Topaz Winters
Part of me truly believes she’ll live forever. Maybe that’s why I volunteer for the night shift, though I’ve been warned it’s especially bad at night. Or maybe I’m wrapping hubris and ignorance in the gentler name of love.
It’s worse than I imagined, made harder by the jet lag and the airplane-stained sweatsuit I’ve been wearing for days now. She wakes on the half hour calling for long-dead family members, grasping for and discarding my hand in turn. With the low buzz of the hospital dampened by darkness, I doze in a metal chair that stings the undersides of my thighs, rise when she does and, on gut instinct, sing. Anything I can think of, really—childhood lullabies, saccharine Top 40 radio from the Uber on the way to the hospital, whatever’s on shuffle in the single earbud lodged in my ear in a feeble attempt to block out the steady blip of her heart monitor. Sometimes she sings along, quiet and halting. Other times she closes her eyes, clasps her hands in prayer. In moments of lucidity she murmurs, don’t stop. Sing it again. Sing to me.
So I do until my throat is raw and itching, until I drift off by the side of the bed. It never lasts long—even in the soundest daze, we both inexorably jolt awake to the bed alarm, the nurses running in to check her vitals. Around five in the morning, I give up on sleep and pace the room as quietly as I can manage, my free ear tuning in to the noise from the bed. The window of her room faces East and I watch the sunrise steep the world to daylight, bleed pink and gold shadows across her motionless legs beneath the blanket.
***
She was the first to teach me that song is an act of worship. At 12, I had no way of knowing that the scales I ran up and down the wooden piano in my mother’s childhood home were the same ones my mother practised at my age, her own mother sitting on the bench beside her, the DNA-deep weight of repetition rendering those keys holy ground. Even in the stiff-backed preteen years, my grandmother knew exactly what to whisper to coax melody from my fingers. An ancestry in each note, a promise of tomorrow wrought strong by yesterday.
As a teenager, she paused outside my bedroom, ear against the door while I sang into the USB microphone I’d spent months saving for. Screeching American pop music—not the Carnatic rhythms she’d been known for in a past life, a thing of myth or miracle, all of Trichy turning to hear the girl whose voice crossed horizons—but song nonetheless. I was heady and untrained, warbling and cracking, and still I opened the door to her wiping away tears. For the first time I felt seen instead of ambushed. When I quit the piano, she was the only one in my family who never asked why.
I’d only begin to trust music again a decade later. As an adult, I knew she prayed for me every day. I thought that maybe when I sang—into a wooden spatula in the kitchen, to my cat fussing in sleep, under my breath to practise my Italian accent—I was praying for her too. This is what she did: find the immortal in the mundane, the holy in every quiet underneath. At 12 years old, how could I know that my grandfather would ask me lifetimes from now, driving home from the funeral, whether I wanted to bring the piano home with me before he sold it on Facebook Marketplace?
***
As March grows weary with all its little resentments, I brace myself for each daily hospital visit, watch the spark in her limbs catch and wear on the jagged edges of chemotherapy. I’ve never seen her without her signature black ringlets, passed down through three generations of mothers and daughters. The silver wisp of her hair now, thinning by the day, trills like a fire alarm, wrongwrongwrongwrong. I want to strike it from the record. The doctors tell us she can go home soon. We all hear the words beneath the words. I am trying to be brave for her; my cheeks hurt with the effort.
One day, she eyes the stale chocolate chip cookie I’ve brought from the hospital café and proclaims that she wants some Easter candy. Since her diabetes diagnosis, she’s mainly channelled her sweet tooth into my sister and me—bestowing us with thumb-thick jelly beans upon returning from Amsterdam, sneaking us leftover jalebi after temple functions. This feels promising, old habits, open hands. Who are we to deny the queen, we quip, so that evening Auntie S presents her with a family-sized variety pack of Hershey’s milk chocolate bars, Kit Kats, Almond Joys, Reese’s peanut butter cups.
With her release date drawing nearer, the candy depletes steadily. Not by her hand—I think she eats a total of half an Almond Joy across the week in sparse nibbles—but she offers the bag to each nurse that bustles into the room, the hum of them familiar as a fish tank filter. It takes days for me to realise that her favourite nurses receive Kit Kats and peanut butter cups, and the others are relegated to Almond Joys and milk chocolate bars. When I finally catch on, she winks and lifts a finger to her lips, our little secret.
But even with old mischief glimmering through the cracks, she barely eats, growing more translucent, like she might dissolve into a dream if I look away for too long. After a particularly paltry meal—two bites of idli for dinner, nothing more despite our pleading—she accepts half of a Kit Kat from my grandfather. One for you, one for me, he says.
Later, she insists he stay with her in the hospital overnight. My grandfather’s eyes, heavy with dusk, meet mine. No, Grandma, I say. Let me stay instead. We can hang out. Have a girls’ night.
My mother chimes in: who needs to hang out with Dad? You’ve been hanging out with Dad for 59 years.
My grandmother’s sigh is sulfur-singed, inevitable as smoke billowing through the room. I could use a couple more.
***
Home from the nursery, she pressed a packet of marigold seeds into my palm of my hand. At six years old, I was more enamoured with the colourful flowers sketched on the packet than the trowel she offered, but nonetheless I dutifully dug a trench in the soil where she pointed, baptised the ground with the watering can. We saved the roses for last. Her favourite and mine, the two of us September-daughters reaching for each other through the decades, with the same mess of curls and lightning tongue and weakness for beauty even at the expense of truth.
My mother never got to touch the rosebushes as a child—she was relegated to planting touch-me-nots, impatiens, because you’re full of impatience, my grandmother would tut—and I held this knowledge close to my chest. My grandmother saw something in me worthy of roses. Like her, I was growing into a nurturer with thorns, tender in the marrow but sharp to the touch, generous and guarded in the same hand. Unlike her, I began to cry when the thick, wet soil smudged across the front of my red overalls. She took my hand, led me inside to the basement washing machine, and murmured as I stripped down, kannamma, some messes are worth making. The roses took months to reach full bloom, and by the time I returned for my next visit, her backyard garden was frozen over. All I ever saw were the photos.
It stung even then, to trust in the mess to alchemise the light. To let a lifeline breathe liquid and safe, without my clumsy fists choking it into legibility. To feel the blooming behind my back and keep walking forward, even without the gift of peripheral vision.
***
No tells me how much of sickness is in the mechanics—keeping people fed, entertained, passing the molasses-long hours until the inevitable. In hospice care at home, she tires quickly. When she calls for my mother or father, guilt rises dense and dark as tar in my throat, even though I know that it’s me she asks for the moment I leave. It’s harder to muster the perpetual hospital-tinted grin, each delicate eye on me another knife to dodge.
When I can no longer stand the rotation of caregivers, nurses, aunties and uncles exclaiming at how much I’ve grown, I slide into the open mouth of an Uber to the nearest fast food joint. I joke with M that mediocre chain restaurants are really all the Midwest is good for, so it’s only natural that I take advantage. (I don’t say while I still can.) I hit Olive Garden, Applebees, Red Lobster. I gorge myself on bread sticks and strawberry margaritas as large as my face, eavesdrop on the chattering blond families at adjoining tables, loiter until the waiters are pointedly pushing dessert menus under my nose.
The return always feels one-night-stand-shameful, as if I’ve broken some essential promise I can’t remember making. I slink in through the garage door so as not to wake her, re-plaster the smile onto my face, and wash the dishes from my family’s dinner. The fridge is unwieldy with food from well-meaning neighbours—idli, aloo curry, pakora, dosa, biriyani, carefully labelled with masking tape over blue Tupperware. At my grandmother’s request, someone drops off a twelve-pack of soda, of which she drinks three sips. A jar marked as “curd” holds a mysterious green mush I can only guess is some kind of string bean curry.
I sniff the contents of each container, scrape the foulest-smelling ones into the garbage, keep an eye on the hospice bed in the living room. A month from now, we will drive home from the temple and sit around the dining table, one chair empty, eating leftover samosas and drinking the cans of ice-cold orange Fanta that my grandfather had complained no one would want.
***
I waltzed into her home at age 19 with tattoos adorning either bicep, resolving to approach the new addition as casually as possible—maybe not even acknowledge it at all, if I could get away with it. I’d been bracing for the blowback for weeks, ever since my mother had taken one look over FaceTime, raised an eyebrow, and warned, have fun telling your grandmother. But I was staying with her through the entire winter break, I reasoned—surely she couldn’t be angry with me that long. (Years of gossiping over the phone with her, of course, rendered this thread of hope comical. No one knew better than me how well my grandmother could hold a grudge.)
When I stepped in the doorway, she registered the ink beneath my skin, the trepidation on my face. Then she took a breath and beamed. Those are beautiful. Tell me about them.
The moon and the sun, dreams and waking, bewilderment and certainty, deception mirrored back as truth. Darkness a mess worth making for the promise of light. We were both Libras, born chasing the transitory, yanked back like dogs on chains when the song faded out. I wanted something constant, quantifiable, beyond question. I should’ve known she would see me for exactly what I was and love me anyway. She asked about my tattoo artist, joked about making an appointment for a matching sun and moon of her own. If you can do it, why can’t I?
I should’ve asked her then, maybe, what it was like to have a granddaughter with all of her quaver and none of her grace. The two of us imperfect reflections, carefully-pruned gardens in her eyes transcribed as a tangle of vines in my chest, the same note sustained octaves apart.
***
She holds on weeks after the doctors’ forecasts, stubborn with sweetness, making it look easy as only she can. My paid time off is diminishing, so I reluctantly sniff the lime pickle one last time, pack up my cat, and catch a flight back to real life. In daily calls, she sounds tired but still sharp, still entirely present. I marvel to my mother, whose smile shines even over the phone: your grandmother’s never been one to meet a deadline. I call her a miracle. My mother says, you’re like her that way.
I don’t start crying until after I hang up, and then I can’t stop. Alone in my apartment in New York, a thousand miles away from the piano where my grandmother raised the woman who raised me, H texts to ask how I’m doing. I’m just trying to be grateful, I say. Instead of scared.
Part of me truly believes she’ll live forever—because how could she not, with her hands steady as a mother tongue, spinning song out of silence, myth out of migraine, extraordinary in the gentlest ways. My father is holding her when she finally leaves. The last words I say to her are I love you. I’ll see you soon.
***
In the Minneapolis Novembers of before, my grandfather and his daughter waited in the car for the heater to drape its fuzz over the cold. 15 minutes later, as the ice on the windshield was thawing, the front door opened and my grandmother—ever regal in her rainbow of saris and heavy-duty snow boots—flitted outside and into the car.
The way my mother tells it, she was a tropical bird, orange glitch of paradise in the snow, bindi perched in the exact centre of her forehead. She summoned the sun. Refused to enter the car without the requisite preheating. Rode shotgun each day as my grandfather dropped off first my mother at preschool and then my grandmother at her job at the trucking company. This was long before they discovered the possibilities of the backyard soil, before they could afford to buy a piano, before they stepped foot into the temple that would become their life’s work. My grandmother had brought little by way of saris from Trichy, so she took my mother to Joann Fabrics on Saturdays and made her own from clearance bolts of polyester and a second-hand sewing machine. They were a gateway drug to hope, an arrow in the neck of tameness. Of course she was the strangest coworker, the object of every wayward whisper: smart and she knew it, charming and she used it, impossible to resist at one glimpse of that dream-bright birthright of a smile. Mrs. D became Auntie D became my mother’s default after-school caretaker, teaching my grandmother about Costco memberships and Easter candy and how to move quick and nectared enough that no white woman dared overtake her.
Years after my mother began raising her own children an ocean away, still fluent in the piano with her Tamil crumbling by the day, my grandmother painstakingly chopped fruit for her husband each afternoon. She’d be rushed to the hospital for the first time in the turmeric tinge of autumn. Hours before she collapsed, she’d cut up a mango, its gold touch raucous against the kitchen tile. She’d hand the bowl to my grandfather in his living room armchair and ask if it was too late in the season, if the mango wasn’t sweet enough. And my grandfather would look up at her and respond, how could it not be perfect when you cut it?
***
We only realise twenty minutes into the drive to the memorial service that we’ve left the roses at home. My grandfather stops in a grocery store parking lot, and my sister and I run inside in our salwars. As we reach the flower display, littered with only a few wilting crocuses, a memory hits me like high tide washing into my throat: my mother and grandmother play-arguing over crocuses, my mother’s favourite. There’s beauty in what’s ordinary, my mother used to say, to which my grandmother would respond, give me roses or give me death. It was funny at the time.
My sister and I stand there Googling nearby florists, debating whether we should run back home for the roses and hope we make it in time to the service or if we should just make do with these purple-brown leftovers. Mom will be happy, I finally offer, and my sister sighs and begins to gingerly lift the soggy stems from the water.
Then we hear an excuse me, and a grocery store worker slips between us to place two bunches of fresh, full-blooming roses in the display—yellow and pink, my grandmother’s favourite colours. My sister and I grin. Even now, she has to have the last word.
***
She stands in the kitchen in my favourite photograph of her, hair haloed with humidity, dish towel flung on the counter.Beside her, a vase of roses, their shock of red and green stark as a diminished chord in the digital camera. Her expression impossible to read. My mother always named it annoyance—someone said something stupid, and you know your grandmother hardly suffered fools. I liked to think otherwise: patron saint of the present, she was never one to argue with rhythm. Her fingers frozen in the leaves, and that magnificent enigma of a half-smile. I liked to think someone had interrupted her rapture, her hands in the flowers both lullaby and prayer, the photographer privy to an absolute awareness, a waking from a dream. The only god I’ve ever worshipped is a pair of dirt-stained red overalls, a rosebush I planted once in a backyard garden and never saw again. In that photo, the roses will live forever, and so will she.
***
Weeks after she goes, I am on the phone with my grandfather. Love you too much, he says before hanging up, and I’m not sure if it’s intentional or a Freudian slip, not sure if it matters. What do you do with a love that big, a love that erases motive and reason, splits your pulse into an open wound, un- and re-makes the ending to every story? How do you keep living when the keys on the piano run out, leave you balancing on empty air?
I call my lover afterward, inconsolable. To calm me down, H says, will you sing to me? Like you did for her, at the end? It hits me in the ribs, true and howling, and my voice when I begin lumbers with sobs. Please remember me happily, by the rosebush, laughing. Who the hell can see forever?
By the time I’ve finished the last verse, I think she might be asleep, the crackle of the phone a shimmering gulf I’ll never quite breach. My bedroom window faces West. Instead of sunrise, all I see is the grey candy floss of morning, the implacable waking of the first planting season that my grandmother isn’t here to welcome. I’ve never been more alone in my life. I do my best to steady my breath, my finger hovering over end call.
Then H’s voice, coarse with exhaustion and clear as a newly-heard secret, returns over the phone. Don’t stop. Sing it again, she says. Sing to me.
And I do.
#
Anandi in the kitchen, ca. 1995
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022, winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & a LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024, finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Foglifter, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, & the National YoungArts Foundation. She lives between New York & Singapore.