered. “Nisha aunt’s mother-in-law stayed there. She said it was nice.” “How much?” I told her.
She shook her head. “Too much. You don’t earn much, beta. I know that. The EMI on the flat, the children’s school fees, Meena’s job situation — I know everything. I don’t want you spending all your money on your sick mother.” “You’re not that sick, Ma.” She looked at me then, and I understood that she was. That there were things she hadn’t told me. That she had been carrying something in her body for a while now, quietly, in the way she carried everything — without fuss, without demand. “Take me to the least expensive place,” she said. “A clean one. That’s all I ask. Clean and quiet.”
NEXT PART and the FULL ENDING are coming. Type ‘NEXT PART’ and press ‘LIKE’ so we can post full story. Your [LIKE] helps these honest stories reach the people who need them most. Thank you for the support. 
