Casualty

When my mother conceived me, she wasn’t in a good place with my father. A failed marriage loomed over them and their desperate attempt to save it became my inception. Marriages were meant to be a permanent bond until death arrived to sever it. No one knew what it was like to live separately after a seemingly trying time together. Even if you hated your husband, you were supposed to live with him for the rest of your life and vice versa. Affairs on the sly, separate bedrooms and cold wars were all secretly acceptable but not divorce.

 As I grew up, I never heard a kind word from my father to my mother, and I never saw my mother smile at my father. They slept in separate rooms, and I slept with my mother. For me, that was natural. Parents weren’t supposed to coddle one another or pass, knowing smiles at one another over meals. They were meant to – like my parents – live under one roof in their respective rooms and argue whenever their paths collided however briefly. Every day as I went to school and my father went to work in the tea factory, I wondered what my mother did when she was by herself. I didn’t have to wonder too long because one day we were sent home early. I found my mother sitting in front of the mirror and staring at her reflection in perfect stillness. From the back, she looked like the statue of goddess Sarasvati in one the pandals put up by our village during Sarasvati puja. Wavy dark hair fell down to her waist in a thick tumble, and as I stood at the door and watched her dumbfounded, and as she stayed like that - oblivious of my presence - I realised that I had never seen my mother’s hair open like that. She always had it tied in a knot on top of her head, or kept it platted.

“Ama.” The words escaped my mouth in awe. I was struck by the beauty of her thick dark hair that cascaded like waves; waves of the Balasun river after the sun went down; waves of the Balasun river under a full moon night, mysterious and breathtaking. She whipped her head around as soon as she became aware of my presence, and I saw that she was wearing make-up. Bright, beautiful eyes lined with kohl and red lips stared back at me.

“Why the hell are you home so early?” She spat out and suddenly, all her beauty disappeared with the words that came out of her mouth turning her back at once into the bitter gourd she usually feeds me. I have vowed to never have or cook bitter gourd ever in my life when I grow up.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked. I was curious. She never left home.

“Do I have to go somewhere every time I put make-up and comb my hair? Can’t I do what I want for once?” She said, her sentences all ending in questions that I had no answers for. Turning back to the mirror, she added, “as long as your father isn’t at home, I can bloody well do what I want.” I understood then that it was all about father. A part of me was happy that she wasn’t going anywhere, but a part of me wondered what our house would be like without her.

She suddenly stood up and ran to the bathroom emerging half an hour later without the make-up. A lop-sided smile hung in one corner of her mouth, and her eyes were glassy. She had washed her face, and it appeared red and raw. Perhaps she had rubbed it too hard. The rims of her eyes and the tip of her nose were a bright red like the lipstick on her lips a while ago. Had she been crying? Drinking in the bathroom?

I realised later that she had been doing both.

I was old enough to see that my mother was miserable and that my father was more like a guest who stayed the night watching tv into the wee hours of the morning drinking whiskey. I didn’t understand how he stayed up every night and still be on time for work. Once, I stayed up all night studying for an exam and the next day, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d studied the night before. I fell asleep on the desk and failed the exam.

It wasn’t until I began watching shows on the black and white tv in my neighbour’s house that I saw that a father and a mother could smile at each other and say kind words to one another all the time and sleep in the same bed and exchange knowing smiles over meals. To me, that was some revelation. I wanted to see more of that. Somehow, I got hungry for shows like that. It was like I was craving for food that I had never tasted. My best friend Pema chuckled when I once said that I would like my father and mother to be kind to one another because the folks on tv were so kind to one another and when they were so nice to one another everything seemed so lovely all around.

“Dummy. All that isn’t real. That’s what tv shows do. They make you long for things you cannot have.”

What would she know? I thought later. She only had a mother. She never knew her father since he’d died long before she was even born. That’s what mother had said when I’d asked her about where Pema’s father was. Then I had been horrified when she’d added. “I’d be lucky to be in her mother’s shoes.” What kind of a wife wishes for her husband to die? I thought revulsed by my mother’s words.

In our neighbourhood, we’d often hear about a boy and a girl eloping for three days and three nights until their families gave up searching and welcomed them home as a couple. People in our village talked about how deeply the couple were in love that they just couldn’t do without each other. Could two people love like that? I wondered. Then what of my parents? Did they start with a love like that? Or were they just brought together by my grandparents one day and said that they were to live as husband and wife from that day on?

Mira, a girl in my class who sat beside me, slipped a note in my desk one day.  I really like you. It said. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say and why she’d had to write a note when I was sitting right next to her. I liked her too, and I liked Pema, just like I liked everyone in my class. She probably read my confusion because the next thing she did was pull my hand under the desk and squeeze it and look at me like the people on tv did. I panicked, because no one had pulled my hand under the desk and squeezed it looking at me like that. For some reason, I kept this from Pema. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to keep this a secret and I felt disgusted when I thought of Mira's hand on mine. What was that?

When I came home, my mother opened the door with a blue eye. I pretended not to notice it. She went back to her room while I went to the kitchen to rummage pots and pans for leftover lunch. I ate a bowl full of rice and chicken, and I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt hollow inside. Father came home in the evening piss drunk and picked a fight with mother again. I wanted to run away from home. A week later I bled, and terrified as I was, seeing the big black spot in my underwear, I screamed so loudly that my mother banged on the bathroom door and struck me hard with her knuckles when I opened it. That was when I was told that I had become a woman. My stomach bloated, and it hurt everywhere, especially my chest that had begun to swell too. “You better be careful now. Boys will smell you like dogs.” My mother said, pulling out a sanitary napkin from the drawer and handing it to me. I was mortified by the sudden changes in my body, and I thought that I was dying. One thing I was sure about those days was that I had been struck by a terminal disease, and I was dying. I waited for death to embrace me, but it never arrived.

The bleeding stopped to my relief only to appear again a month later. I had thousands of questions popping in my head continuously those days, but every time I began talking to mother in bed at night, she would turn away. When I pressed, she'd breathe heavily and say, “enough! You are a woman now. Understand that. Men will want you the way you have never been wanted. Keep away from them.” Keep away from men was the first real advice I got from my mother. Men like my father I thought, who never smiled or said a kind word to mother or to me, who drank like a fish and picked fights almost every day.

 Our house turned into a battleground when mother began to hit back. Soon we had broken things lying around in the house that could no longer be fixed. I wanted to run away from home. I thought about it every night, but where would I go? Then one day it dawned on me. There was a monastery far up on the hill where only female nuns lived and practised. I had been there once or twice during festivals. Could I go there and live with them? There wouldn't be any men smelling me up like dogs there. What would happen to my mother if I left? That was one troubling question that reared its head up like a snake in my head. I was never close to my mother, and I hated the way she got annoyed at me for every little thing. She wasn’t the kind of mother I saw on tv or read about in books.

Sometimes I wanted to do things to make her cry or worry. Like that time when I didn’t come home for the night. I stayed at Pema’s house without telling her. The next day, she slapped me across the face and pulled my hair, saying, “how dare you! How dare you do this to me too!” I was more frightened than hurt. I didn’t know who to hate more. The man who was my father in name only, or the woman who gave birth to me and called herself my mother but did nothing else that other mothers did. I had learnt to do things early by myself. I cooked, I cleaned, I washed, and I could take care of myself better than any other girls my age. My mother only cooked when she was in a good mood, and that was rare.

Then one day, news hit our small village. “Did you hear?” Our neighbour, a woman with a substantial girth, said pushing herself in through our tiny door.

“Namu has left her husband.”

“For another man?” My mother asked, dark rings under her eyes making her look like a ghost.

“No, she left just like that. She didn’t even bother to take her things. And oh, those children! What will happen to them now? Disgraceful woman. Couldn’t she have thought about what this will do to her parents? They will be treated like outcasts now.”

My eyes darted between my mother and our neighbour, and strangely, my mother smiled as though she was glad for the woman. But when she spoke, she said, “you’re right; her parents will be shamed, and everybody will feel sorry for her husband and the children. She will never be welcomed back. Where did she go? That woman?” The smile lingered on her lips a few more seconds but our neighbour, who was busy lifting lids off our pots to see what mother had cooked, didn’t notice it.

That night in bed, I turned towards mother. We faced each other and just as she was about to turn away, I spoke. “Do you want to leave too?”

“What?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I said, do you want to leave father too?” I repeat.

“Go to sleep. It’s late.” She turned away, and I didn’t see the tears that fell on her pillow. I only felt her shoulders shake.

That night I must have grown a whole lot because for the first time I felt a pang inside. It hurt, and it wasn’t my pain. It was my mother’s. She had been in pain all along. The pain of a loveless marriage. The pain of an indifferent husband, sorrow for all the wasted years in school and college when she could’ve used it to find a job and become independent. Pain and anger for trusting someone else more than trusting herself. Pain for not being able to become a mother to me, for not being able to love me.

Love, a confusing emotion had somehow niggled its way inside me, and it was no short of a miracle. It was perhaps my birth-right to feel it even if no one had taught me how to. That such emotion was a natural order of things and should come just as naturally as the seasons. I felt love for my mother that night. I wanted to hold her even when I knew she would slap my hand away. That night I felt love for my father. I wanted to tell him it’s okay. I understood how he ached inside, being despised by the woman his parents had so carefully picked for him. For the first time, I understood that it hurt him more than anything else. The monastery on the hill that beckoned me so loudly that past month, now seemed too far away and the journey there seemed impossible.

I was born as an attempt to save a marriage. A loveless marriage. I stood as a testament for two people who had tried and failed but had nowhere else to escape. I thought about the way Mira had squeezed my hand under the desk and looked at me with a kind of yearning. Was she feeling love?

I don’t know what it exactly means to love one another. I can mimic it from books and tv and films of course, but I don’t really know what it means to do things for love, but that night, I was willing to try. I wanted to try. I wanted to feel loved and I wanted to love another person. Home, was where I wanted to start. My mother and father were the people I wanted to start loving. Love, that little word suddenly felt so big and unattainable, but I was willing to try.

*Illustrations by Yoshay