Some days my mother would be waiting in the balcony for us in tight pants and a tight v-necked t-shirt. On those days we'd know she'd met some friends for lunch or been to a movie or had some sort of desire to write again. But most days she was in the same nightie and blue dressing gown we'd seen her in that morning, holding a cigarette in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, smiling her beautiful smile, waiting to get from us her perfunctory hugs and sloppy kisses. But even though most days we saw her standing there looking like a bedraggled, once-lovely whore, there was always this sense of possibility about her that loomed large over our childhood… a feeling that at any time, everything might change.
But nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. There were no visiting diplomats and no threats of suicide. We never went camping, we had no untimely deaths in the family, we had no dogs to walk or gods to pray to. We weren’t atheist and we weren’t agnostic, we had no political debates or spiritual discussions over dinner. I was never molested by an uncle, and never made fun of at school. My father never spoke about freedom fighters at flag hoistings and was never in jail for tax evasion. My best friends were neither popular nor the opposite, they were neither interested nor inspired, they didn’t know who Sunderlal Bahuguna was, and they didn’t care. They were just like me. And none of us ever really knew our fathers. Our fathers were one man - the strange alien pin striped skinny-legged man who went to ‘the office’ (slaughterhouse? match-factory?) and came home to eat, belch, watch the news and go to bed. Our mothers would fuss around him for a while, feed him, feed us, tuck us in, kiss us goodnight and come in thrice to check if we were still breathing before we finally fell asleep.
My mother always sat with my brother and I while we ate breakfast. She waved to us from the balcony as we caught the school bus, and then she would get back into bed to sleep off the rest of the day. But she would be back in the balcony when we came home, like a young widow watching for the return of a son at war. I don’t know what battles she was fighting, but with each defeat went huge bales of her beauty. They were being shipped out in huge invisible containers and in its place barrels of toxic waste lodged in her flesh. And they seeped, the damn things, turning her uglier and less immaculate before our eyes. Maybe they seeped into us too. “How long has it been”, asked her body when she died, “since I felt any pleasure?". But my mother never started writing again and when my brother got married, she even stopped wearing the tight pants.
When I was twenty I wanted to write a dystopian novel. An Orwellian pastiche, a lovechild of The Catcher in the Rye and A Clockwork Orange. Should Alex and Holden unite, mingle, change gender, nationality to become a sort of temperamental modern Indian goddess of destruction and renewal? An arbiter, a prophet a judge? A Kali for Kalyug? Durga the teenage goddess? It could work. I knew it could work. But my friends and I grew up eating soft chocolate from strange shores that would melt in our mouths, wrappers that would peel so easily and cheese that we’d scoop up in huge spoons and lick at while watching American high school movies. So later, when I sat downstairs in the garden, mouth full of chocolate, telling my stories, no one really got that the protagonist wasn’t blonde.
But today, I’m looking at old photographs. In this one he looks so clean, so perfect, so easy to explain in his linen shirt and strong forearms, his body casually draped over the chair, toes buried in the sand… A slight swell of beer belly, a hint of wrinkle around his grey eyes. He’s laughing about something. I can’t remember what it was. I remember his cigarette breath and his skin so warm that always smelled of honeydew melons. I remember later that night watching the sea and the moon. “Call me Ishmael” he said and dropped his head into my lap. My fingers slipped through his long fine hair, his eyelashes brushed against my thigh. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” He whispers the words of a Chilean prophet above the sound of the Arabian Sea. It was impossible not to love him. Even dogs followed him around. He had no money, and he had big plans. He had plans that scraped the roof of the mouth of the sky. I was 17 and wherever he was going, I was going too.
There’s the thud of papers, files, books, on the telephone table and the shuffle of feet coming down the hall. He’s home and he brings with him all the troubles of the universe. Our seven-year-old drops the photograph she was looking at and scurries into her room. She doesn’t really like her father. She thinks he’s weird. He rustles in the kitchen. I stay in bed and open another shoebox of photographs. In this one we’re at my mother’s house. My mother is looking at him looking at me. She’s checking him out. “Do you love my daughter?” ask her eyes. “I love this woman,” answer his hands. I touch the photograph where his mouth is. Ignoring the food waiting for him on the table, he brings into the room a sandwich, a beer, an apple and the alien universe that he carries around like a sack of marbles. He sits down, turns on the TV, and I know that the thing that’s holding him together might give anytime now and everything might fall out and roll around and lodge under sofas, carpets, irretrievable. Tonight just looking at him makes me angry because I know he knows that I may not be able to gather him up if he falls apart and how dare he expect me to?
But I’m tired of thinking and the bed feels like a pocket or a cool white womb, and I hug the pillow, and I grab the wall. I trap my toes between the mattress and the bed frame. Tonight, I will not be aborted. When I finally fall asleep, I dream that I am in deep blue water. The surface twinkles above, too far to reach. I have no tank, no tubes, no air, but I can breathe. There is a hint of vegetation, a few gaudy fish… a smooth white manta ray glides overhead, opening and closing its slit mouth at me voicelessly. It flaps to rest behind me and engulfs me in its velvet wings till I can see nothing and all I can hear is bubbles. I start to panic but the gentle pressure make my muscles relax and my mind drift into a sort of timelessness. When I wake up, it’s dark outside and the curtains are still. Today will be a day like all the others. But I will get up and I will send her to school and I will hand him his shirt and I will watch them leave and I will wave goodbye and I will get back into bed and I will write my life in dreams of cherry trees.
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