My Mother in the Mirror

Gleaming blue of the swimming pool. On it, a net of dragonflies, fluttering up as we felt our way down the steps. We were always a party of women and children. Most of these women were in their 20s. I was six, seven and eight. Although I had no concept of age and what it does to you, I knew all these women were old, Aunties. Make no mistake, age by itself does not make an Aunty. An Aunty is ascertained by her makeup (powder that dried like paint on your face, metallic lipsticks with far darkly lined lips and a bindi I can only, for reasons unknown, describe as apsara), by her clothes (matching suits with a thin dupatta, bangles, waxy sandals with a tiny heel) and the matters she chooses to discuss (children, husbands, weight – trying to lose it, failing to lose it, musing about the lucky few who don’t need to lose it). 

 My mother was an Aunty, an especially young one. She got married at 21, early even in the 90s. The story goes, my Nani (who, lifelong smoker, lives on even today at the age of 80) believed she only had one more year to live and wanted to see her daughter get married. I believe this story. While I was growing up, my mother was living her longings. My mother shaving before my father came home, my mother eating boiled dahl, my mother singing, my mother on a call, twirling the cord of the phone: I used to think this was the life I would grow into, now I think she was living the longings of girlhood. I know my mother’s longings like the back of my hand because they are also my own. These longings are the prologue, the subtext. I think she longed the most for love, but my father was not capable of accepting or giving love. These longings, in my story, are the footnotes. Always saying your story is yours because, because, because. I longed most for love too, although I didn’t know it then. I carried it as a darkness and later, as a ferocity. Krish, my best friend, and I used to fight all the time. We loved each other all the time too. I remember the screaming and biting, but I don’t remember why. Yet, if I close my eyes, I can almost dip into the summer we used up all his mother’s Surf Excel to make G.I. Joes a foaming river to jump into. I can smell the freshly cut grass, the sweetness of dusk. I can hear my mother laugh, talking to his. 

On summer evenings, my friends and I would clamber into my car (a red Maruti Suzuki) and my mother would take us swimming. It was the year Adnan Sami’s “Tera Chehra” had come out and that is what we sang. I did not sing badly on purpose like Krish. My parents had a habit of talking about me like I wasn’t there even when I was. Once, I sat on my mother’s lap in the car as we drove home at night. I was singing along to the radio, and she turned to my father and said, “She’s got such a sweet voice, doesn’t she?” I blushed, I beamed. Afterwards, I sang with great care. I wanted everyone to hear me sing and think what a sweet voice I had. I learnt who I was by being perceived, not witnessed. It is girlhood – who you are curated especially for a person, a place, until you are unknown to yourself. Or maybe you do know yourself but yourself is a madwoman in the attic – feral, confined. 

My mother came into her own when she was 35. I was 13, also coming into my own (or so I thought). My father had quit his job and lived with us now. He was angrier than ever. It is possible that I never had the time (with him) or faculties to witness his anger before this time. We shared a home in an area with people strange to our old ways of life. We shared an anxiety about my father and his job, with the bigger anxiety of jobs in 2009. We shared a silence that was always about to shatter. This year I stood in front of the mirror and didn’t follow the invisible hand of my mother. It is a reckoning I did for the next decade and a half – look in the mirror and know you have a body, and try your best to keep your body in check, contained. My mother jogged, swam, crunched and bent over backwards containing her body. My father didn’t touch her after she gave birth, she told me. It was a lesson on love. I was already certain I didn’t deserve love for reasons existential. Suddenly, I was given a reason I could prod and probe, a reason that explained the vague sense of uproot I had felt all my life. If I looked worth touching, I was worth loving. I wanted to be touched, my mother wanted to be left alone. She had been alone so long, even while being married, that she didn’t know how to live with my father. My father wasn’t equipped to understand the distance between them, nor to bridge it. My mother had had enough. She worked now, earned money, and met women who had a mind of their own. She was many people in this time – silly girl, working mother, hurt lover. She was most herself she had ever been. 

Sometimes being a teenager felt like my limbs were growing in different sizes, directions. I could fall asleep in the backseat of our car and be carried home (albeit with difficulty) and I spent hours online taking ‘Does he like me?’ quizzes. One evening, while walking back home from the grocery shop, a cyclist rammed into me. More alarmed than hurt, I yelled at him as he scrabbled on the road. Later, “Dear Diary, I’ve realised I must be kind to everyone, no matter what” – a revelation so trite yet so special. I wrote endlessly, badly. I wrote to give my own self shape, to discover the grammar of my girlhood after the wordlessness of childhood. I became myself many times. The becoming carries on, even now at 29. My girlhood lives in me – as mornings glazed with sunlight and scars on my knees, as lingering perfume in clothes packed away in boxes and diaries I read and re-read, as a mirror that reflects my mother back to me.