The Fall

The autumn air has that familiar brittle quality to it, or perhaps it is just Ami’s moods that storm around leaving trails of flying static. She’s snappish, dragon-like these days. What else to expect when it’s September? She whirls in and out of a room I struggle to define as private, and the space around me begins to shrink to an even less enviable size. I wish I had the gift of weathering this with stoic patience, to tolerate her with compassion. My friend tells me to start Sufi meditation but I just hold my tongue and give myself mental brownie points for managing as much. When did we start grating on each other by just sharing air? I lay in her womb and sucked life from her, her blood and bones were my first home.

I used to have such a round full face as a child. Plump red cheeks, the sort of face that aunties kiss and uncles pinch. So why is it that in every picture I see of myself I am frowning deeply, so very serious? I suppose I considered myself a solemn child, one with purpose, despite the bouncing plaits coming down both sides of my face and the cute little legs all dimpled down the thighs. I didn’t skip and giggle. I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and this thin old face stared out at me. I was expecting to see some one else. Some one lighter, some one whose purpose hasn’t gown on her back like an unsightly hump.

‘You were so bloody…damn! What’s the word?’ Shazi snatches the baby’s jam filled hand a minute after he’s smeared a snail-track down the lovely blouse. ‘Why oh why do I ever wear white?’ she groans to no one in particular as I smile and hand her the wet-wipe pulled out of my bag.

‘Pert! That’s the word, honestly Sam you were. You used to always be so clean and perfect and bloody pert. And of course I used to have ripped and stained clothes and my hair a scruffy mess.’ She pauses in mid-sentence and takes a bemused look at herself. The baby gurgles in delight along with our laughter.
‘I was never pert!’

‘Oh yes, and petite and perfect and just the sort of cousin to hate with a passion! Why can’t you be more like Samina darling? Oh beti what will happen to you?’
She mimics her mother’s voice so well it’s scary. I’m sure Khala doesn’t wish for that anymore I think to myself, as I take the baby from Shazi so that she can bring to a halt the bloody battle about to erupt between the twins over which video to watch. Shazi was going to be one to build towers to climb and raise her parents’ blood pressure in the process. I was the solid one always praised by silence and pleased little smiles.

I don’t look anything like Ami despite what people tell me. I think they say it to be kind or perhaps because I some what resemble what she looks like now. With her worn features and fiercely twisted bun I can claim some affinity; I certainly don’t look like she did at thirty-eight. That was when she was still a gleaming society belle or maybe that was earlier still, while she was in her twenties. In any case she didn’t look like I do when she was my age. I have these silver hairs poking up all through my middle parting, defiantly I leave them be. A while ago Ami discreetly left two boxes of Clairol Ultrabrown on display by the sink in my bathroom. They stayed there untouched until a patina of dust had dulled their sheen and then one morning they had vanished as silently as they had appeared.

I found her outside my bedroom with the handyman this evening, greasing the lock, sharpening the key.

‘Your lock wasn’t working properly!’ She glared at me reproachfully.
‘I know Ami, it doesn’t really matter.’
‘Of course it does! Don’t you know that by now?’
I shrugged impatiently and moved past her to put my brief-case on the desk.
‘I’ve made some aloo ki bhujia and shami kababs.’ Her voice had taken on that odd guilt-inducing tone again which drives me nuts.
‘I’m not hungry; I’ll just have a coffee.’ I actually felt a small spurt of satisfaction at the brief look of dismay on her face. We can both play the guilt game very well.
‘Suit yourself, but you’re getting ridiculously thin again. I know you don’t eat a thing at that damn office all day.’ I prefer her angry, it is somehow reassuring.
It’s September and the days are heavy and dense. We haven’t quite shed the summer heat but that will change by the end of the month. We’ll move into real autumn then, in the mean time the air is just hard to breathe.

We’re sitting in silence, Ami in the rocking-chair bent over her crossword and I’ve got some of the office files spread out on the sofa around me. What should be a calm companionable silence is merely a sugar coating over angry inner conversations we are having with each other. We should have learned to scream and shout at each other a long time ago, we should have known that a time would come where we would need the skills to rage and yet still love each other. Politeness instead has become such an ingrained habit that neither of us dares to ever raise a voice. We allow the silence instead to speak volumes.

I miss Umber in a million ways, but mostly these days I miss her for the cushion she created between Ami and me. Even her noisy inhalations ensured that there was never any silence around us, her exaggerated oofh-y exhalations, her cat-like yawns which loudly stretched into minutes as her arms extended out wide enough to encompass the world. Things that Ami and I scurry away and do in the privacy of our rooms she did in broad view, making sure that not a part of this house was free of her presence. Like the way she would bring her hand-lotion out into the television room and rub it vigorously into her fingers, throw off her slippers and start painting her toes while nodding in time to the music from American Idol.

When ever she got a phone call she’s pick up the handset and start chatting while walking around, out of her room into mine, on to the balcony, into the kitchen, opening the fridge to pop a grape in her mouth. ‘No! Really? You’re kidding! When?’ We were always drawn, Ami and I, into this vortex of a world where only Umber lived while we slumbered in the shadows. It was the way we all liked it. My friends would say ‘she is so selfish, she doesn’t let you have a life, it’s me me me’ and I’d tell them shut up, you don’t know anything, she’s my baby sister and I made her this way all by myself so don’t think you understand when you don’t. I’d take the steaming pan of brownies out of the oven and wave it under her nose, and she would say “yum!” and swallow one whole as she ran out the door with a wave to me. I’d wrap them away carefully for her midnight scoff, and something in me made sense in those moments. It’s like standing outside next to the person who’s holding up some aluminium foil to their face. The sun goes all their way so you stay safe and unburned and yet basking in their reflected glow.

‘Are you going to call him back?’
‘Who?’ I look up from the chopping board in surprise, onion tears streaming down my face and dampening my shirt.
‘That chap, what’s his name?’ She stirs the pot and studiously avoids eye contact. ‘You know the one who called up a few times last week.’
‘Imran, you mean Imran. No Ami I don’t need to phone him. He was just calling about some work thing.’ I can’t help my impatient tone.

I want to scream and stamp my feet. I want to run away and never come back to these visions of who I should now be, to these things that set my spine on edge. I want Umber to be here in the kitchen to get us all giggling with her mockery of some latest besotted conquest as she rolls her eyes and sits on the counter swinging her smooth bare legs. I want her to be here popping bits of chopped carrots into her mouth as I move around her to do my chores. I want to be the grown up responsible one and have her here as my foil, the forever child, the shining star.

I cleared her cupboards out and all these bright colours fell on me. Red satins and pink silks, bows and buttons and dozens of slinky shoes. How come I never noticed before that my cupboard is filled with varying shades of beige and black and a few muted pastels? She was the one filled with life, the one who painted colour into our world. Ami frets and frowns and shoves everything into big black garbage bags, while I wish that I was the sort of daughter who could still her restless hands.

It’s September and the month extends before us in a precise order of remembrances. On the 18th will be the day of the accident and that stomach-churning first phone call. On the 19th the day of doctors and choices. Then on to remember or rather forget the day of hope and after that the day of pulling the plug. Ami has her rituals she performs as she does each year and briefly we draw close together as we plan the visit to the florist and on to the grave yard, the placing of the flowers, the receiving of the annual phone calls from solicitous family members. September will end and as the year rolls on we will go back to being two graying women waiting for the sun to come home.