Hing at the end

At three in the morning, her side of the bed is empty. I go straight to the main door, it’s wide open again, I run downstairs without slippers.
She's at the gate, nightgown, shawl slipping, trying our house keys in the street lock, patient and certain, as if it's the wrong key, not a wrong door. Shinde, the watchman, doesn't glance up anymore. That he no longer finds it strange is its own kind of grief.
Ma, I say.
She turns, looks at me fully. Anjali. I need to go home. My mother will be worried.
Her mother has been gone forty years. I ease the keys from her fingers, the way you take something from a child, without admitting it.
Come, Ma. We'll go in the morning.
You look tired, she says.
I'm fine.
You always say that.
Upstairs, she won't cross our threshold. It doesn't smell like mine, she says. What does yours smell like? Samosas. And rain. She left that kitchen fifty-five years ago, and none since has smelled the same.
Baba sleeps through it — third night this week. I forgot to slide the high bolt across. So, I do the thing that always works: I put the dal on.
It's already on, she says, though I lit it. My bangles slide as I stir — the sound that once meant: she is here, you needn't worry.
Riya, thirteen, appears and doesn't ask why we're cooking at 3 a.m. anymore. She watches me add the hing at the very end, off the flame, the way my mother taught me, and hers before her. She's filing it away without being told.
Near dawn, her hands start rolling rotis that aren't there. Ma, I'm sorry, I say. For thinking your patience was just your nature, not something you chose.
I knew, she says, not recognizing me. I let her feed me nothing, and it's the most I've eaten in years.
Then, like a cloud sliding off the moon, she's entirely here.
Do you forgive me? she asks. For all of this.
There's nothing to forgive.
There is. I taught you to be honest. Don't lie to me now.
Then yes. And you forgive me too.
She holds my face in both hands. Look after Riya, she says. Don't teach her to be small. Then her eyes drift past me, and she asks, politely, if I've eaten. She's gone again.
By morning she's elsewhere, content, tea cooling in her hands. Tuesday, Aaji, Riya tells her, not looking up — patient, as many times as it takes.
A note came home last week: Riya had corrected her teacher, politely — and been right. Cheekiness, it said. The old family instinct rose in me — a girl who argues is a girl no one keeps — words I'd used on Riya without hearing myself. This time I told her she was right, once she'd checked her facts, and sent the note back.
You look tired, Riya says now, at the sink.
I'm fine.
You always say that. She goes back to her reading.
Behind me, my mother hums a bhajan she can no longer hold. The dal from the dark hours is still good on the stove. I lift the lid, breathe in the steam — and the way she taught me, the way her mother taught her, the way Riya is already learning without being told, I add the hing at the end.