Like a bowl shaved into a scimitar, most of her jaw had been removed. By the time I was four, I knew her only as mute—a concept appalling to Maa, who had been on the receiving end of her mother-in-law’s verbal abuse for the ten years she had to live in a joint family home with her, before the cancer rendered my grandmother unspeaking. In my memories, my grandmother’s face is always shifting, an image I cannot pin down. Over the years, her lower lip turns into the stitch of a rag doll’s mouth. In my little girl eyes, each thread is thick as rope, while the skin of her chin is too thin, glistening like nacreous pearl. Squamous cell carcinoma: I know it now by name, by medical definition. But to us it was less a disease and more a punishment, Allah’s, for the ways the woman had used her mouth.

It was said that you did not piss off a woman from her village if you did not want to be chased around the square with a fish knife. So when she could no longer run, she sicced her words on you like famished black dogs. It was not just what she said—vile enough to turn the air sulfur blue—but how she said it, indignities punctuated with sneers and spiteful smirks, face gnarled with malice or a leer of cruel delight. It did not help that she was a vengeful woman. She never forgave Maa for being the woman my father loved. 

Even as a girl, I was hated by my grandmother for being my mother’s child, her loathing my inheritance I was born into. Maa claims she never left me alone with my grandmother, but in this memory she is not present. It is a searing hot summer day. There is a power outage, so my cousins and I sit in our grandmother’s room where the ceiling fan still works, attached to the backup generator. A cousin, a gangly teenage boy who we knew set kittens on fire, spots the guava tree outside our grandmother’s window heaving with fruit. He runs out and brings back half a dozen ripe ones slung into the upturned front hem of his T-shirt. Everyone gets one. Everyone except me. My cousin devours the pink insides of a guava while holding another atop his head, baiting me. A performance for the sake of my grandmother who hates me. My toddler body bangs into his knees, trying to make him relent, give me my guava. My grandmother no longer has her voice by then, but she is thumping her fists on the bed, convulsing with a laughter that is just a sick wheeze of her lungs. Maa finds me in a mess of tears and snot, and takes me upstairs for a cold shower. 

Not too long after, our new apartment on the other side of town is finally ready. Maa is delighted to move away from my father’s family. Months later, Maa arrives one day to pick me up early from my new school in our new neighborhood. Baba, who never misses a day of work, waits for us in the car with a creased forehead. We drive to the hospital. My grandmother is dying.

In the hospital room, my grandmother is attached to beeping and whirring machines, more of her face gone like a waning moon. We are told that she could go at any moment. Maa goes across the street to buy samosas for a quick lunch, and Baba steps out to find the doctor in charge. I am all alone in the room with my gruesome grandmother when her lashless lids teeter open. We lock eyes, and the pipe attached to her throat rises and falls in clicks as she attempts to groan something. An instruction. Slowly, she raises an arm to the bed rail, lifts a shaky finger weighed down with an oxygen meter to point at something across the room.

A jug of water sits there, sunlit. She is asking for water, her quivering finger creating a beat against the metal rail, imploring me. I smirk at her in my school uniform. Her eyes soften with hope when I get up slowly and pour a glass of water. I lock eyes with her as I gulp it down with relish, imagining the sweetness of guava on my tongue, as drops crawl down my chin and throat. Nor do I relay her request when the nurse pops her head in for a second. I deny a dying woman her last sip of water.

Soon, the green zigzags on the monitor will flatline, a beeping alarm will sound, nurses and doctors will rush in and remove me from the room. Soon I will learn that there is something of my grandmother in me after all: a burning vengeance, metastasizing.