Short fiction: An elderly woman celebrates a strange Christmas after a health scare

Their voices buzzed around her head like hyperactive mosquitoes irritating and annoying her, but she couldn't do anything about it. Vinny knew she was lying on a hospital bed; not dead but not quite alive, either. She could hear the usual hospital noises all around her, metal trollies clanging, nurses calling out to each other and ward boys laughing as they muttered friendly abuses under their breath. The terrible smell of disinfectant and sickly bodily fluids that all hospitals seemed to have filled her with nausea.

Her daughters’ voices grew louder and louder. Vinny tried moving her head to give them a stern look, a look she had practiced to perfection over six decades, but she wasn’t sure it worked because their chatter continued, filling the hospital room with discordant sounds. A dull throbbing now began in her forehead and she closed her eyes.

Had her daughters always been so loud or was her hearing sharper now that she was in the hospital? How long had she been here? And why was she here, anyway?

Then she remembered.

“Mama, you’ve had a mild stroke. Nothing to worry about. The doctors wanted to make sure everything is alright so you have to spend a few days in the hospital. You’re in a nice, comfy private room. We're all here with you. Can you hear us?” shouted Candy, the eldest of her three daughters.

Vinny had always felt sorry for her. She wasn't pretty like her younger sisters or very bright. Vinny had been relieved when she got married but then, a year after her marriage, her husband had dropped dead following a huge lunch cooked by his mother.

“I told him not to eat so much vindaloo, but his Ma kept forcing him to eat more, saying he was looking so thin," said Candy to everyone at the funeral. She wasn't at all upset about her husband’s death, didn’t bother to wear black even when they went to church later on. She was nine months pregnant when he died.

A nurse came in and shook Vinny’s arm.

“Grandma, have you passed wind?” she shouted, leaning over Vinny, putting her mouth right next to her ear.

Why are they all shouting? Do they think I'm deaf? This nurse with a long hooked nose, is the worst. Why does she insist on calling me Grandma. I wish I had gone to the hairdresser and dyed my hair, instead of waiting till one week before Christmas. Everyone tells me that I look around 60, not 78. But now my horrible white strands must be showing, and dressed in this cat-shit green hospital gown, I probably look a hundred years old. Life is full of nasty surprises. One moment I was sitting at the kitchen table, mixing the raisins and nuts I had soaked in rum last month for the Christmas cake batter, the next thing I know I am lying in a hospital bed.

Vinny she tried to move her head but it felt as if it was no longer attached to her body.

I don’t want to die in this room smelling of disinfectant. I want to pass on in my own bed like Ma did. Died peacefully in her sleep, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and her faithful servants quietly sobbing by the door. Her life was one smooth path with no hiccups, no hospital beds. She breathed her last with a smile on her face, her head on her very own frilled, lace-edged pillows.

Vinny heard a metal trolly rattling. Here comes Miss Hooked Nose, bearing a tray full of horrible things. She will jab me with needles, pull me and push me, turn me over like a slab of meat in a frying pan, all the time gossiping with the other nurse. They are very excited about some mix-up in the maternity ward next door.

A boy baby was given to the wrong parents and now the rightful owners of the boy have come to fight it out and return the girl baby. How did they find out this baby was not theirs? Vinny wanted to ask but no sound comes out of her throat.

“Grandma, are you OK?” the nurse shouted, peering into Vinny’s face.

I can tell she has been smoking. Her breath smells of cigarettes. I have become her bloody Grandma now. My own grandson calls me Vinny Nano, Vinny muttered soundlessly to herself, as voices continued to whirl around her head.

Now her daughters were talking about their various in-laws, discussing what presents to buy them for Christmas. “Something not too expensive, but shouldn’t look cheap,” Rosalind, her middle daughter, kept saying. There is no such thing, Vinny wanted to tell her. Cheap looks cheap.

Excerpted with permission from ‘A Windfall at Christmas’ in Gardens Of The Hearts and Other Festival Stories, Bulbul Sharma, Women Unlimited.