Eclosion
I sat upright on the chair, eye to eye with the two pairs of eyes across the table..
This was the second questioning session of the week. I prepared myself to give the same answer I had already given a hundred times by now. "It was just an accident and a kind gesture after that. I do not personally know him."
Unconvinced, one of them left the chair, as if to try the next set of tortures to make me accept the crime. I was right, she gently came up to me with a warm outside, but fuming inside smile(that's her speciality), leaned towards my left ear, and whispered: "Beta, you know, I am your mom, I understand everything, you can tell me anything in this world and I still would only love you..." and waited for an answer.
Time ticked backwards in my head. I was in 2nd grade, and the Environmental Studies class was going on. The teacher advised, "So children, you should help others in all ways you can, you are the future citizens... "(blah). Later on, the way back home that day, a hungry kid appeared on the street. Before I knew the future citizen in me took out the snack box from my bag and offered it to the kid, and the future citizen in the kid ran away with it. A similar interrogation took place that day, only to bring to my realization that I had lost the 'expensive' snack box. Taking all the sweetness in my mom's words for face value, and trusting "I still would only love you" to be true, I blurted out the entire episode. The next thing I knew was getting entangled in a verbal tumble dryer and being thrown back and forth. The charges on me were multi-fold: 1. Interacting with strangers 2. Losing my snack box 3. Believing teacher's words without consulting mom (yes, seriously). How I wish I had this talent of hers to list out every argument in concise bullet points during exams!
"Do not feel shy. You can tell everything to your mom. Do you need daddy out of this room?" Okay. It is time for a lie. "Mom, sorry for lying earlier. It was my friend Puja's cousin's friend's boyfriend. We've met in a party before." Someone else's boyfriend... I heard the sigh of relief fall straight on my ear with all the warmth.
"See, I told you, I have raised her right." and they walked out of the room.
I have never been able to say if it was some sort of pressure of 'raising right' that was making her so much of a pressure cooker to cook me every now and then judging each minute thing she "finds out" about me. When I was a kid, it was about missing pencils and unfinished snacks, in high school the level was upped to "promise me you will not love art more than science" and now in college, "who's that boy". How I wish, of the umpteen times I have screamed saying "I do not have time for all this", at least once it went into her head instead of echoing endlessly inside our house.
Though all these happened, I had learned to make clean shots behind her back and do things I love. I helped people out of my pocket money, I found time for art, I even have had boyfriends, though none stayed on steady. Medicine was a hectic course, and it claimed most of my time, even the sleep hours.
The professor went on and on, and while dozing off a bit, I heard him say, "In the course of a lifetime, not all people will experience a mental illness, but everyone will struggle or have a challenge with their mental well-being". Interesting... I managed to pull my eyelids open without the help of a wedge, though I thought at first it might be necessary. It was easy for me to think about my mom after hearing that statement, as I compared her with Joker and other villains who behaved weirdly, just like her. Is mom, like those villains, in a life-long mental struggle? Well, this is disturbing. This may be a new angle to her behaviour. Though I can never accept that my mom is mentally unwell. She's perfectly alright except for the irritating behaviour.
I decided to go home that weekend, as for the first time in my life, I felt bad for mom. I wanted to meet her for her, not for myself. I tried to imagine how she might be living her life. She has never gone to work. She has been to college, but got married before completing her graduation. And then she got pregnant which made her quit her studies halfway through, and the complications it brought along ended up in me being their only child.
"Ma, did you have friends back in school and college?". She seemed alarmed with the question: "Why?"
"You are my mom. I share everything to you. I am also a grown-up now, can't you share with me? Don't you love me? Trust me?"
Well, weapons do backfire at times, right? And she knew she lost the game there. She wiped her hands on her saree and came sat near me in the kitchen corner, my favourite place where I used to sit and munch on whatever interesting I could find in the kitchen. A smile, which wasn't fuming inside, which wasn't filled with love to me, but something different, spread on her face, so contagious that the sparkle in her eyes made my eyes well up...
"I had a lot of friends... In school, I was the gang leader, you know. You was a nice girl when you were little, I wasn't. I was very naughty, teachers even used to say you should have been a boy instead." Then she went on about the day she hurt the neighbour by throwing stones at the mango tree and a boy who passed by got all the blame, how they got even with a boy who teased them by pouring water in his seat, how she threatened kids who tried to be mean to her friends, how she stole jaggery from the kitchen... her stories were creating monochrome scenes in a screen in front of my eyes. It was hard to believe that the tomboyish girl in these scenes was the same person, who, other than raising her voice for scolding me, is so silent that it is hard to find which part of the house she's in.
She continued with her college stories, how she formed her own 'gang' as soon as she got in, how they teased and pulled pranks on toxic boys who made fun of girls, when everyone else were busy falling in love and flirting... and then... in the middle of the second year... I felt like her voice was choking. Her eyes welled up and her far gaze went even farther. I felt sad too. I took her hands and gently squeezed them. "Ma, was that when you got married?"
The wells in her eyes started overflowing without control. "Not got married, forced to get married."
After a long pause she continued. "I had lot of dreams, but at that point, marriage was never one of them. In fact, marriage was so powerful that when it fell on my dreams, everything got shattered. Back then phones weren't popular, I lost touch with all my friends. My wedding day was the last time I saw them. After that, I tried to convince your father to let me go back to college, but then pregnancy came as a villain. That was the end of that part of my story."
She was no longer crying. I felt like her eyes were so deep now that it could fit in the entire world in it, and still have more free space. I rose a little, and held her head against my chest, like she used to, to console me when I fell and hurt myself as a kid. While gently stroking her hair, I could imagine her pain. Suddenly being pulled away from herself and being forced to be someone else. I wondered how hard it would be to go to some other house, live there with a person whom she barely knew, learn his tastes and cook for him, get pregnant soon... A person who wasn't even ready for a relationship, holding a baby in hand and having to take care of it, when in another world, at the same time, she could have been pulling pranks on naughty guys and being a hero of girls. Feeding the baby and conducting the funeral of her own self in her mind, wondering where her friends would be, with no way to know.
She sprang up suddenly when her head was wet by a drop from my right eye and wiped the left eye even before it could start rolling. She cupped my face in her arms and smiled. "Don't you want to hear the rest of the story?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued. It was my turn to lean against her chest now.
"I got pregnant and was scared. I was just 19 then. But as months passed by, you started kicking in my belly. It was an ethereal feeling. Something in me told that I was going to get a friend, and as I liked it, a girl. You came into my dreams, we ran together down the grassy hills, we caught fish in the running stream and set them free again, we danced to our fullest in closed rooms with no one around to judge. Just that, you did not have a face, but I knew you were beautiful. The delivery was complicated, and I could not see you for a couple of days. Once I came back to senses, the first thing I asked was about my daughter, they say. I did not even know whether it was a boy or girl at that time, they say. They did not know that we knew each other for ages, right, Beta? And everyone was very upset and scared to let me know that I can't have any more babies. Well, who wanted more anyway, I had you. My life took the next turn there, dear. I started enjoying cooking for you and taking care of you. I was selfish, I was preparing you to be my friend. The best friend of them all. I had this pressure of 'raising you right' from all sides. I showed off that I am concerned, just to convince them."
"But I also made sure that you lived your life to the fullest. I stuck in extra snacks when I knew you were sharing it. Have you ever wondered about the unlimited supply of papers and pencils and stuff you need for your art, that you 'accidentally' found around the house? I did not want you to miss out, but the decisions were not mine to make. I tried to help in the ways I could." She had a wide smile when I rose to look at her.
"Beta, I know I have been tough on you, sometimes on purpose, sometimes, under pressure. I have always wanted to know everything going on in your life, consider it my selfishness. But of all the selfishness I had, was this wish that, one day you would come to me and have this talk. To share my life with you, to release the pressure and be myself with someone again, not just someone, you."
I felt like I did her a favour as she had done to me twenty-two years ago. I gave her a rebirth. A release from the cocoon she was in...
