The Secret Order of What We Carry for Love

My friends and relatives, people who’ve known me as a child still make fun of what happened to me on the first day of my school. It was a new nursery called Children’s Home just next to the petrol pump at Bora Service. Maa had me dressed in the uniform — grey shorts, white shirt, a red tie and a red belt with black stripes. She’d removed the bedsheet from our drawing room bed, and asked me to stand on top of the uncovered mattress. On the plywood wall behind me, I still remember, was a picture of Sai Baba pasted with strips of brown sellotape. She then stood by the fridge, checked her angle and asked Papa to get the premier camera out of our Godrej almirah. I was not excited at all, but I still smiled. My knees and legs felt wobbly thinking that I will have to get down the bed and go somewhere. Somewhere far from Maa. My cheeks and neck felt full, my jaws pained when I smiled. Right after the picture, Maa and I rushed to the rickshaw waiting outside our house. From now on, Maa informed, this will be the rickshaw that will take us to school from home and back home from school. I remember the day was bright and crispy, and yet a certain kind of sadness had started growing in me. In retrospect, it almost feels like the same feeling, when after giving your best and investing all your energy into a relationship, you finally have to let go of the other person, and maybe you do that in calm resignation — because you’ve accepted the truth that this is it. It goes no further than this. It is true that as a child I was sensitive and in autumn when the gulmohars and oleanders would shed leaves, I’d cry. Sometimes in the evenings, Maa would stand in the verandah, the oleander tree dropping leaves and yellow flowers right at our entrance. She’d wait till the nearby auntie would come out of her house with a baby on her shoulder. While Maa would speak to her about lunches and dinners, I would look at the child with the woman, always sleeping and a big patch of red skin over one of his eyes. He never opened his other eye. And it worried me. Even when I didn’t know how the child suffered and what the mother went through, at night in my bed I’d cry. It would pain me beyond any logical explanation that my tiny brain could decipher back then. There was something about a little boy losing his mother, or the mother losing the child that made me so restless and devastated. And that’s exactly how I felt on my first day at Children’s Home. When Maa left me at the gate and the teacher came to pick me up, I broke into howls and screams. I would hold onto Maa’s hands and not let go. I felt if I let go of her, either I or she would die. It wasn’t just sadness that I felt, but a deep, endless grief that someone suddenly had injected into my body. Maa would have to finally forcefully remove my tight fists from her saree and run out of the school gate. And unfortunately this didn’t stop happening after the first day. It kept happening every single day, until the teacher requested Maa to stop coming to school. “Please ask his father to drop him instead,” she said. While by then I had found a few friends at Children’s Home and that helped, I still withdrew into a corner during tiffin hours to eat alone. The soggy maggi noodles sticking to the walls of my red plastic tiffin, the thinly sliced pieces of apple growing brown inside the smaller container, the small bottle of glucon D — reminded me of Maa and I would smell them as I ate. It felt as if I had separated from her for years and the food in my tiffin were her last remembrances I could hold on to.

How easily, and with great mocking pleasure we use phrases like mama’s boy or pansy-sissy or namby-pamby without ever knowing what could actually make a child so desperate and vulnerable. Sometimes, even parents feel they must chide their child, castigating them for being so clingy. I see so many fathers asking their little four year olds to man up! I see so many mothers pushing their three or four year olds away while they are pregnant with the second one. This is confusing for the child. Because he doesn’t understand his father’s unrealistic ideas of virility that he’s carried from his family. Nor does he understand his mother’s pregnancy and all the mood paraphernalia that comes with it. He simply reads it as a rejection, and feels abandoned. He feels something is wrong with him. He feels devalued and insignificant. While none of these happened to me, there were still valid reasons for my anxiety and agitation. As a teenager when I started having panic attacks and everyone called me a psycho at med-school, I’d wake up on certain nights gasping for breath and ask Maa to sleep next to me. The smell of her body, of boroplus on her hands, the feel of her belly on my palms would calm me down. Even when I couldn’t understand my depression and didn’t have an idea as to what pain took over me on evenings that I’d cry for endless hours, I still found my peace sitting next to her eating something she’d make: seera-bhaaji, aaloo bhaaji and lusi, paayox, or just pitha — with the hope that it might change my mood and cure me in some way. All this while, she did a lot for me and yet I would be engulfed by this anxiety that I am not safe, maybe things may fall apart any moment. Someone might die. Maybe I or maybe Maa. It was agonizing to relive a nightmare like that in my head multiple times and not know what evil on earth brought them.

Children when in their mother’s womb remember its previous inhabitants. They remember their coming, they remember their going. My mother had lost a child just before me. He’d appeared in her womb. Stayed there for three months and suddenly left. Before she could grieve her first child’s passing fully, I had already found life in her. The first six months went fine. And then she stopped feeling a lot of movement. Maa once mentioned that Papa loved her so much he immediately applied for a job change and took her to Guwahati. He didn’t think twice as to where he’d rent a house or how he’d run it if he didn’t find a job at all. Maa says Papa could never recover from the shock of losing his first child. And when things went south with her second pregnancy, he grew anxious and desperate. They moved from one doctor to the other, one hospital to the other not knowing what could help the child move and his falling heartbeat. Finally, the doctors at the Marwari Maternity Hospital told Papa that only either of us could be saved. They took a signed document from him. So when I came, my mother was still under the effect of anesthesia and it was Papa who was asked to come and see me. He once described how he broke down seeing me, not because I had finally made it alive but because my skin had dried up in patches, cracked open all over my arms, thighs and chest, and blood oozed out in slits. It was as if I had raged a battle somewhere and somehow finally made it alive here. Though, each battle leaves its darkness and death within the souls of all those who fight it. When I look back at the fate of my mother and the desperations of my father, I wonder what excruciating fear and trauma these young 23–24 year olds may have gone through. And how much of that did I carry. The reasons for my desperation and anguish were embedded in the history of the war in my mother’s womb, the loss of my elder brother and my father’s unvoiced grief and fear.

It is often in my relationships, I have felt immense shame and discomfort, asking for presence or availability in these imaginary but powerful undulating moments: as if everything were on the edge and any moment a catastrophe could derail everything we’ve built together. While sinking into panic and imaginary nightmares can be dismissed by us or by our partner into irrelevant, unrealistic mania, what we never stall to wonder that they could be actually true. Maybe we have lived them at a time we don’t remember. Maybe they were lived by our helpless mother or our beloved grief stricken father. Maybe the pain of losing a blooming love and an eventual separation belongs to our body as much as it belonged to our dead brother. It is true that we discover our deepest wounds while exploring who we become with our partners. And while many of us never discover what a relationship truly has to offer in uncovering our past traumas and healing them eventually, some of us do. I did. So on nights, when I am in the washroom brushing my teeth, or getting water from the refrigerator or pressing out some hand cream and suddenly I notice the feeling of doom returning, and my body begins to close, we know it’s coming. We prepare not in haste but slowly slip into entanglements of head, neck and limbs. He then holds my chest and offers my mouth to the air. As if preparing the body open so it can let go of the residues of a lost time. I close my eyes and open my heart. There stands Maa, Papa, my beautiful brother and the little baby from Children’s Home. In my mind’s eye, while I lay on my lover’s chest, with each breath leaving my open heart I tell them: “dear Maa, dear Papa, darling brother and my beautiful baby boy, it’s over long back. I now leave what I carry with all of you. And I take your love, each one of yours. Back in my heart. That’s what I’ll carry here on.”