This is non fiction.
There was a lady. She is 81 years old. She wears glasses, but her vision is poor. Three of her sons and two of her daughters stay with her.
Her youngest son is a mountaineer and instructor. He does not have regular employment. He is unmarried.
Her two other sons are employed – one is a teacher and the other works for a small private company. The son who is a teacher is unmarried.
Two of her daughters who stay with her are spinsters.
The older of the two, a Masters degree holder each in Ancient, Medieval and Modern Indian History, did a course in Alternative Medicine. She considers herself to be a doctor.
Those who practice this therapy take a six-month course. The practice of Alternative Medicine is illegal in India. But this does not deter her. She works for a pittance at a small missionary hospital. She also claims she knows yoga and has done some ‘research’.
She also talks a lot. In a conversation she hardly let’s the other person talk.
She has never looked after her mother. She sometimes has used harsh words with her mother. She does not know how to cook. She expects her mother to cook for her. This her mother does.
The son who is a teacher dabbles in religion. He works voluntarily for a religious order.
Though soft-spoken, he likes to hear the sound of his own voice. He also forged his mother’s signature and withdrew the money his father had saved. His father died about a decade ago.
His younger sister who is unmarried has a temper. She helps her mother with the household chores though. She accompanies her brother who is a teacher on visits to the religious order’s institution.
The other brother who is married turned sickly after marriage. He has a quarrelsome wife.
Though he and his wife live on the ground floor of the house, he seldom goes upstairs to either meet or inquire about his mother, whose health has been failing for many years now.
When the mother suffered a cerebral stroke early this week, the daughter rushed her to the hospital where she devotes time as a volunteer. The hospital only takes in female patients and is a maternity hospital.
This daughter left home in the ambulance with her mother with hair uncombed, wearing a nightie. Her feet were bare. After her mother was shifted to a proper hospital
She told doctors there that she was a doctor. The doctors were surprised at her dress.
She sat beside her mother’s bedside all through the day and into the night – the picture of a devoted daughter.
Her brother the teacher, at first refused to believe that her mother could not be treated at the maternity hospital and required to be shifted to a proper one. Possibly, he was worried at the expense.
At the hospital, while his ‘doctor’ sister gave free advice to actual doctors on how her mother should be given treatment, the teacher brother sulked in the background.
He also refused to inform relatives who would have come to help. When they came, he advised them politely that they were not required.
He also spoke about positive thinking. He was thinking positively that his mother would get well. The power of positive thinking worked better than medicines.
How can people be such hypocrites? A daughter, who ordered her mother around and refused to help around the house, let alone cook, is now posing as the ideal daughter.
Do people need to pose at times of distress?
And the man who robbed his mother off her savings, taking advantage of her advanced age, is lecturing visitors who are dropping in that he would take his mother home safe and sound soon. Positive thinking would cure her.
His mother is partially paralysed after suffering the stroke. She also has a massive brain hemorrhage. Doctors have decided not to operate on her because of her age. She can mercifully neither see nor hear the antics of her progeny.