Hail Mary

Maha was seven, when her mom had left her dad and their children, unhappy with her husband. She was 16 when her dad married again, this time someone young enough to be her sister. She was 17 when she was pulled out of school and was married off to her step mother's brother, fifteen years her senior. She was 27 when she saw her mother again. She is now a mother of 2 children, the daughter has just started college and the son is in a middle school.

Today the doctors had told her only physiotherapy would help her husband anymore, she was crying.

When she had started to talk I tried searching for words, with not much getting my way, all I did was to look at her, until she finished and leaned on to a cot sobbing.

I must have spoken to her twice before when I had seen her with my mom, probably thrice but not more than that, I was surprised she was crying to me today, this was different, very different from any other pair of eyes that ever cried with me; for one thing she is 35 years old.

I met Maha at a hospital; her husband was in the intensive care after an accident at his workplace, a gas station. I had seen her husband in his bed before, old, tired and gaunt he is everything he should not be. The accident had ruptured his spine and left his legs and hands immobile for now although the doctors have assured better days.

In the one month I saw her at the hospital, her mom was her only constant visitor; her husband's four brothers were at the hospital for a whole five minutes once and her family never came not even her father.

Maha works as an accountant in some small company that pays her Rs.5000 pm, that’s of course as much your high school education can give you in a bustling metro. For now she travels 45 kms every day from the hospital to her workplace and back while her mother takes care of her husband during the day. Her mother also takes care of her children during the nights but she is keen on leaving home.

Though sober most of the time, I have also seen Maha laugh, she is always happy with her children around. The two children visit during the weekends, the younger one is too small to understand much, he spends most of his time playing on his mother’s mobile phone and the daughter is older but can only helplessly sit beside her mother holding her hands.

Today the doctors had told her only physiotherapy would help her husband anymore, she was crying and not just for her husband. Now that he would be discharged, Maha is scared to leave the hospital because when she does, she would have two children to feed, an immobile husband to take care of, a day job that doesn’t pay much, an almost empty bank account and no one to cry to.

She leaned on to a cot sobbing.

It was abrupt when she left as the physiotherapist was attending to her husband, I was relieved, not because she left but because the physiotherapist is actually funny to be with.

That night when I left the hospital at around 10.00 pm, I saw her kneeling in front of a wooden bench with her eyes closed. She was clutching firmly to a copy of the Bible in front of the bench on which a figurine of Virgin Mary holding infant Jesus stood still.