I Thought I Knew My Ma


(My short story published in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb 2011.)


Read my other short stories: Virginia Mahi, Colors


I thought I could see my ma in a green and white polka dotted frock sitting on her bed beside the window, looking out at the night sky, trying to capture the full moon between two pink wild roses blooming on the old creeper that curled itself around the bars of the window. I thought I could almost hear her sigh as she smiled to herself dreaming of a tall dark-haired man, clutching a microphone and singing in a gravelly voice on the Bihu stage, under another full moon. She was thinking that she will marry him when she grows up, and koka should have no opposition to that because although he was a Muslim, he was an artiste, and koka was an artiste, and he always said that literature and art should be the only religions people were ever allowed to practice. They were her religions too, although she also toldkoka that loving flowers should be another religion. She was practicing her religion now, loving the flowers, letting them hold the moon in their bosom. The flowers shifted slightly in the breeze, and the moon was hidden for a moment. At that same moment, a shadow passed over her face. She was wishing he had not been a Muslim, because although art, literature and loving flowers should be the only religions, in Barbari where they lived, Hindu and Muslim were the only religions. The Muslims there were mostly immigrants, and Aita said they fought over land and cut each other up at the slightest provocation and gave birth to lots and lots of children “so that they can grab some more of our land.” Of course, aita had eleven children, of whom my Ma was the youngest. But she reasoned koka was very rich, and they could afford to have as many children as aita could bear. Aita was proud she could bear her husband so many children.Koka of course never knew how they were raised because aita kept them under her control and also, he was hardly ever home. If he was not supervising his vast land holding, he was settling some dispute in the village of which he was the undisputed patriarch because he had set it up by clearing the forests and settling people from his old village, and bringing Muslim agriculturists to work on their fields. In the evenings, koka would be rehearsing for the next play the Rangmahal club would stage – he was their chief patron and often, the lead actor. When there was no play, Choudhury koka, Sirajuddin koka, Dambaru mama and everybody else would get together and discuss poetry or music. Sometimes, if the artiste was not travelling with his troupe, he would come and sing in their batghar which koka had transformed into a natghar, aita often complained. When the sounds of the rehearsals started reaching the main house, and aita retreated into the kitchen, my Ma would sneak away from her study table and run to the batghar. It was through these rehearsals that Ma had become close to koka, who liked that one of his children was interested in the arts. And koka forever for her remained the artiste, the lover of literature, and the man who always quoted Chandraprasad: Xundarar Aradhanai Jibanar Khel: the sport of life is in the worship of the Beautiful. Sometimes, the image of the Beautiful conjured up in her mind would be that of her father, sometimes of the artiste. She only ever wanted to be the silent worshipper.

I thought I could sense my Ma’s bewilderment when she was forced to come and live in Guwahati. I thought I could measure her reluctance. She had not wanted to come, but koka had insisted she get a better education than he ever did: “Study English literature, because it will teach you to appreciate how beautiful life is.” She had heard from him that pain could be beautiful, and after the death of the artiste – some said from drinking too much, but she never believed them – she had often felt loss could be as precious as love. Without anybody knowing it, she had stolen the teacup kept aside for him – aita insisted that no Muslim could drink from the same cup as they did – and hidden it in her trunk under her bed. Although she hardly ever took it out of there, she liked to think: “this is the cup that ‘runneth over’ with my grief”. She left behind the cup when she went to Guwahati and once when she came home for the holidays, she didn’t notice that it was gone from her trunk. Just like the artiste’s cup, many things had slowly slipped away from her unnoticed, but not her shyness, her solitude, and her love of Beauty, reinforced now by the English Romantic poets.

***

The silken slender threads of a mournful flute found her one day at her hostel window when she was once again toying with the moon. They were floating in from the direction of the boys’ hostel, and she was immediately in love once again. Her artiste was back to life and she had found something to hold dear in this city where everything seemed daunting, everybody intimidating. Majnixa xar pai xunisane ketiyaba ketekir hiya bhaga mat? She felt the bird’s wailing that the poet heard in the middle of the night must have aroused the same pain, the same desire as the music of the flute now did in her. Sometimes she wondered who it was that could weave such sorrowful magic; often she told herself the magic was enough, the magician incidental. And she would not have known if he had not played the same melancholy notes on College Day, and as she sat there in the auditorium with her friends, she suddenly, for a moment, went back to her old bed at home and could smell the wild roses at her window. But she was grown up now, and knew she could not dream of getting married to somebody just because they pierced your heart with so much pain. Because she knew now what marriage entailed and she could foretell how aita and koka would both react if they only knew she was in love with a tribal boy. Koka would perhaps understand the love and devotion, but she knew well enough now that abstract religions of the heart had nothing to do with institutional religions people practised in everyday life, and even koka would not accept such a social ignominy as his daughter marrying a tribal boy. Oh, the tribals are Hindu alright, but they do still eat pork and drink alcohol. And although her elder brothers often went hunting in the reserved forest nearby and brought home deer meat almost every time, and maybe even ate wild pigs and buffaloes on the sly, pork – and of course beef – were taboo at home. And all the men of the house, including koka, only drank alcohol in secret, never socially like the tribals did. She had been shocked the day she found a bottle of rum in her father’s safe which he had accidentally left open. She had never told anybody about it, and had later accepted that although drinking alcohol was bad, it is a weakness even the strongest of men must sometimes give in to. And then, they say artistes need alcohol. Was he drunk now? Suddenly she came back to herself and found herself sitting in the auditorium surrounded by an applauding audience and blushed. The performance had ended, and she wished she could look at him sometime longer. Since she couldn’t do that now, she started sitting towards the end of the classroom and watching shyly, guiltily, his profile on the boys’ side of the room. And waiting for the evenings when she could listen to him playing the flute. She made believe that he played only for her, because she listened. One day instead of the music, she heard a huge commotion from the direction of the boys’ hostel. Some of the more adventurous girls in the hostel went over to the warden’s and brought back the news that the tribal boys had started a rebellion of sorts. They would no longer eat in the Second Dining Hall, they wanted to eat with the upper caste Hindu boys in the First Dining Hall. There was a little violence, and some of the boys on both sides had been injured. From the next day, she did not hear him playing the flute anymore. News was some of the boys in the hostel had been rusticated for indiscipline, he was one of them. Some of the other girls who had taken to openly declaring their adoration of him ever since the College Day, proudly proclaimed that at least his sacrifice had set in motion a change that would be good for the society. She wanted to cry because she hated it when they spoke about him as though he could ever belong to anybody but her.

***

I thought I felt my Ma’s trepidation the day she got married. I thought I knew how her tears were both of sorrow at leaving her parents’ home and of fear of the unknown life she was about to start by marrying deuta. Her only consolation was that koka had himself chosen deuta to be her husband, and she knew he would never make a wrong choice for her. She had barely met him a few times before the wedding but she had read his novel and imagined he would be like Pramathes, the protagonist, who was a social activist and stood for all that was true, right and good. She was also a bit worried that if he was as good as Pramathes, she might not live up to his expectations. But her sense of inadequacy began to disappear as she started learning a few lessons about life in the daily grind of married life. The first of these lessons was that a man who was too good to be true should not get married. Unaware of his duties to his family, deuta indeed turned out to be like Pramathes, consumed with a desire for cleansing the society of its evils and injustices. Perhaps it was something in the air in those days, but many other people like deuta also thought they could do this, and very naively they all joined the Asom Andolan – that massive civil unrest that turned our society upside down for nearly six decades – a well-intentioned movement which a few self serving people hijacked and turned into one that polarized our society, alienating all Muslims and as well as tribals. People like my deuta who had joined the movement because they wanted to fight for the rights of the “sons of the soil” did not realise this until it was too late. And then when they did, they ended up as bitter defeated crusaders who remained forever afterwards cynical about any change in society. Deuta could never get over it, and he changed, kept strictly to his textbooks and teachings and pretty much banished whatever was left of Pramathes from his person. Meanwhile, my Ma had already given up two of her favourite preoccupations, because early in the marriage, she had realized that it would not do for both partners to immerse themselves in art and literature, or there would be nobody to run the house, what withdeuta also possessing at the same time an unbending social conscience. Since the same realization had not come todeuta, it was my Ma who had to relinquish.

She did however keep her third religion alive, that of loving flowers. She had a huge garden with many different kinds of flowers to which she was more attached than to deuta. When I was born, she named me Pahi – flower petal – although she must have been disappointed that I did not turn out to be as delicate, as pliant, or as attached to her as her flowers. I was more attached to deuta who would sometimes, only for me, come out of his cynical shell and recount the fervour with which his generation had wanted to “save our nation and identity”. Another generation was at that moment in history trying to do the same with guns and explosives and failing miserably, defeated by ideological poverty. Growing up amidst all this and knowing what had gone before, I started believing that mass movements and armed insurgencies led nowhere. Revolution had to begin at the individual level, and I started my little rebellions. I began by renouncing the Brahminism I was born into. I took to eating beef and pork with friends, and later, travelling to places my mother would only have heard of, or my one-time social activist father would never have been acquainted with, where the people who he had once thought he was fighting for really lived. There, getting drunk on rice beer, we discussed ethnic reconciliation and religious tolerance, deliberated on blueprints of a future society without conflicts. And I thought I was in love, with an indigenous Muslim boy who spoke with the same passion about the same things I believed in.

I thought my Ma would be my worst enemy at this juncture. I thought deuta was the one who would understand. But it was deuta who very subtly blackmailed me into agreeing to marry Bordoloi khura’s son who lives in Bangalore. He stopped eating, and sat on his easy chair in the veranda for hours with a wounded look, the book on his lap open at the same page for a week. I gave in, but not before I realized my mother was on my side. She said nothing the day I broke the news, and I would have thought she was silent only because deuta had said what she would have wanted to say, had she not come and sat beside me on my bed and run her fingers through my hair the day the love of my life heaped accusations of hypocrisy and elitism on me and Bandini seeing that I was well rid of him, came up to me and told me how he had been sleeping with another woman all along. My world and my rebellion and my beliefs had all come crushing down, but in the midst of it all, I suddenly saw my Ma, I saw that my Ma felt my pain, that she was indeed made of pain. And it was then, for the first time in my life, that I thought I should get to know her the way she must have been.


***