by Sumana Roy
There were hardly any poems about love on the bookshelves. Tina said that it wasn’t the time for love and I agreed.
We did find a book of poems at last; it was, however, in Hindi. Our Hindi was poor, but it was enough to help us to translate the writer’s words into English and pass them off as Tina’s. ‘Good, Professor Singh won’t even find out that I didn’t write the poem. He’ll think I’m the perfect girl for him.’ I remember that we paid only twenty-five rupees for the book.
‘The writer must be a woman,’ Tina concluded as we entered the house.
It was early spring and we hadn’t carried warm clothes with us; our mother scolded us as soon as she saw us.
‘Ma, Tina’s bought a book of poems,’ I said, trying to divert her attention. I’d come to realise that she liked listening to poetry. She would turn on the radio in the afternoon on certain days of the week and listen to a man or a woman saying difficult words, painfully, the lilt of the faraway in their voice, and whisper ‘Wah wah’ as if she was speaking to them.
‘Are you in love, Tintin?’ Ma asked Tina. She called her Tintin just as she called me Tush-Tush, affectionately, but, in front of the world, even the maid, we were always Tina and Tushi.
‘No, Ma. I want to be a writer,’ Tina replied, unprepared for the question.
‘And what’s the first book you’ve bought for that?’ she asked, smiling.
‘Sweeping My Self,’ Tina and I replied, translating the title from Hindi.
I didn’t notice it then but when I think of it now, I can see that my mother hadn’t even asked to see the book.
We discovered the name of the poet much later. The publishers of Sweeping My Self could afford to spend on only one photograph – they had chosen the photograph of the brown broom on the cover over a photograph of the writer. But it is strange that we, who’d grown up in a culture of naming a poem followed by the name of the poet – ‘Africa by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’, ‘The Unknown Citizen by WH Auden’ – hadn’t cared to even find out the name of the poet of Sweeping My Self. It was perhaps because Tina had only wanted the words; she hadn’t needed the voice.
The poet of Sweeping My Self wrote under a pseudonym, Kutumb; it means ‘family’.
‘What a strange name for a man, Kutumb!’ said Tina, the next morning at breakfast.
‘A man?’ asked my mother.
My father was away on a tour, selling generators to managers in tea gardens.
‘Yes. And I had thought that it was a woman…’
‘But Kutumb could be a woman as well?’ asked my mother.
‘Don’t be stupid, Ma. Imagine a girl with a name like Kutumb…’
‘Why not, Tintin?’
‘Oh, Ma! Imagine yourself with the name… Kutumb Srivastav…’
‘I don’t think I’d ever write with the baggage of a surname,’ Ma had said then.
Now, when I think of the room in which my mother spent most of her day, perhaps writing, I can remember the faint smell of cigarette smoke behind the decaying curtains. My father was away from home most of the time, even missing our birthdays and annual concert days in school without regret. He was a heavy smoker, and Tina and I came to associate the smell of cigarette smoke with his temporary return to the saltiness of our lives. I can still remember the unsettling smell of cigarette in the damp house hitting our faces when Basanti, the maid, opened the door. We’d think that our father had returned. We’d take off our shoes and leave our school bags in the living room and go upstairs to his bedroom to meet him. But he wouldn’t be there.
Who smoked cigarettes while our father was away? Was it our mother or someone else? Was it the man whose ‘back was full of green grass in which Radha lost her toe-ring’?
Tina told me once – I think it was a week after I discovered the man in the poem – that she’d had a nightmare in which our mother was smoking cigarettes, one after the other, and stubbing the burning pieces on Cuddly, our pink teddy bear, and then stuffing her pillowcase with her poems, her manuscripts. I told Tina that the woman in her dream couldn’t have been our mother. Our mother smelled of lemon (how often she’d say, ‘Like a lemon, I’m turning bitter with the world’s squeezing!’ after a tiff with Father). But Tina’s been insistent – she’ll have me believe that it was our mother who smoked those cigarettes. She thinks that, like her writing, there are other things about our mother that we do not yet know.
Sometimes, especially when I have to scrape burnt milk off a steel vessel at the end of an afternoon, I begin to believe in Tina’s words. My mother, during these moments, becomes someone else, a woman strangely younger than when I saw her last, a woman at the bus-stop whom men refuse to forget for a few nights, a woman swinging her legs on a sewing-machine in the middle of the night, a woman who stores cough syrup in her wardrobe. I do not know why my mother is never my mother in my dream. After her death and after my discovery, she’s become someone else for me, a pet name on a spine in a book on a shelf, like the name of an expensive but necessary drug at a chemist’s, or, as Tina’s husband said to me over the phone, like a newspaper in an unfamiliar language in a foreign country.
Sometimes I feel that I’m beginning to miss her, to think of her in the way my South Indian neighbour Bharati feels her mother – in the style of her plait, in the hot flush of her ears, in her underlined horoscope that she scrutinises for new stories whenever her husband is away on a sales tour. I realise that I’ve begun to miss my mother the most when my car passes by a bookstore. Even the magazine vendor in train compartments reminds me of her in a way I cannot explain.
I remember an obituary I read on the train from Delhi to Varanasi. It’d been published in the supplement of an English newspaper whose name was new to me, one of the many which had appeared after I’d got married and left India. People bought them more for the daily supplements of gossip than the emaciated news pushed to the margins by half-page advertisements of things that had come to the country after I’d left – cell phones, apartments in planned mini-townships and mutual funds. It was written by a man whose name sounded familiar to me. Abhimanyu Singh. I couldn’t remember whether it was the name of a friend or relative.
‘Failing Successfully: Atithi, the guest-poet at home.’ This was the title of the obituary. It was a well-written piece although it came to my ears, perhaps because of my long stay in the United States, as the voice of a second-language English speaker. I read the article at one go and it left me with a sense of unease, something I cannot put in words in any language I know, something I once felt in the proximity of a lake at night on my first visit to England, when the water could not be seen, only sensed from a distance from the fearful reflection of the dull sky. The words in the obituary seemed to make an effort to remind me of someone I couldn’t remember. Abhimanyu Singh’s words had wrapped my mother in lace curtains making her seem even more distant after our late discovery, like blurred pictures of familiar objects in my mind, a toothbrush, a pair of blue-strapped hawai sandals, a pair of oil-fogged glasses, things I knew, could identify, but not put into a map to locate the woman from whom I’d begun my journey into the world.
‘Home is where we must make a name’ – the obituary had begun with a quotation from Nissim Ezekiel, the Indian English poet, writing about returning to India to harvest a reputation more than a quarter-century ago. The comparison between the much-travelled Indian Jew and my mother who’d never been abroad and had visited only four states in India in her entire life struck me as odd. My mother had known only Uttar Pradesh, where we lived; Bihar, my father’s ancestral home; Bengal, where we sometimes accompanied our father to the tea gardens in the Dooars; and Orissa, the place where my mother had once said she’d be happiest to die.
Orissa, pick me up,
Let your trunk wrap itself around me
While the mahouts of the world bathe you
With their moonlight soaps…
Hurry up,
They are sending guards, I know,
To prove
that I stole the wombs you’d lent to the papaya tree…
When I see the books on her shelves now, I see them full of the Oriya writers – Mahapatra and Mohanty, Senapati and Salabega, their symbols of all-remembering tigers and deep silent wells – and I begin to see how much she loved reading them. She loved Orissa: our drawing-room cloth decorations from Pipli, their cut-and-paste routine that always brought other things from other places on the same canvas, which Abhimanyu Singh had related to the aesthetic of the patchwork in my mother’s poetry. It struck me, suddenly, that the writer of this obituary was someone who’d visited our house in Lucknow, someone who had known my mother. I cannot explain why that thought unnerved me instantly. I felt as if someone had seen my mother in the nude, seen her wearing a sari, as if through a keyhole. I know that it was a strange thought to have, but I felt that my mother had been violated, that some thief had touched her stained undergarments. For he was right; my mother, I began to recollect, had indeed been ‘fascinated by disparateness, by dissonance, by disturbance’. Unlike most mothers of twins, she’d never made an effort to dress Tina and me in similar clothes. In fact, she’d insisted that Tina grow her hair till her waist while I had mine cut to near my ears.
I continued reading the piece. He had quoted from another of my mother’s poems, talking about her fear of heights, something I had not known about her:
People ask for ladders
To go and come,
Give me one,
Too,
I say,
So that I can see
The workshop where He
Shapes the toes on feet
Those that walk on streets,
And climb ladders
Through the skin-bruised indigo highway…
Singh’s translation was poor, or perhaps my mother’s words themselves had been vague making them look even more insignificant in translation.
My mother had very little hair on her head. We learnt later, as we were growing up, that she’d lost most of her hair when Tina and I were born. Only a few roots had remained alive after our birth. A few strands of hair emerged shyly and occasionally. I do not remember her ever blaming us for that loss. But, as Abhimanyu Singh had written, her poems were full of women who had an ambiguous relationship with their hair. His translations failed to convey the violence of the shearing of the widow’s hair, her shaven head, the burnt hair on the head of a woman who had tried to commit suicide; even schoolgirls’ pigtails; and another short poem on wigs –
Don’t pretend that you could’ve been my mother,
My mother’s body could cast no shadow,
She forgot to carry her wig with her in death,
I could lend it to you, her wig, you know,
In return for the sound of your pigeon’s gizzard…
My shadow saw her last, biting the tasteless
underside of her lips,
While trying to tie herself to life, desperately,
With the uneven end of her long plait,
Standing, falling, standing, like water’s cousin,
Dancing, without joy, in the middle of a lotus leaf,
Without the borrowed conscience of a wig
In her life, my mother had betrayed her self. In her writing, she’d refused to be her other; in life, she’d been a bun of hair hanging sleepily at the root of her neck; in her writing, she had slipped, with the agility of a barber at mid-day, into various wigs, wigs fashioned out of fragments of strangers’ roots.
Abhimanyu Singh had said that my mother had failed in all that she had attempted to create: the series of seven-line poems that she had cheekily titled Sonnet – The Daughter’s Share were too full of half-suggested meanings to demand a reader’s attention; her longest poem, Future Tense: The Despot, had, cruelly, been called ‘an elephant’s miscarriage’ by an influential reviewer; two of her most popular collections, I’m God’s Elder Sister and Fingerprints on a Sugar Pot, in spite of being minor bestsellers, had been accused of being ‘telegrams to Kalidasa’; and her last book, Love’s Laboratory, a collection of dialogues between men and women in various relationships, the men speaking in rhyme and the women in blank verse, had been thrashed by a critic named Shukla as ‘an insult to Indian womanhood, to her time-honoured image of sobriety…making the writer one of Vatsyayana’s courtesans’. I laughed as I read these sentences; perhaps my mother had done the same. But, all these failures, Abhimanyu Singh maintained, these gulfs, big and small, between intention and result, had given my mother’s poetry that ineffable charm that perfection has often snatched from the best craftsmen, Alexander Pope and, sometimes, Byron.
My mother, Abhimanyu Singh had succeeded in convincing me by the time I reached Varanasi, was a great lover of incomplete things, of the half-burnt candle, of masons who ran away from work leaving behind unfinished buildings, of undeveloped film rolls and negatives, even ruins, and unresolved court cases. His obituary quoted from her poems liberally and the words in those poems constructed a woman who was the name on a spine, of a book, rather than the woman I thought I’d known, with a broad discoloured beige belt near the base of her spine worn to help her to stand erect when she got up from a chair or sofa. She loved birds, he said, and I believed him. She loved the colour of poverty, darkish yellow, the colour of bile and vomit, the obituary said, and I believed him. She loved stealing flowers offered to gods in temples, he said, and I believed him. She loved tearing ends of envelopes, he said, and I believed him again. I had no choice: it was as if my parents had shifted house while I’d been away and I had now come to a place of which I was expected to have a memory. All I could have done was succumb to belief, to neighbours’ myths about the sounds in the kitchen in the new home and I did that.
I think I know what pigeons say
When we talk of the heat or cold
I think I heard one say, today,
While getting wet in the late rain,
How sad men feel time and again,
That they can’t fly, that they can’t eat stones,
That they can’t live without breaking alphabet’s bones…
What could my mother have meant? It was painful reading her poems in Singh’s article: it felt like reading a letter written in shorthand from a loved one. His interventions, wise as they must have been, made him look like a goldsmith in my eyes, a man beating and boring through fine sheets of gold to get the shine on the light’s side while leaving the underside unmade and undiscovered. This was my first encounter with my mother’s poems, and he was telling me a fable about her, a mixed fable in which the sour grapes were really sour and the thirsty crow refused to put the stones in the pitcher to drink the water. I was irritated. They burnt my mother’s body before I could reach India. I wouldn’t let a stranger comb out half-truths from the soles of her slippers. Little did I realise that I did not have a choice, that this man, Abhimanyu Singh, whose name came to me like the sound of the referee’s whistle, leaving me unsure of beginning or ending, had won the race by increasing the distance of the marathon, leaving me confused and unprepared. He had introduced my mother to me in a way that all future introductions that I would make on behalf of my mother to the world had been rendered redundant.
I waited.
I had other stories to hear. Only, no one would tell me.
I continued reading the obituary:
Mrs Srivastava, as the postman called her, took refuge in pseudonyms. Hers was not the fear of rejection or criticism of the nineteenth-century women writers which demanded a cloak for the self; her guises, significantly not just the refuge of a single pen name but a few, were not the multiple-personality disorder as she’s recently been accused of. Rather, the dance of her selves, from Anjani to Kutumb to Atithi, marked a trajectory of her changing aesthetic as the meaning of her pen names imply, the unsure stranger of the first collection Coming to the letters to her relatives in the third collection Letters from a Lizard to the hesitancy of the surrogate mother in Blue Eyes, Blue Blood: Yes, Yellow. Her writing
, time and again, talks about the problems of translation obliquely: in the poem Punctuation, from North Pole, South Pole, where she talks about her unease with the way her daughters have stopped using punctuations when speaking in their mother tongue, she ends with the biting last lines:
It’s like dieting, a new fashion, speaking without commas or semicolons,
Only full stops, endless, a handful at a time,
Like cornflakes in milk, emaciated, sweetened without sugar,
Chiding me, my round Hindi alphabet, for being obese,
The unwanted grease of the matras threatening to kill with a ‘heart-attack’
Her short poem, Mrs Basnett, My Tongue-tied Translator, begins with an Englishwoman knocking at her door with a bouquet of bougainvillea, a flower she’d never seen in a bouquet. The encounter between the two women is narrated in a few nouns rather than adjectives – ‘sugar’, ‘spoon’, ‘shoes’, ‘socks’, ‘stabiliser’ and ‘skylight’. This gives way to the climax of the final lines:
I scolded her, shyly,
trying to extract some smell from the bougainvillea,
That I couldn’t stand being translated
In a lonely language where I had no friends
Whose names could begin with the last four letters of the alphabet,
W, X, Y, Z
This, of course, was another way of refusing to surrender to what she had, in another poem, called ‘the piracy of poetry/By long-distant swimmers with bad breath/Across the Channel/Tempting us with chairs with a comfortable backrest’. This short-sightedness was her failure but as another woman had proved before her, ‘Without failure, no ethics’.
She died, without pleas to anyone, her two fingers touching her blocked nose. My mother had failed. He had been right, as I was to discover when I reached home.
No one came to receive me at the railway station.
My train was late. I’d expected Tina or her husband to come. Most of the coolies were drunk after Janmashtami. An autorickshaw took me home through the deserted streets. The gate was open, as if indifferent to entries and exits.
