THE GIRL SHE REMEMBERED

“Bol Aai, Bol,” she would tell me when I was barely one and a half years old, leaning closer with a patience only certain women possess, repeating the word again and again as though the entire world had narrowed itself down to that one moment.

And when I finally said “Aai,” the joy in her eyes was not the joy of being addressed.

It was the quiet fulfilment of a love that had finally found somewhere permanent to live.

Years later, I found myself saying the same word again.

But this time, it was inside an ICU.

“Aai”

The room smelled of antiseptic, medicines, cold air-conditioning, and the strange metallic silence hospitals carry at night. Machines blinked around her with the kind of confidence only machines possess, as though numbers and sounds could fully explain what was happening inside a human body.

She had suffered a brain stroke.

I was twenty. Old enough to understand fear properly now.

One of her children stood outside the ICU and told me quietly, that the doctors had asked them to call me. 

“She remembers nobody,” they had said.

Not their names. Not faces. Not conversations.

But continuously, in broken intervals, she kept repeating one name.

Mine.

I remember standing there for a few seconds unable to move.

Because life prepares you for losing people. But it never prepares you for discovering how deeply you were loved.

When I entered the ICU, she looked impossibly small. This was not the Aayi I knew.

The Aai I knew moved loudly through kitchens. Her bangles made noise before she entered rooms. Her sarees carried the smell of coconut oil, agarbatti, fish fry, and fresh jasmine flowers all at once. Her voice could travel across buildings if required.

This woman looked fragile enough to disappear into the bedsheet.

I sat beside her slowly.

“Aai” I whispered again.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then suddenly, very gently, she opened her eyes.

And in that half-conscious voice, somewhere between memory and sleep, she smiled faintly and said,

“Maaji porgi aali ” Then softer, “Maaji mulgi aali ” ( My girl has come )

And before I could even process it, she closed her eyes again.

As though her body had only stayed awake long enough to recognize me. I sat there holding her hand for a long time after that.

And somewhere between the beeping machines and the silence of the ICU, time stopped behaving normally.

Suddenly I was no longer twenty. I was three months old again.

Wrapped somewhere beneath the soft cotton folds of Aai’s saree while she moved around the house doing a hundred things at once.

Aayi and Baba already had three grown children by then. They did not take care of me because they needed money.  They took care of me because life had suddenly become too quiet after their own children grew up.

And then I arrived. A small, loud interruption.

Amma would get ready for office in the mornings, still worried like all first-time mothers are, and Aai would simply say with complete confidence,

“You go. She is mine till you come back.” And somehow everybody believed her.

I grew up more under her saree than inside my own house. My vegetarian Malayalee parents probably imagined I was growing up eating soft idlis and mashed vegetables.

Instead, I spent my childhood chasing crabs near blue and orange buckets in the kitchen while Aai shouted dramatically behind me like I was hunting wild animals instead of terrified seafood.

I was obsessed with the fish market. The crabs fascinated me. The lobsters terrified and excited me equally. And king fish, to me, was not food. It was royalty.

Aai would make me sit on her lap while feeding me rice, dal, and king fish fry with her hands, telling stories as though every meal required mythology.

“This fish was once the king of the sea,” she would whisper seriously.

And I would listen with full belief while chewing.

Every fish had a backstory. Every prawn had character development. Every crab apparently had attitude problems.

Looking back now, I realize half my childhood nutrition came from stories.

And Baba, Baba was softness disguised as a man with a large stomach and a permanently serious face.

When I had cough or fever, he believed in exactly two medicines.

Faith and Rum.

One tiny spoon of rum “for warmth,” according to him, and then I would sleep on his stomach while he lay down after lunch.

His breathing moved me up and down slowly like a swing.

Inhale. Rise.

Exhale. Fall.

To this day, no expensive mattress in the world has ever recreated that level of emotional luxury.

For them, I was not somebody else’s child. I was simply theirs. And for me, that was family.

I do not remember confusion. I do not remember separation. I only remember belonging.

I remember Aai every morning in fresh sarees, as though ordinary days deserved respect too. Crisp cotton sarees. Fresh gajra in her hair every single day. A bright red bindi. A tiny shining nose pin. Sindoor placed carefully as though even marriage deserved ritual after decades.

As a child, I thought women naturally looked beautiful while cutting vegetables and yelling at pressure cookers. Like every good story, ours also began changing quietly before it ended loudly.

Amma and Achan bought a new house. I was four years old. Old enough to recognise attachment. Too young to understand separation.

Everyone said it happily.

“New house.”
“New beginning.”
“Closer to school.”
“Better future.”

Adults are very skilled at placing beautiful words around painful things. I remember the day we were leaving.

Aai held me so tightly it almost frightened me. She kept crying and crying openly, without dignity, without restraint, like someone trying to hold water in their hands.

Baba stood near the doorway.

His eyes were completely red.

But he did not cry.

Some men belong to generations where tears were considered personal failures.

I remember being confused more than sad. Because children believe people they love will continue existing exactly where they left them.

I did not cry while leaving. Not immediately.

I cried later that night in the new house. Because suddenly the world felt unfamiliar.

The walls were unfamiliar. The smells were unfamiliar. The silence was unfamiliar.

Even Amma and Achan felt unfamiliar in a strange way because until then, they mostly existed for me in the evenings after office, during dinner, during bedtime.

My everyday life had been Aai and Baba. And for the first time in my life, I kept crying and calling only one word.

“Aai” Amma later told me that period hurt her deeply for two reasons.

One, because she realized I emotionally belonged more to Aai than to her.

And second, because she knew that amma and achan had caused that separation.

Making me eat became a daily war after that for amma and achan

Poor Amma.

She was trying to feed a child raised on fish curry inside a strict vegetarian household.

I refused almost everything, as though I had personally been betrayed by cuisine itself. And that was the time i realized i am never going to eat non - vegetarian because cuisine betrayed me. Left me. 

And slowly, like all intelligent children, I developed survival techniques.

Particularly regarding milk. Every morning Amma would lovingly give hot milk to me, while achan standing near the Tulsi plant  offering prayers.

And every morning, the Tulsi plant grew weaker.

Brown leaves.
Weak stems.
A deeply tragic appearance.

“This place has some problem,” Achan would say seriously. “No Tulsi survives here.”

Little did he know the Tulsi plant had become the victim of my daily milk disposal operation.

For years, that poor plant suffered in silence because I lacked the courage to reject milk honestly.

Life continued after that the way life always does.

Weekends became reunion days.

Amma would take me to visit Aai. I would buy fresh gajra for her because in my head Aai without jasmine flowers felt emotionally incomplete. We would spend entire afternoons together as though trying to repair time itself.

This continued till around tenth standard.

Then life changed slowly.

Weekly became monthly.
Monthly became yearly.

And then eventually memories became something you carried more than something you visited.

Time is cruel that way. People often say time heals. But nobody speaks enough about how time also erases. Gently. You forget voices first. Then smells. Then tiny habits. See I am a pure vege

And one day you realize entire years have passed without thinking about someone who once felt like your whole world. That frightened me more than death ever has.

And now here I was again. Inside a hospital.

Holding Aai’s hand.

The woman who remembered nobody else from her own life at that moment, but somehow remembered me.

Not because memory is logical. Because love is not.

I sat beside her thinking about everything she had given me.

A language. A childhood. A version of family. A thousand ordinary afternoons that now felt priceless.

And suddenly guilt arrived quietly beside gratitude.

Because what had I really given her back?

Visits became fewer. Calls became shorter. Life became louder.

And somewhere between adulthood, ambition, survival,  and becoming everything life demanded from me, I too had slowly moved away.

Not intentionally. Just gradually. 

The way continents drift. Life continued after the hospital. That is the strange thing about life.

Even after moments that feel large enough to divide your existence into before and after, morning still arrives. Aai eventually returned home.

Slower now. Softer.

Something about her had changed after the stroke. Not visibly at first. She still wore her sarees neatly. Still adjusted her pallu properly before opening the door. Still asked whether people had eaten, but no more she recognized anyone, apart from me. The speed of her had reduced, as though life had gently lowered her volume.

I got married at twenty-three.

And somewhere between becoming a wife, adjusting to new homes, new people, new expectations, adulthood arrived fully without asking permission. Then son was born.

And the day I held him for the first time, wrapped tightly like a warm secret against my chest, something inside me shifted in a way I did not expect.

Somewhere deep inside, I wanted him to know only me as mother. Only me. Not because I lacked love. Not because I wanted to deny him the warmth of other women.

Perhaps because somewhere inside me still lived that four-year-old child standing in a strange new house crying for Aai. 

And suddenly I understood my own mother differently too.

How painful it must have been to watch your child run first toward another woman. How guilty she must have felt while taking me away from the people who had become my world. How motherhood itself is sometimes filled with invisible competitions nobody openly admits.

Somewhere nearby, life was already beginning another ordinary day. And perhaps that is the kindest thing about life.

No matter how much love changes us, leaves us, breaks us, raises us, or follows us through the years, life still keeps making space for new mornings, new people, new hunger, new laughter. Maybe that is why the heart survives everything it does, because even after loss, confusion, distance, and time, it still remembers how to return to warmth.

And then I smelled it.

Fresh parotta.

Hot, flaky, buttery parotta being made at the small Shenoy’s thattu kada. Even now, certain smells do not arrive alone.

They bring entire childhoods with them.

And immediately, without warning, i heard a voice,  “What is this white thing?” “And what is this orange colour inside the bottle?”

I must have been eight then.

When I was sitting with muthashi in Kerala. And she asked, " What is this white thing.............. bottle ?"