To the Man Who Poisoned My Mother
I imagine you noticed my mother first, a woman wearing blue jeans and sneakers, with white hair in a careless braid. Maybe you saw her at one of the events at the conference center in New Delhi where you were both staying, a woman eating breakfast by herself. Perhaps you wondered: What kind of a woman travels without her family? Perhaps this is when you saw your opportunity. Of the few things I’m sure of, Swami Ananda, it’s this: you are an opportunist. Otherwise, how to explain the basket of fruit you sent to my mother’s room? You were thanking her for something, perhaps a donation to your temple or organization. And then, maybe to underscore that gratitude, or to see what else you could get from her, you invited her to dinner.
When my mother called me in Pittsburgh, she mentioned you, along with all the other people she’d met at the conference. She said you offered to help her. I wasn’t particularly worried. She was gregarious and liked meeting new people. New Delhi was her home. We started staying at this center years ago, after my grandfather’s house got too crowded. The staff knew my parents.
Then, a week after meeting you, she called me again.
“I’m sick,” she said. “I haven’t been able to eat for days.”
She’d been poisoned, she said. By you, Swami Ananda.
“He forced me to eat chapati.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
My mother couldn’t or wouldn’t answer me. She was so angry. I didn’t realize until later that she was already feeling pain from the scar tissue left behind by two previous abdominal surgeries. She must have traveled to India knowing the scar tissue had grown, which she hid from my father. All I knew was her unhappiness with everyone and everything in New York. The only solution was a trip home.
We called India “back home,” a place where my parents could restore themselves. Whatever ailed them, India provided the cure. No one stared at them or asked my mother why she had a dot on her forehead. They didn’t have to search for vegetarian food. They went to temples and shrines to pray and receive blessings, something they didn’t do in New York. In India, they were confident and relaxed, better versions of themselves.
I believed in this home.
I wonder, Swami Ananda, if you looked for her the next day in the dining room. I wonder if you asked one of the waiters what happened to the elderly woman who’d been alone. Or did you sit at a table by one of the large picture windows overlooking the garden and watch the green parrots flit from one tree to the next and give no thought to the woman you ate dinner with the night before? As a spiritual leader, you met a lot of people.
*
After your dinner, my mother’s pain became unbearable. A few days later, she entered the hospital, where she had surgery to remove an abdominal obstruction. My father flew to Delhi to be with her while she recovered. Two weeks later, she died.
The hospital recorded the cause of death as cardiac arrest; Dad, who was a doctor, thought it might have been a pulmonary embolism. My sister, who reads medical records for a living, now says sepsis killed our mother. One thing we agreed on: It wasn’t poison. Mom never mentioned you again after that phone call. But she knew: Medicine had failed her, and so had religion. Still, Dad arranged for Hindu cremation rites, and her ashes were dispersed in the Ganges per her wishes.
*
I arrived four days after her death. The sky was a chemical pink as my plane descended at dusk, and the smoky combination of coal fires and burning rubber greeted me as I left the airport. The air was thick with dust particles and soot, wood smoke and fog, comforting in its familiarity. Lights blinked along the road. Television screens flickered through open tent flaps and other temporary dwellings set up by migrants. Forty years ago, this area was wide open, with empty lots punctuated by single-story stucco houses. Now, extravagant three-story houses, with high gates and shards of glass embedded into the walls, crowded together. The narrow streets crawled with SUVs more suited to American highways.
When my mother talked about home, she meant her mother and father standing at the gate of their modest post-Partition house, waiting to welcome her. She had a shelf in her younger sister’s closet, where she kept her clothes and an envelope of money that she replenished before she returned to New York, so that the family would never fall short. As late as 1994, after her parents were gone, we could still walk the streets of her neighborhood to visit old friends. Now her friends had moved, the old houses were being torn down and turned into apartments, and the streets had no room for pedestrians, especially women walking alone. Still, my mother called it home.
Delhi was not my father’s home. A Gujarati among Punjabis, he was more of an outsider here than he was in New York, which had been their home for over 40 years. During the week we were there after my mother’s death, he kept busy. His to-do list was short: Check in with consulate. Go to pharmacy. Talk to night nurse. Find Swami Ananda.
*
“If I had to name her illness, I’d have called it nostalgia.”
While attending to my father’s list, we stayed at the India International Centre, the same place where my mother met you. Every evening, after watching the news in our room, Dad and I went down to the lounge. With its rattan furniture and glass coffee tables, it felt like a café. More than a café, it felt like home, not just because we’d been coming here for years but because the people filtering in and out, with their spirited discussions about politics, were not so different from Mom’s colleagues that she and Dad hosted in New York.
I sat next to Dad on the settee. Around us, men and women talked loudly to each other, as if trying to be heard by the whole room. I felt small and unimportant and wondered if Dad felt the same. His hair had gone white overnight, it seemed, from the shock of losing his wife of 42 years. He looked deflated, his suit loose around his bony frame. His hand shook as he raised the teacup to his mouth. It landed with a clink in the saucer. His eyes followed each man, each guest and waiter, who walked by us.
A tall man in red robes swept by with an entourage.
"Him," Dad said. He was sure.
The man was imposing, in the way he carried himself as well as his height. He was fair-skinned and could have been Indian or Tibetan. His head gleamed like Yul Brynner's from The King and I, and his eyes narrowed as they glanced over us. He felt us staring and dismissed us, Dad in his baggy suit, me in jeans and a t-shirt, standouts among all those smartly dressed, lively people. Did you give my mother the same unseeing once-over when she sat down for dinner with you in the dining room, in her usual outfit of jeans and a loose cotton kurta?
Later, I wondered why I didn’t get up and say, “Are you Swami Ananda? How much money did my mother give you for your organization? Did you promise a mantra that would restore her intestine to its original length and healthy pink condition?” My family believed in your poison and threw away the fruit. I did not. No one could force Manorama Kothari to do anything.
Something stopped me. Perhaps the sliver of the respect I’d acquired for sadhus and other holy men held me back. Maybe I didn’t want to cause a scene. Still, I wondered what you said that made her so angry she’d accuse you of poisoning her.
Dad summoned a waiter and pointed to the man’s back. Was that Swami Ananda? The waiter refused to say, and this would be the pattern all week long, waiters pretending they didn’t understand us or claiming you’d left. When Dad asked at reception, he was told that no Swami Ananda had ever checked into the India International Centre.
*
You saw an old lady alone in the world. You didn’t know that my mother wasn’t some sheltered female who’d never traveled by herself. In 1950, Manorama Sud arrived in New York from a small town in the Punjab to work at the United Nations. At 22 years old, she was the first person in her family to travel overseas. She lived alone for 11 years before meeting my father at a friend’s apartment.
In the weeks before her death, Mom took hundreds of photographs at the conference. She photographed the men selling shawls and other textiles; she photographed the woman who sold her books; she photographed elbows, the backs of heads, and sharp profiles. Those photos, taken at a reception, made me sad, their angles suggesting a person on the outside looking in. Once, Manorama Kothari would have been the person holding court in that dining room, dressed as befitted a woman who had risen through the ranks of the UN, in a sari, pearls, and a slash of red lipstick. She’d always been curious about people, full of questions and conversation.
If I had to name her illness, I’d have called it nostalgia. She thought a return to India would make her feel better. We all did. She’d carried her homesickness with her since the day she left. Perhaps she’d returned to reclaim New Delhi, find her place there again. You underestimated her. She was old, not stupid. She saw the way you looked right through her and knew she’d made a mistake. You were interested in helping yourself, not her. You could no sooner restore her health than she could make New Delhi home again. This was your poison.
*
You can have New Delhi. You cannot have my mother.
The truth is, if Dad hadn’t added you to his to-do list, if I hadn’t been flattened by jet lag and grief, I wouldn’t have looked for you. Perhaps I already understood that nothing would bring Mom back. Nothing would make Dad’s hair black again, nothing would make Delhi feel like the warm hug it used to feel like when I came here as a child. Or maybe I was ashamed. After all, I was the daughter who let her elderly mother travel alone.
Dad once said, “Your mother can't tolerate pain.” What he really meant was that she couldn’t admit to feeling it. That would make her weak. When I was younger, my mother would fight with me the week before I left for school rather than admit she was going to miss me. This was how she expressed sadness. In the year before she died, she was angry with all of us—my sister, my father, and me. I now understand that she didn’t want to say goodbye.
“Did she come back to India to die?” That’s what I wanted to know, but you weren’t the person to ask. You didn’t know her, so how can you answer any of my questions?
But let’s say we did meet. Perhaps you still hold court at the India International Centre, a place I’ve only returned to once, another member's guest. While I still imagine the man with red robes, you’re shorter now, diminished by time and distance. You’d start going on about the body as a cage. And while you’re talking, about karma, about the freedom of death, about the possibility of rebirth, you’ll get smaller and smaller, your face caving in on itself and your limbs disappearing into a puddle of red robes on the ground.
About the Author
Geeta Kothari is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review. Her essay "If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?" is widely taught in universities and has been reprinted in several anthologies, including in Best American Essays. Other work has appeared in New England Review, Massachusetts Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is the editor of ‘Did My Mama Like to Dance?’ and Other Stories about Mothers and Daughters, and the author of I Brake for Moose and Other Stories. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the MFA program at Carlow University.
Read Geeta’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Yonatan Anugerah.
