On the first fools’ day, I was still not here, but I’d already pranked my Ma by sending her into false labor. Tired of my not arriving, having read somewhere that nothing seduces labor like Ajinomoto, Ma ordered lip-smacking Chinese food, enough to feed our whole building. Ploughing through greasy noodles and chilli chicken, she engineered herself into contractions and walked to the nearby family health clinic. Handing my slippery body, still thick with her translucent lining, over to the nurse, she giggled, “She’s come out smelling of soy sauce, hasn’t she,” and no sooner had she slid me out of her touch, I released a relentless wail, cutting short her laugh.
On the second fools’ day, Ma was standing on her tippy toes holding tiny silver scissors, cutting Daddy’s nose hair. I sped around the passage of our flat in a red plastic walker. Daddy asked me so seriously, “Who do you love more: your mother or me?”
“Pepsi,” I answered, whizzing away, leaving them in splits. I was afraid picking him would mean she would vanish.
On the third fools’ day, Ma was shrinking downward and I was floating upward. I broke into a shiver of panic, horrified that the stairs under my feet were moving. We were at Oberoi Mall and I’d gotten on the wrong escalator, not knowing what escalators were. Ma turned around and began climbing up on the stairs going down. When she caught hold of me, she buried my head in her chest and whispered, “It did not happen, did not happen. Say it,” she insisted I say, “It did not happen.”
“Can you not let go of jabbering to your so-called friends for one night?” Ma would ask Daddy every night, “Take your wife for one round of fresh air around Five Gardens?”
“Tomorrow,” Daddy would brush her off, rushing through dinner.
“You write three humongous columns each week, and you still have more to ‘contemplate’ with friends? About what?”
“Politics, philosophy, our goddamned economy,” he’d say, looking flustered like he was the prime minister. “Aren’t you lucky you Hindi teachers don’t have to keep up with the world? But tomorrow, the gardens!” he’d promise slithering down the stairwell, rushing to hold court with the building’s coterie of husbands hellbent on not letting the embers of their bachelor lives die.
Those nightly hours, Ma would pull me in closer from my corner on the sofa, coax me to lay my head on her lap. Then she’d go on petting my forehead, diverting her loneliness with the smash-hit TV serial about the ideal husband. On the fourth fools’ day, I plucked out the remote batteries and hid them in the crack between the sofa cushions. To get it to function, Ma banged the remote against the coffee table, the wall, her own tensile head. After that night’s TV episode ended, all the aunties in the building gathered at their kitchen windows in utter disbelief. The ideal husband—a husband so alluring the aunties wouldn’t mind sharing him with a hundred other women—had been killed off. When she ultimately found the batteries, Ma threatened me with tickles. “You made me miss that, I’m coming for you!”
I rejected her touch, her closeness, her scent. On the fifth fools’ day, I threw the milk into my mother’s potted basil. I didn’t let her touch me. Or bathe me. Or tie my shoe buckles. I wore my hair in a raggedy ponytail to school. I threw the contents of my tiffin box to the cow outside the class. I was disgusted by anything she’d come in contact with because she had—despite my hatred of the green, rancid goo—gone to a friend’s wedding and gotten her hands slapped with henna. The smell of mehendi to my nostrils was a hundred open gutters. Wet, hot garbage. For a few days, Ma entertained my imbecility. She wore plastic bag gloves to pack my lunch, serve me dinner, soak my overnight almonds. But a few nights on, when I was nearly asleep, she snuck into my room to tease me by pinching my nose with her pungent hands. “Cringe all you want, how will you escape this on your own wedding?”
I attacked her with a rain of tiny slaps, screaming, “I will just marry you instead and never take you to the gardens”
On the sixth fools’ day, I got mumps, which for a while I thought were Mum’s—how had my mother abducted my throat? My body burnt, my tonsil flared. Tender and painful mounds like ping-pong balls grew on both sides of my chin. I cried out of horror at the ugliness in the mirror. Ma loomed over my reflection, an orange lodged in each cheek, muttering, “We look sexy, no?” I burst out laughing, and though it hurt to laugh through my raw red swelling, seeing her laugh threw me down a giggle train, which caused her to choke on the oranges, sending her into shock tears until we were two open-mouthed idiots cackling soundlessly in the mirror, and if by accident a neighbor spotted us, we’d look like we were looking at ourselves happily dying.
On the seventh fools’ day, Ma agreed to take me to Daffodil’s to buy me a birthday dress. As she pushed open the shop’s door, we were hit with the luxury of air conditioning, I twisted free from her grip and fled into the rows of frilly frocks. We settled on a puffy black dress of crushed velvet with a gold chain around the waist. In the line to pay, Ma realized her purse was wide open and the rubber banded bundle of cash she’d carried had gone missing. We walked out, dressless. She tightened her hand around mine. Not angrily but as if she needed a post to lean on. Looking straight into my face, she begged, “Amma,” calling out to her own gone mother. That tightness, her minute of needing, petrified me. I flapped my heels with irritation against my butt. Then, with the emergency twenty she always had tucked in the tight of her blouse, she bought me a cup of crushed orange ice, knowing already it was surefire laryngitis for my cords, knowing already she would face Daddy’s wrath. I fed her tiny tastes, cold syrup saffroning her tongue, with which she’d slick her thumb at home, counting over and over the money she had left over for the month, hunched at the edge of the bed, darkening the minus symbol at the tally point of her slow calculations. When Daddy returned, she whispered, “Don’t tell him.”
But angry at having returned without a frock, I blurted, “A thief stole our money.”
“I’m sorry,” Ma told him, “I was about to tell you.”
Ma decided she’d had enough of waiting around for Daddy to take us anywhere. She and I would go on a holiday with her sisters to Vaishno Devi, trekking seventeen kilometers up a mountain to be blessed by the ultimate mother, Durga Maata. I didn’t believe in goddesses, but I believed in my mother, the orchestrator of my fun. However, on the eighth fools’ day, our suitcases ready at the door, Ma awoke covered in Maata—what we call chickenpox. Lore went, if you’d angered the goddess, she’d come to beat you with a silver broom and enter your body in the form of pox. I winced at the depth of itchiness crawling over Ma’s skin, yet I couldn’t help the anger that her illness stood to ruin my joy. To my surprise, Ma let me travel unparented. My first motherless journey. One maasi held my hand on the winding path strewn with mounds of fresh horseshit. Another maasi offered me snacks and binned my wrappers. A third maasi gave me her jacket as I shivered and waded barefoot through the last three kilometre stretch of icy water flowing through broken rocks (you weren’t a “serious devotee” if you wore shoes). As I hopped toward the shrine, a fourth maasi handed me coins to drop into the donation box. We entered the pitch-dark cave, freezing water lapping cold rocks. With four aunts grounded like bedposts around me and the eight-handed goddess lounging on her tiger in front, it was raining mothers. “Make a wish,” the mothers said. I despised the goddess lounging on her tiger with her fixed-polite smile while my knees buckled with pain. Flinging coins at her feet, I demanded Maata to immediately leave my mother’s body.
As a souvenir, I brought home a plastic lamp of Maata the size of a child. What did you wish for, Ma asked and I blurted, “To come first in class, obviously.” I did not know what it was— but it felt like the hard textured shyness of a lover to admit that they were falling hard for someone—that kept me from confessing to Ma it was her I wished for. Her, I wanted well.
Ma decided to leave Daddy. “Die-vorce,” she said. When she told him, he cackled and told her fools’ day was yesterday and returned to berate the rival newspaper’s low standards for reporting scandal. She showed him the lease she’d signed for a new flat, and he just sat there clicking his tongue, then sprung into a lecture about divorce being unprofitable for all parties as if it wasn’t happening to him but to some stranger in a story book.
On the tenth fools’ day, Ma became a mother to sixty more children. She converted our new flat into a coaching class for language tuitions. Kids from the five neighboring schools in batches of twelve arrived each evening, usurping our every piece of furniture and floor space. Unlike other teachers, Ma was neither a constant disciplinarian nor was she too jaded to care. She loved teaching as she loved mothering. Our home overran with a flock of thirsty prepubescents vying for her attention, ravishing with after-school hunger for the homemade snacks she’d keep ready, alongside grammar and vocabulary lessons. The boys, especially, were so aroused by free food that they lingered on for hours. At school and home, in recess and in session, on the road encountering their families, in the beauty parlor gossiping with students’ mums, Ma’s roster of friends grew larger than mine. I wish the only result of her bathing herself in camaraderie was me feeling something simple as envy. But when the house emptied, and the phone stopped ringing with kitty-party invites and pre-exam panic calls and night came, Ma’s fatigued sighs ricocheted between the walls. She would beg me to massage her by walking on her back, a lonesome desperation with which she spoke to nobody else. She appeared happy, content, even exalted to the outsider, but for me, she lay herself open like a lament. As I struggled to still my wobbling legs into walking in a straight line upon her aching back, “Deeper,” she’d urge, “Add more pressure, I can’t even feel your heel,” as if the sum total of her deeper aloneness—her discomfort with her aloneness—collected day after day and froze in the stick of her spine. I wanted to melt into my mother. I wanted to get inside her skin and throw her a dance party. “You love your mother, don’t you,” she’d ask, and I’d say nothing and bounce my whole body into her, treat her as my playground, make her my horse, my chair, my scarf, my bed.
On the eleventh fools’ day, I was unbearably ugly. My nose secreted so much oil it could run Dubai’s economy. “You’re still beautiful,” Ma said. “You can never not be beautiful to me.” But then she said that to the stagnant tulsi she’d planted, to the three-legged stray dog, to the bald and buck-toothed geometry teacher from the boys’ school who came over on Saturday afternoons and kidnapped my napping spot next to her, closing the bedroom door. We never closed doors. And so what if he made us surprisingly delicious mutton curry? So what if she continued to pour tender words into my revolting body, all lumps and hair? I feared that this man’s presence could suddenly throw me off to second place in my mother’s life. And before she could displace me, my body, like a magic trick learned to distance myself from her, greeted her love with eyerolls. I too began closing my door, except when I needed her—which was more often than I admitted to myself—I clung to her like Velcro upon its pad.
On the twelfth fools’ day, I still thirsted for stuffed animals. They were my children, my siblings, my wealth of velvet. I’d won so many plushies our living room cabinet was a full-fledged zoo. But it’s wrong to say I won them. Ma won them for me. My hand-eye coordination sucked bollocks while Ma’s was precise as threading a needle. She’d let me hold the joystick first, letting me believe I was piloting the magic, then she’d match her fingers over mine, her Pepsi sweating in the cup holder, other hand on hip, sure as a cowboy, she pushed the steel arm straight into the heart of the stuffed pit and wait for the miracle to take, for a cuddlebug to drop out of the steel slide.
I bit my lip straining to look anywhere else but at Ma changing into a hospital gown, one loose bow securing her back. We were back in the room I was born in. The nurse suggested I wait outside, but Ma said, buckling her legs into stirrups, “Stay, beta. You’re old enough to learn what abortion is.” An envelope with cash delivered by the geometry teacher’s servant lay open in her wide-open purse. The masked doctor bent into Ma with a speculum. Mid-consciousness, Ma lifted her hand for me to come closer, but it scared me to look at her, lying there like roadkill. For elocution next semester, I wrote and recited a poem dedicated to Ma about how men were horrendous thieves pilfering women’s bodies. It received a standing ovation. When I handed Ma the winning certificate she said, “All this and you couldn’t hold my hand?”
Ma became sloppy, forgetful, chaotic. She’d mix-up her students’ names, endlessly watch television instead of lesson planning, grade papers with the seriousness of browsing tabloids. I’d spend more evenings visiting Daddy, who’d quiz me from the thesaurus, discontented that my English wasn’t “elevated” yet. He’d never let me return without a bag of old books, his method of filling in for his absence. “It’s time to let Nietzsche/Marx/Huxley/Tagore reinvent you.” And Ma would guffaw at his ambitions. “The man quit one paper because their politics are tame. Next, because paper is becoming obsolete, Internet is the future, my honeys. Quit the dot-com life because he can’t tolerate a yuppie with a bow tie being his boss. And the world just lets him keep reinventing himself.”
Her scorn of him, more salty than meaningful, still pricked me. She was bored, boring and smug in her stability. And Daddy, never enough in his bank for three months’ rent, still shone with naive excitement when he spoke about the world. Ma’s effortlessness and imperfections—once her charm—felt to me like warning sirens. I believed her messiness was the reason why she was and would continue to be so chronically alone. On the fifteenth fools’ day—as if Ma’s bitterness was contagious— I fled home for a college one city over.
In the sixteenth fools’ month, Ma was diagnosed with cancer. “But you said the cyst was benign, wasn’t it,” I rationalized, tightly wringing the cord of the hostel phone around my wrist. “Wait, Ma, you’re joking?” Silence. I was already shuddering at the thought of witnessing her suffer, so when she said, “Come what may,” her voice damp, “You will not be upsetting your studies for my sake,” I was washed in guilt-laden relief. Besides, she continued, “We’ve kicked mumps’ ass and pox and your lump of a father. This is a cakewalk.” Daddy moved in temporarily to assist Ma through the trinity of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. In one of the letters, of the several she sent and that went unanswered, she wrote:
Your father is just like you. His intentions are good but god does he fail at expressing that he loves me. Though he tries. He is amusingly dumb in the ways he shows his care. I’d once told him absentmindedly that I was craving sukha bhel. And now he has it in his head that sukha bhel is the mecca of my pleasure. Every evening he queues up at the bhelwala and brings me a packet of the same sukha bhel. Never a variation. Will it kill him to bring me a samosa? Breaks my heart to tell him I often feed his care to the crows. They are making me drink wheatgrass juice on an empty stomach each morning. Honestly, death would be more pleasing.
The treatments failed. The letters thinned out. Another round of chemotherapy leeched Ma of her energy and her light. To lift her spirits, on a visit home, I shaved my head, arriving with matching headscarves. Ma asked me to shut all our windows lest some aunty catch sight of my stupidity. My mother was right in front of me, and yet I couldn’t remember the sound of her laugh.
On the seventeenth fools’ day, Ma gave away all her winnings from Astro Mischief and replaced our hall cabinets with picture frames, newspaper cuttings, and miniature statues of a Guru her sister introduced her to. On the shelves grew an exploding traffic jam of hymn books, god idols, bells, incense stands, and ash packets. She took an informal vow of silence and spoke only to God via the language of moving her rosary beads. “How can you be okay with this?” I yelled at Daddy who for once, despite his worldwide wisdom, was speechless, heartbroken. In a notebook in which she used to scribe “modern” recipes for her tuition kids, Ma wrote:
Wherever good has put full stop do not put question mark for it is his way and his thoughts are higher than ours and because he knows what is best for you.
Better to be dissatisfied than pig satisfied. If our one desire is satisfied, after that we desire for more and more then we become like a pig, who on eating the whole day is never full and is given bad name and we must not be like a pig, and so it is better to be unsatisfied than to be pig satisfied.
Be eggless egoless. No desire no disappointment.
I did not desire God. Or a life miracle. I was willing to forgo Ma ever speaking a single word to me. I only desired that she feel one desire again. Any. Even half.
On the eighteenth fools’ day, I returned home for a summer internship to work at a family-owned company that blended horsehair and human hair, dyed them in luminous shades of browns and reds, and exported the wigs to Asia and America and Africa. I was sitting in Ma’s room on the floor making a bullshit presentation, my back to the double set of cupboards. Ma was on the bed rolling her beads in a discarded Nirvana T-shirt of mine. The pressure cooker whistle blew in the kitchen. She gestured to me to turn the stove off, and as I rose to stand, my hair got yanked in a slit between the cupboards. I almost screamed, and Ma rushed to untangle the jumbled lock. She rubbed her beads over my pulled patch of scalp and cleared her throat. “I was harrowed by seeing it fall in tails and wisps,” she whispered. “It fell apart like grapes off a stem. One day I just took the kitchen scissors, stood in front of the mirror, and chopped it all off. It was my best feature, wasn’t it?”
At that moment I wanted to raid my employer’s warehouse and bring my mother a thousand wigs. And if she rejected them all, I’d offer up my head of hair. “It’s just hair, Ma,” I asserted, kicking the emotion out of my voice. Again, I was the summation of all the love I felt for my mother but did not dare let her know. Or maybe I was dodging sentimentality to fool myself that the cancer was unthreatening, passing, defeated.
When the phone call arrived, I was at a Chinese restaurant with college friends, celebrating our night of graduation. It was my mother’s sister. And in a flash of teleportation, I was on GoAir 601 to Mumbai. Someone had googled flights. Someone had whipped out their credit card. Someone had summoned a rickshaw. Since the cancer hospital had long declared Ma terminal, Ma’s occupancy was considered a waste of their bed. Daddy, therefore, had shifted her to a dispensary close to home. I returned to the room I was born in. I was late. How late was I? The length of Ma’s life. I looked at Daddy’s watch. It was the day after fools’ day.
End Seekers, I wish I could write here that I was alone with my mother’s body in a room. I wish I were told to change her for her pyre into bridal maroon. That when I undressed her behind closed doors, I realized it was the first time I was seeing my mother stark naked. That if her ghost was lurking around, she would have shimmied her shoulders and said, “Sexy, no!” Or more poetically, as I lifted her, one slack breast would fall into the cradle of my palm and I would go on touching it—a reminder of her tender, soft-tissued loneliness spilling into me. I have imagined wanting to kiss her wet. I have imagined mixing her ashes into tea and drinking her dust and bone. But my every imagining to close the distance between Ma and me, no matter which pearl of memory I cast it into, is just that—a distance. I am now remembering a line by a poet I dearly love.
Why do you keep writing about your mother?
Because my mother keeps being dead.
On the twentieth fools’ day, to commemorate her death anniversary, as much a stranger to grief and religion as me, Daddy brought over the plastic Durga lamp from my pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi. He parroted some aunt’s advice about how keeping Maata plugged in would soften the passage of Ma’s spirit. The goddess, when turned on, in a thick sugary female voice—imagine molasses being poured into your ears—sang the gayatri mantra on loop and lit up with red and green lights like Diwali ran through her gaudily painted body. Did spirits have such shit taste in vocals? I wondered. Within the week, the cheap lamp broke. The woman’s sucralose voice trapped inside the goddess lagged, roughened, became incomprehensible and turned entirely male and slow in the way of spoiled audio cassettes. I yanked the wire from the socket and flung the idol out our second-floor window. Sweet, sweet relief. Then, horrified that I may have derailed the journey of my mother’s wandering soul, I ran downstairs, feverish and barefoot, to retrieve the remains of the lamp’s divinity. She lay on the floor, still perched on her tiger, smiling in one piece.
***
Artwork by Beatriz Camaleão
