Placebo

Grief sits in my throat as I imagine
my parents on a train back home
from an appointment with the oncologist,
(although when the patient is metastatic, the visit
should really be called “disappointment”), grief is not
that they were so easily swindled, became targets,
or their fear was preyed upon by a man who
perhaps judging by Mummy’s scarved head, sold
them an untraditional powder remedy
made of herbs with twenty-four carat gold dust,
Proven to work, just mix in water, get your life
back, he whispered as the train
hiccuped; my father is not gullible but imagined
an empty bed while Mummy was already shrinking in it
so he must have relaxed his rationality and I wonder
if it was a rhyming image of her recovery he saw
in a dream—a rhythmic shimmer of leaves or scallops
of lace in her dupatta waltzing in the wind—or was it
the simple, electric restlessness of a sleepless man,
that convinced Papa to phone the crook, trade
bundled cash for a polythene packet of coarse crumbles
that a jeweller later confirmed was obviously
fake, what grief sits within me is not conjuring
the futures Papa had sketched around that
money: paint job, new tiles, mutual funds—or what
my mother dreamed up for it: a fully automatic washing
machine, a hanging macrame swing in the balcony; rather
what pinches me is that Mummy, who otherwise compounded
our kitchen’s hundred spices and seeds into antidotes
for our ailments, then, stirring the spoon round and round
in the steel glass, gulped that concoction of glittering dust,
and what transpired back and forth
between her resigned chin and his optimistic gaze in that
moment—like the crackles of fire around which
they were once wedded, those momentary dots of blaze
that were suspended in celebratory air—were golden speckles
of hope’s remnants: flaming hot, binding, disappearing.

Party Ghost

And now? Is her celebration done? And now?

is what Mummy kept asking
on her last day, holding out for my graduation ceremony—

the robed culmination
of my “freedom years”

she’d wrestled Papa let me have.
Before every exam, rubbing warm oil

into the pain on the inside of my elbows, she’d whisper:
I don’t care first or second rank—I just want you

independent. So independent
I missed her dying

and death. Where was I?
Gobbling down

a feast of glossy noodles
numbed by Sichuan spice.

And when Mummy could no longer
uncurtain her eyes, Papa tells me he assured her:

It is done. Done so good.

 “Placebo” and “Party Ghost” from Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Preeti Vangani. Reprinted by permission of River River Books.