"Of Sarees and Sisyphus: Unraveling the Tapestry of My Mother's Life

My mumma bear will never read this.

Painting by Picasso

My mother dislikes my writing for one sole reason --- I am spilling the family secrets out. But mother, where is this family, and who is reading and talking about our family as if we are the loneliest family in the world? We are, but I don't tell her this as a matter of fact, but a question she will never say yes to. We all have our delusions we cling to, mostly because hope is a thing with feathers, they say.

My mother was born into a family of eight siblings. When I learned to count, I figured it was half of the little boxes on my fingers, which made me laugh at the absurdity of my thoughts. She was the third sibling, which made her the youngest one for a few years before one of my aunts graced this world with her presence. She was insecure as a girl, which I have inherited from her. Struggling to make friends, she had only one friend whom we called P maasi. Apparently, all friends of my aunts and my mother were our maasi because friendship is entangled in the threads of sisterhood, and women's friendships in that way sustain the feebleness of friendships as we age. Nobody abandons their sister, right? Wrong.

As we age, we are shaped by the people around us. As her elder siblings married and she did too, there was something unspeakable that germinated, a seed that would later grow into the fig tree of Plath, which would make my mother the loneliest sister because she was, in fact, abandoned by one of her elder sisters.

As I write her story, I find myself writing her with respect to her sisters, something I don't want to do now. Truth be spoken, she is the loneliest sister in the world, but she is a woman in a family of mostly women who learned to find her way around in this fairly lonely world. After the death of their father, my mother and her siblings knew grief, how to navigate it and lose themselves to it at a very young age.

My mother, in her teens, joined NCC. She dressed in perfectly ironed clothes, with a cap on her head, stood straight in lines, determined to make a mark in this world. She could have been anything she dreamt of. I wonder if she ever felt a sudden loss when she got married at the young age of 21. Still in her 2nd year of college, wearing heavy bangles and an even heavier burden of fitting into a different family, who heard her apprehensions? Aren't women and sacrifice written in the same sentence? A sentence indeed.

She was a shy young woman who didn't know speaking for herself was as necessary as silence. But what fire does to clay, time did to my mother. After she had me, almost like an afterthought of a tragic event my birth was, she decided to continue her studies further. Having a child, I presume, is a sensitive chain around one's body, one that cries and poops and asks for food every now and then. As my father transferred to Chirgaon, she felt a new sense of freedom, rightly so. My father would go to work while my mother stayed back, holding me in one arm and making chapati with the other.

I have always been a troubled child, I believe now. Attention was what fed me more than milk. Hunger was a way to scream into the void that I was here and nobody, not even God, could change that. Talk about a child's courage in the face of God. She covered the entire floor with thick rugs because nobody could hurt a child whose fall was broken by a mother's desperate attempts. I would cry and she would run back only to see me smiling. Love, in that way, has always been a game of seeking attention. From mother, father, friends, sibling. Anyone who came near to the facade of my presence ultimately realized it was Sisyphus rolling the rocks up the hill. I was never satisfied. But my mother flew too close to the sun, burned herself only to lend me some of her sunshine. In that way, my mother became godly and womanhood--a sole survivor of god.

As I entered class 2 and my sister, a year and a half younger than me, my mother held the world by its collar, and took what belonged to her: her education. She became my first inspiration. Over the years, our relationship faltered a bit in my teens, which then smoothed like pleats of a saree for the next few years as I left for college and came back and then into a series of big and small fights that concluded with one thing--we loved each other. We couldn't let go. We suffered. And then we didn't.

As I talk about my mother in respect to me, I still talk about her as a person in relation to something else. Who was she when she didn't have a baby? When did she realize she was in love with my father in this set up of an arranged marriage? Did she ever think of running away? To all these questions, my good mother will say no. But the woman she was, she could have been, will tug the strings of her heart with a faint voice which will be subdued by her love for us. I know mothers as a concoction of everyone around them. But what is it about motherhood that most women accept it so easily?

Maa saw her sisters change, houses, and minds. Of course, it was foolish of me to believe that all the sisters must love each other equally. Sisterhood, after all, is not a promise of togetherness, which she will deny politely, scold me for thinking this way, and will reiterate again and again that she is loved well. But love needs no evidence. So why is she chanting it like a mantra? Maa doesn't accept her loneliness as I don't accept my need for love a little more. Love at its core is finding details, paying attention.

As I have grown into this twenty-six-year-old woman, the age by which my mother had two daughters, I question myself in respect to my mother, the first woman I knew in relation to the world. She laughs sometimes and says, "You will understand when you become a mother yourself," but I don't want to be a mother. I don't want to exist as an extension of something that my children will "infest" later on. I do not want children but for now, this conversation ends as rapidly as the ice melting. She asks me to focus on something bigger than motherhood, the individual self.

My mother loves sarees. In all these years, she has a total of five sarees. She couldn't invest in her dreams for she was busy fulfilling ours. Now when she looks at me, she chirps, "My daughters will buy me a lot of sarees after their first job," she says it as a factual piece of information than a question. I love that about her. But I fail to love myself if I were her. The core of my problem lies here. I have never been a good daughter to her. The guilt chips away my cardiac muscles, something that is confirmed by my high cortisol levels. How can you ever repay what your mother has lost? Time is linear for a reason. Scalar for the magnitude of its presence. Vector for the way it moves ahead. Never looking back. My mother wants to bend time, turn it into a circle or a snake eating its own tail, she wants my childhood but wants my adulthood more.

Through my mother, I see the possibility of the woman I can become. But also the possibilities of sacrifices I might need to make, dreams I might need to bury, and sometimes I don't want to be my mother. She gives too much, and it irks me. Maa learned to speak English later after we were smart enough to teach her bits and pieces of it. She learned to operate a laptop, and make a PowerPoint presentation for her students recently with effects and animations that make her students laugh. She has always been good at storytelling. Her students still carry her words like a bag of gold coins. "You don't know when you might need your kindness," she tells her students and they agree. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. But in her little universe that she has carved for herself and her students, she saves them all the time.

Perhaps the greatest woman I know of, who is the loneliest sister, is my mother. None of her family knows about her struggles but perhaps she doesn't want them to be known. It is her contrived notion of strength; to suffer in silence. Perhaps her generation comes from a time when loneliness was not prominent, something which followed them like shadows but never in light. The dark of the light--this was their loneliness. But today when she has to face her own loneliness, her failed God, her daughter who has drastically failed her, she still has faith. It is delusional, sometimes I think. But hope is delusional. On an abstract level, we all are shaped by our mothers, but also by the women they were, the daughters they became, and the girls they denied the desires of.


Here is a little poem for today:

Two women looked at each other
One smiled and the other looked at the smile
Two women looked at each other
One reached out and the other held her own hand
Two women looked at each other
A mother holding the daughter holding the mother
Two women looked at each other
As they contorted and dismantled
Only to find each other under the same tree
Spreading its branches
Clutching both their throats
Lying again and again
That they were the same

******

Love and mangoes,

G.