Her phone buzzed: Lia pulled it out of her pocket to check the incoming message, expecting a meme, or a friend sending pictures from her latest walk. It was not. “I was there this morning: she’s refusing to take her meds, and she’s yelling at the nurses again. Called the doctor a benchod.” It was a message in the family group chat. Lia hoped that the responses would provide some guidance on how she could get the woman to listen to medical advice, and to stop using particularly colourful language that accused the doctor of fornicating with their siblings. As she scrolled, she quickly saw that no one had anything useful to add. Many in the chat were worried, of course, the appropriate emojis and words of support come up immediately, but that’s all there was. Just hearts and prayer hands.

Years of television had prepared Lia for this place: she barely registered the incessant beeping coming at her from all sides. It was nothing. Background noise, like terrible pop-music covers in a café. The proliferation of Crocs? Expected: she even appreciated the numerous charm decorations on the staff footwear (a little alligator here, a rainbow there). Bursts of laughter and heated discussions about the latest episode of The White Lotus when everyone around her was either dying or almost dead? Of course, what else were people supposed to talk about?

However, there were two things hospital dramas hadn’t prepared her for. First was the room itself. One was a nice surprise, the other, less so. Unexpectedly, the woman was in an actual room, with walls and a large window. Inside, there was a single bed, a few chairs, a bedside table and a small rolling table for meals. The fact that there wasn’t a door was a bit disturbing: the blue curtain in place of a door, even when closed, didn’t provide for any kind of privacy. The lack of a bathroom was also a bit odd, but then again, it wasn’t like the woman who was the room’s current occupant could use it, even if she wanted to.

Second, and this was much more disturbing than the setup, was the smell.  She didn’t know what she expected a hospital to smell like, but it wasn’t this. The woman’s room was disinfected, of course. The whole building was. Walking through the halls, there were hand washing stations every five meters. Not a rogue bacterium in sight: the five-second rule came here to die. But also, to thrive. Because no matter how much a place is disinfected, if there are sick people there, it will smell… of them. Sweat, faeces, Tim Horton’s chilli, coffee, cold pizza, every kind of flower possible, in various stages of decay, much like their beneficiaries. The smell, all these different parts, mixed haphazardly was nauseating, permeating every corner of the place. There was no avoiding it. The mixture was so strong that Lia’s partially broken nose couldn’t save her from it.

Lia put her purse on the ledge by the window.  She had an unprecedented view of the parking lot. The lot was filled with innumerable trucks and 4x4s, many of them with the engines running to keep the cars warm in the sub-zero temperatures:  a mixture of grey, black and white fumes creating a thickening cloud just along the tree line. The smell of burning oil, gasoline and sulphur overpowering any chance the neat rows of trees placed around the lot had of countering their invasion.

As glad as she was at no longer being out there, she shivered as she sat in the high-backed chair with what could pass for cushions, facing the single bed. A loving daughter would move the chair closer to the bed, hold her mother’s hand. She would cry at the state of her mother, in that bed, wearing a diaper and a half open robe, unable to do the simplest thing for herself. Instead, tired and dry-eyed, she picked up photo album on the side table, black laminated with an unidentifiable pink flower on the cover. A relic from the late 1990’s. She picked it up: something to flip through in the semi silence. She let out a deep sigh and sank deeper into the chair. Perhaps the album would have a better impact than the trees outside, absorbing the fumes overpowering her in the room. The first picture she saw was one of her old house, the front yard perfectly mowed, the gentle purple lilac tree in full bloom. She could feel her grandmother’s smile every time she thought of that tree. She couldn’t smell those flowers anymore. Not here.

Lia thought about the home she grew up in, when her grandmother lived with them. She knew the neighbours. They invited her over for Thanksgiving. She babysat their son. The woman had sold that house a long time ago, her grandmother was long gone, and the neighbours had moved. There were pictures in this album that used to decorate the walls of that home. The next picture was one she remembered from the wall. It was of four kids in a bright orange inflatable raft, the youngest of the four wearing water wings.

Lia pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose and pulled the picture out of the album to look at it more closely. To try and feel something, remember something from this trip.

The smiles in that photo took over the entire frame. Crooked teeth and squinted eyes portrayed an uncontainable joy. The laugher fuelled the sunshine, added extra sparkle to the water. A man with a bushy black moustache was behind them in the water, holding the raft as the children laughed. A laugher that jumped out from the photo. A laughter so loud it drowned out any possible distraction. The perfect postcard if postcards had pictures of brown kids on them.

She doesn’t remember that trip. Only the photo on the wall.

She sighed and put the picture back in its spot. Lia pulled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She’d always needed glasses, since she was seven or eight years old. Her teachers used to call home, tell her parents that their daughter was having trouble learning, that she couldn’t see the blackboard. The woman’s response was always the same. “She’s just looking for attention. That’s how she is. She can see fine.” Until one day the woman finally gave in and took Lia to the doctor. She did need glasses. Two years too late, she was on the edge of being legally blind. Her thick glasses ensured that she remembered.

The nurse came in and saw the food tray that remained untouched. His light-blue scrubs were properly accessorised with matching Crocs, though there were no charms on the shoes. Serious Crocs were the order of the day. He tried to do his job: gently woke the woman up and told her to eat her meal, that he was going to do a few health checks. Ach, Loi na pi was the incomprehensible response. The woman closed her eyes, the period at the end of her sentence. The nurse looked at Lia, confused, but Lia was certain that this was not the moment to get into the nuances of Gujarati imagery and how the woman telling someone to stop drinking her blood didn’t have anything to do with blood at all. Or drinking. Instead, Lia offered a basic interpretation. “It means she doesn’t want to.”

After a few minutes that could have been a few hours or a few days, where the blood pressure was too high, the medicines were ignored and the food uneaten, the woman looked at Lia, acknowledging her presence. “You were much fatter and uglier before.” The first words, directly spoken to Lia from the mother she had flown halfway around the world to see. The nurse’s eyes widened as he continued to fuss about, failing to pretend he hadn’t heard. He eventually left the room, a quick word about having to speak to the doctor, and Lia stayed in her chair, album in her lap. The tray having been removed from the room did not improve the smell.

The woman closed her eyes. The doctor had said that she would sleep a lot. Recovery from a stroke was exhausting work. Her breathing became heavier, a light snore that floated into the hall. There was no need to sit there while she was snoring. Taking the album with her, Lia went to the cafeteria. It had been a long flight, she had come straight from the airport, and she was hungry. Happily, she got the last cheese scone. That glorious find, coupled with a cup of mint tea was all she needed. The fuel for her 4x4, minus the exhaust. The scone was expensive, though she wasn’t sure of the current price of freshly made scones. Lia was always worried about spending too much money. She took a corner table in the cafeteria, facing the entry. She could watch everyone in the room but was far back enough that she was practically invisible. The perfect spot.

In the album, she found a picture of herself with all her friends, sitting in the newly renovated basement of that much loved house with the lilac tree, on an orange corduroy sofa. A group of teenage girls, all in their pjs, and there was an ice cream cake nearby. For some inexplicable reason one of her friends had a pink Barbie tent on her head. Another had surrounded herself with My Little Ponies of all colours. Lia, her big glasses taking over half her face, had a Nancy Drew book in her hand. Like the photo on the beach, the smiles were large, a clear depiction of the nakra that had already occurred in that basement. They were the queens of nakra, the shenanigans of youth. Not particularly troublesome, but oh so noisy.

She doesn’t remember that party.

Lia was a teen when the woman asked if she wanted her own space in a different part of the house.

“We’re going to renovate the basement, make a little room for you down there. Don’t you want that? Your own space? For you and your friends?”

Of course, she loved the idea: her own private sanctuary, away from the rest of the family. She could invite her friends over, have slumber parties down there. Would she also have her own bathroom? The dream.

“Then you know what you have to do. I need you to make the call, ask for more money,” the woman said. “And be serious about it. Make them feel bad, they’re rich and we’re not. They have to support us. Ask for a lot. I also want some new appliances in the kitchen.”

Before WhatsApp and the family chat, there was a beige phone on the wall, used for all sorts of conversations. The woman insisted Lia make the calls to her uncles and aunts for money. They responded better to a child’s request.

Lia hated making those calls. “I don’t need a new room.”

“You don’t want to help your family, is that it? You think it’s not your job? You’re just like your father, aren’t you, pada.” Lia hated being called fatty. It was as though the woman was screaming at her right now, in this cafeteria, and not thirty-odd years ago. “You only think about yourself, what you want. You never think about this family. Imagine how it looks, our house being run down, or us losing it, just because he can’t make enough money for what I need, for this family.” He was outside mowing the lawn. It was Saturday. There was beer in the fridge.

Lia loved that house more than anything. She knew the man was doing his best. The calls were humiliating, but she couldn’t let the family down.

Lia looked up from the album and watched other visitors mill around the cafeteria. Very few people were alone, most came in pairs or in packs. There was safety in numbers. A father came in through the sliding doors, young son in tow. Got himself a coffee and the boy a chocolate milk. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there were a lot of giggles and some snorted laughter. The contagious kind. It was nice to see smiles in real life, ones that reached the eyes and shined outward, the midday sun in summer. Like the sun in her beach picture. The father took a long sip of his coffee, creating a foam moustache. The child thought this was the funniest thing in the world. The giggles took over the entire room. People smiled.

Lia thought about her own man with a moustache, mowing the lawn on Saturdays, pushing the inflatable boat with the children in it during the vacation, driving the car during their road trips. There’s a picture of him here, on the front lawn, in his stylish 80’s haircut and tinted glasses, helping her on her bicycle. The woman always laughed as she told people that Lia rode her bike around the block every weekend. She could only go around the block as she wasn’t allowed to cross the street.

She doesn’t remember him teaching her to ride.

She remembers him in that beloved home, the beige phone ripped off the wall, thrown across the room. There was screaming and crying.

“You’re a failure to this family!”

“I’m doing the best I can. How much more can I do?”

“You’re pathetic and your children will be nothing because of you.”

The screaming was endless.

In the middle of it all a young girl and her grandmother, trying to get them to calm down, reminding them that the baby was sleeping. The smell of curry in the kitchen, the hiss of the pot overflowing, abandoned from her grandmother’s watchful eye in her attempt to intervene. She was twelve.

She doesn’t remember how it ended.

“When you’re older, you have to be rich so I can come and live with you in your house. This is your duty to me. Do you understand?” The woman would tell her after an episode. Lia nodded solemnly. She was fourteen. She was eleven. She was sixteen.

Saddened that her scone was finite, Lia took a final bite, picked up the album and headed back to the room.

The woman was still asleep in her bed. Lia looked over at the chair, but before she sat, another nurse came in, horse pills in hand. Lia was happy to see that the nurse’s outfit included not only the expected, but also the seemingly necessary Crocs. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to wake her up. She didn’t take her pills earlier.” Lia nodded. The nurse gently rubbed the woman’s shoulder. “Ma’am, you need to take your medicine. I have it here for you, and some juice for you to wash it down.”

The woman looked around the room. Saw the nurse with the pills in hand and shook her head. “No pills.” Her words were slurred but clear enough. “I will stay here until I die. Go to hell.”

“Oh, enough already,” Lia interjected. She was tired.

“You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t want me anyway. None of my children do. I know you wish I was dead.” Thankfully, this nurse was less susceptible to her mother’s linguistic violence than the last one.

“We’ll have to put in an IV and restrain her since she pulled it out the last time” was her response, in an even tone.

“Do what you have to do.” Lia couldn’t think of anything else to say. The nurse left. It was the two of them now.

“I want to go home.” A sad voice from the bed. Childlike.

“I know you do,” Lia answered quietly. “So do I. Take your pills and we can all go home.”

The woman closed her eyes again. A family came into the room next door, a big bag of fast food in hand. The smell of chicken nuggets overwhelming the scent of the flowers that were on the counter, drowning out the disinfectant the nurse used to clean her hands before leaving the room. Lia put the album down, page open to a picture of the family in the front yard, surrounded by snow. The youngest’s orange snow suit almost the exact same shade as the water wings from the previous pictures. Snowballs in hand, a battle was clearly underway.

“I love you.” The woman mumbled from the bed.

Lia leaned back, unsure of how to respond. Finally: “I know. I love you too.”