Zoha Kashif

For seven weeks, I had been driving an hour to my mother, Sabina’s apartment since her knee surgery. It would have been easier to move in until she was back on her feet, but that would have meant stepping too far across the line we had drawn between our shadows over the years.

 

Last Saturday, I arrived at her apartment with paper bags full of groceries: basmati rice, lentils, onions, boneless chicken, and grapes.

 

The years had painted themselves into her face. Thick lines gathered at the corners of her eyes, and a pale scar cut through one eyebrow, a remnant from before I was born. Her hair, once pure black, had thinned to silver at the temple, though she still kept it pinned neatly behind her ears.

 

“Did you bring milk cartons, Beta?” Sabina asked, looking up from her newspaper.

 

I stilled at the entrance for a moment. 

 

Her eyes looked at my face as if they might find the missing milk there. My hair had fallen loose from its clip during the drive, and I could feel the faint ache beneath my eyes from another late night studying.

 

“You always forget everything. So careless.”

 

She sighed and unfolded her newspaper again, smoothing the crease along the middle with the palm of her hand.

 

“That’s not true. I brought everything else on the list, Mom.”

 

I sucked in a breath through my teeth and grabbed the pack of onions. Their skins were loose and papery beneath my fingers, tearing as I shoved them inside the bottom shelf.

 

“You forgot to bring floss last time.”

 

“You just love reminding me of my tiny mistakes, Mom.”

 

“They’re not very tiny, Inaya.”

 

Sabina rubbed her forehead with her thumb and index finger, the way she did whenever she was trying to collect her patience back.

 

“How will you become a proper wife and mother if you do not even know how to get groceries, Inaya?”

 

“I know how to get groceries, and I would be a good wife and mother.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“What do you mean by sure?”

 

“If you were capable, you would have been married with children by now, but you’re twenty-five and still unmarried.”

 

“You say it like it’s an insult, Mom. I’m just focusing on medical school.”

 

“It pains me to tell your aunt Mina that my only daughter is devoted to being a childless spinster.”

 

“That’s not what I planned, Mom.”

 

“But it’s where you’re headed.”

 

I reached for the boneless chicken without looking at her.

 

“I don’t need your advice. Please keep it to yourself now.”

 

“I’m your mother and will give you advice, Inaya. Whether you like it or don’t, I won’t silently watch your life fall apart.”

 

I slid the chicken into the freezer, snorting.

 

“My life is not falling apart. You can be so dramatic, Mom.”

 

“I am not dramatic. Do not talk to your mother that way.”

 

The freezer door closed on my hand with a sickening thud. I winced and wrenched my hand back.

 

Her eyes darted to my fingers, widening for a moment. She immediately rolled herself over to the fridge.

 

“Show me your hand, Beta.”

 

“I’m fine, really.”

 

She inspected my hand closely, her lips pressed together. My fingers had already turned pink, the skin beginning to swell like ginger root.

 

The freezer door opened again, cold air spilling across the floor. She shuffled through packs of peas and frozen meat until she found an ice pack buried beneath a bag of chicken.

 

Then she pressed it gently against my hand.

 

“It’s fine. I can hold it, Mom.”

 

“I know you can.”

 

She kept her hand there for the next thirty minutes. I told her she didn’t need to hold it, that I could do it myself, that her hand would grow tired. 

 

Her fingers still stayed wrapped around mine, warm despite the cold leaking through the ice pack.

 

Afterwards, she rolled her wheelchair toward the window and watched the children playing in the park. Their small hands tugged at the swings. Frost veiled the maple trees, every branch white against the glass. The children laughed beneath them, some spreading their palms to catch the snow. 

 

My mother watched them for a long time with a sense of wistfulness.

 

I noticed the nests of dust gathering on the radiator close to her. I remembered she had asked me that morning to repair the radiator. I knelt beside it and tightened the loose screws with a rusty screwdriver, pulling until they finally locked into place. 

 

I wiped the shutters with lavender detergent until they shone faintly and my fingers were left smelling like a lavender field.

 

When I tightened the last screw, the radiator shuddered in its frame, coughed once, then sighed awake.

 

For a minute, nothing happened.

 

Then heat began to move through the metal, reluctant and uneven, lingering around my knees. The radiator breathed against my legs as though it, too, had forgotten how.

 

I took the shawl from the back of the chair.

 

Her name was embroidered along one corner in Urdu, the letters softened by years of fingers passing over them. The dark-brown fleece had begun to fray at the edges, but she never looked at them. 

 

Her mother, Samia had embroidered it for her before she crossed continents. Before she learned to sand the softness from her tongue. Before she put her dowry kurtas away in the attic.

 

I draped the shawl around her shoulders.

 

For a moment, I could see the girl she must have been inside the woman she had become: wrapped in her mother’s handiwork, carrying a name stitched by the hands of someone who had expected to grow old beside her.

 

My mother pulled the shawl closer beneath her chin.

 

I wanted to tell her that I remembered.

 

I was not sure what I remembered: the woman she had been, the mother I had needed, or the years in which we had both learned how to live around each other’s absences.

 

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “There’s chicken pulao in the fridge. Take care, Mom.”

 

She nodded without looking at me.

 

I stood there a moment longer.

 

The radiator kept breathing. Outside, the children swung higher, their voices carrying faintly through the window. My mother’s thumb rested over the Urdu letters, tracing her name.

 

I closed the door softly behind me, leaving her wrapped in the shawl her mother had made, with the heat trembling through the room and a name beneath her hand that had survived everything neither of us knew how to say.