She awoke in her own bed but, while inhabiting that minor moment before consciousness, assumed she was still on the concrete where she’d fallen. This was perhaps attributed to the fact that last night, immediately before she’d retired to her bedroom, leaving her nearly former son-in-law in her living room and lit by the glow of a television she knew he felt was beneath him, he’d asked quietly, “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

No, she did not. But despite that, here was her mind working against her, right on time to fuck her over as usual. She remembered trying to give the unhoused man cash, and their disastrous embrace. She remembered falling; she remembered thinking desperately please not my hip. At her age, that was the beginning of the end: the hips.

God listened and, like some wily genie obsessed with loopholes, opted for her head instead.

She’d come to with the police and paramedics looming over her. “I don’t need an ambulance,” she said, immediately fretting over cost. She was on Medicare, which would help, but still. Yes, there was copious blood; however, head wounds bled profusely and deceptively, she knew that. In another life, she would still be retired, but from practicing medicine.

But there was no room for her will, really, because she was concussed and thought it was the year 2015. Called Obama the president, though later she’d quip that that wasn’t the concussion so much as wishful thinking. With slurred speech, she told them her daughter could pick her up – because in 2015, her daughter still lived nearby with Nathan, her then-boyfriend. In 2015, she hadn’t yet absconded to India to be a forty-year-old graduate student.

Malti was asked if she wanted to press charges.

“Charges?” she echoed with a bewilderment wholly removed from her head injury. “It was an accident.”

“You were assaulted, ma’am. The cameras got it.”

“But he’s – he’s not … right,” she said, her words failing. What she wanted to say was coming to her in Gujarati, not English. “He needs help.”

Her options, as explained to her, were to either press charges or not. They’d take him in if the former and let him be if the latter. The man had not moved far – they pointed. He was still in the strip mall, tottering near the Smart & Final.

“If you take him in, will he see a doctor?”

No, they were not in a position to help.

Then what is the point of you? she thought, but thankfully did not say aloud. Though maybe she had said it aloud. By that juncture, the thick curtain she normally maintained between her thoughts and her tongue had been yanked aside.

Now, in her bed, her entire body aching, she wondered if the police themselves ever felt frustrated by the lack of options they were able to offer. Like the system bound their hands, too, but they faced a public that thought they were the system. Malti wasn’t ignorant; she watched the news. She knew plenty of them were fundamentally off, eager to wield a gun and play bully—the job often attracted selfish megalomaniacs obsessed with control, like those reels of violent ICE agents hunting like predators. But she also knew there simply had to be good police officers, ones who were drawn to the job by a calling to help. Or maybe she didn’t know it, but she had to believe it.

Malti also had a soft spot for alleged villains lately. When you spent so much time painted as one, you began reaching for nuance.

She should rise, but she did not wish to. She reached for her glasses, which had mercifully not broken in the fall, though she’d lost her beloved visor from Daiso. No matter. She had others, had given one or two to Kavya over the years to wear while driving, though she never did.

Malti checked her phone. Eleven. She stared at the digits with a slack lack of comprehension. Eleven. Every morning – retirement be damned – she awoke sans alarm at 6.32 whether she wanted to or not. Eleven. It was so decadent, so uncharacteristic that she succumbed to a stretch and immediately regretted it. Her battered body screamed a long list of complaints.

She gingerly moved into a seated position, her legs hanging, toes not quite meeting the decorative rug until she scooted forward. She planted her feet and stood, reaching for the support of the dresser and walls in case she lost her bearings. In this manner she trudged out of her room to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway.

Kavya hadn’t lived here for nearly twenty years, but the master bedroom—primary bedroom, Kavya’s voice interrupted, because “slavery and shit”—with the en suite bathroom was still hers in Malti’s mind. Kavya had often implored in vain for her mother to shift.

“It’s crazy that you let me have it in the first place,” she’d said, home from college in 2002, her voice not unkind. “You should get the best room. It was so nice of you, but I didn’t realise how bizarre it was until later.” Upon leaving Malti’s arms and joining the world, Kavya said this about many ways of their life. “I can help you move.” But Malti did not want to move.

Not out of some deluded longing to preserve the room in case Kavya ever returned to this faded nest. She wouldn’t. Malti knew that. But she’d tried sleeping in the primary room a few times and it had just felt wrong, uncomfortable, like wearing shoes that did not fit. She preferred her room, with the familiar shadows she’d slept under for decades.

So the primary room remained vacant yet bursting with possessions from an abandoned era—posters, framed photographs, outdated jewelry. The house was not a preservation of Malti’s daughter, but rather of things that had once served her and now no longer did, things left to molder while she made new memories, leaving behind the clothes, the books, and of course Malti herself, in the mausoleum that was this exhausted house.

In the bathroom, Malti was reluctant to look at herself for more reasons than the usual. Sure there were all the typical markers of age: sun spots, loose skin, clouds of melasma (though surprisingly few wrinkles and no gray hair, which Kavya envied). But now there were the added decorations of her black eye, stitches across her temple from where her head had greeted the metal bench, and cuts on her cheekbone.

Her ablutions, though minimal, exhausted her nonetheless and she leaned against the tiled counter next to the sink to catch her breath. She felt as though she were moving weighted limbs through molasses; the simplest of motions required concerted effort.

When she exited, she saw Nathan filling the doorway that connected the hallway to the living room. She yelped and pushed a palm to her sternum. The reminder of him in her space flooded her with discomfort. She did not mind him sleeping here per se; it was more the idea of him poking around, finding flaws and criticisms, things that should have been done or tended to that were not. The house was not perfect, but it was her home, and Nathan was consistent in his hobby of ferreting out what he deemed neglect.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you heard me.”

She shook her head and regretted it, the reverberations painful.

“Do you want to sleep some more, or maybe eat something? I know you said you weren’t hungry but I—”

Alarmed, she said, “I didn’t say that. When did I say that?”

He hesitated. “About an hour ago.”

“I wasn’t awake an hour ago.” Because Nathan replied okay in a soothing way that enraged her, she asked, “Was I?”

“Yes, to pee.” Which made sense, because while urinating was typically what drove her out of bed, it had not even occurred to her just now. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. You can go home,” she said with a wave of her hand.

He ignored that. “Hungry?”

Reluctantly, she admitted, “Yes.” She shuffled down the hallway toward the kitchen, a few feet from where Nathan stood. He followed her. Her kitchen smelled of heat and use. She made to open the refrigerator. The door felt terribly heavy. Her arm dropped.

“Do you like omelettes?” He gestured to a plate on the dining table.

Yes, but she did not care for food that she had not prepared, with the exception of Madras Cafe dosa, pizza, falafel, and Burger King’s onion rings. Decades before, when Kavya was a child, Malti had also loved Taco Bell’s tostadas, but she hadn’t frequented there in ages. She mustered her strength and tugged the refrigerator open.

“I have food in here,” she said, gesturing to the dark, cool shelves. The refrigerator light had died six months ago and she’d grown accustomed. “Jacuzzi fritters.” She paused. That wasn’t how to pronounce zucchini. She tried again. “Jacuzzi.” Frustration twisted her face, which aggravated her injuries. “Jacuzzi,” she said angrily.

Nathan’s brow furrowed before he understood. “It’s okay. It’s the concussion. It’ll pass.”

But she could not let it go, could not accept she was not the master of her mind. She tried twice more before Nathan said of the omelette, “If you try one bite, I won’t bug you about it anymore.”

Excerpted with permission from Some People, Parini Shroff, HarperCollins India.

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