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the fragile mess she was.
    The hospital room reeked of cleaning supplies and the general medicine smell all hospitals emanate. There was a small buzzing sound coming from the outside, probably someone waxing the floor, though Devi wasn't sure ofthat. She could hardly hear anything beyond the voices of her family, which were loud and clear. She pretended she couldn't hear them and tried to concentrate on the buzzing from the outside instead.
    There were a few facts she had to deal with despite the fuzz in her brain. The first, a hideous one: she was alive. And the secondfact, worse than the first one, was she had been saved by her crazy mother. The irony ofthat was not lost upon her.
    Damn it, if she was lying in her bathtub with her wrists cut to bits, it probably was because she wanted to be lying there the way she was lying there. That was her wish and she had a right to do as she pleased in the privacy of her own bathroom. Anger and resentment congealed within her, and she had half a mind to open her eyes and give her mother a piece of her mind. Death was supposed to have happened. She had chosen to die, but now she was alive, a survivor. What exactly had she survived? How was she supposed to deal with the failure to end her life as well as the failure of not being able to live it with any dignity?
    They were whispering for her benefit. Shobha, her sister, had been in the room a while ago, was angry about having to deal with this at the end of the quarter. She had work to do, and the last thing she wanted was to hang around her dotty little sister, but there was a tremor in Shobha's voice and Devi heard her sister's tears even if she couldn't see them. Shobha was angry, but she was also devastated, just as everyone else was.
    Her grandmother Vasu was the only one whose feelings Devi couldn't surmise. Vasu hadn't spoken a word, though Devi knew she was there. She could smell the Ponds talcum powder, which only G'ma used. Besides, even if Devi was half dead she'd know the hand holding hers for the past few hours was her grandmother's.
    But it was her mother who annoyed her the most at this point. That woman had to use her key again, had to use her key on just the day she wanted to complete the business of living. Of all the shit luck she'd had, this one took the cake and the baker.
    “Mummy, I will sit with her,” Devi heard her mother say. Saroj had been in the room almost always, refusing to leave. When Devi heard her father tell Saroj to go home so that she could at least wash the blood off herself, Devi almost threw up. The jagged edge of adrenaline brought bitterness to her throat as she tried to forget yet again how Saroj saved her.
    “No.” Devi heard her grandmother for the first time. “You sat here all night. And Saroj, it is okay if someone else takes charge for a little while.”
    “This is not about who is in charge, this is about me wanting to be with my daughter,” Saroj said indignantly. There were times when she sounded young, not like a woman over fifty, but like a petulant teenager. This was one of those times. The petulance usually entered her voice when she was speaking with Vasu. It was when Vasu was around that Devi saw Saroj as a daughter instead of a mother.
    “Can't you be with your daughter while I am in the room?” Vasu asked patiently.
    “Of course I can,” Saroj said peevishly. “I am the one who saved her, you know?”
    “And are you going to push that down the poor girl's throat for the rest of her life? If so, you would have done her a favor by letting her die,” Vasu retorted.
    “How dare you, Mummy?” Now she really sounded like a little girl, especially the way she said
Mummy.
“Do you have any idea what I have been through? How hard this is for me? There was blood everywhere … all over the …” Saroj's voice hitched and Devi heard a loud sob.
    Oh, Mama,
she thought irritably,
can't we do without the histrionics? Blood wasn't everywhere. It was only inside the