My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  Like being there by that summer ocean

  on the other side of the island while

  love was fading out of her, the stars

  burning so extravagantly those nights that

  anyone could tell you they would never last.

  Every morning she was asleep in my bed

  like a visitation, the gentleness in her

  like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

  Each afternoon I watched her coming back

  through the hot stony field after swimming,

  the sea light behind her and the huge sky

  on the other side of that. Listened to her

  while we ate lunch.

  ‘Notice how after the generic lines about love and marriage and their success and failure the poet begins chasing metaphors...’

  ‘Like chasing women once you have acquired a wife!’ Mayurika is laughing at her own joke.

  Before I can intervene, Amla imports her own interpretation. ‘I know what you mean. My mother says that my father did exactly that! But my understanding of these lines is different. The first few lines are the equivalent of taking the saat pheras or a walk down the aisle. It’s the same for everyone. Only after that does the marriage begin to become customised. Hence the metaphors.’

  I like her interpretation though, of course, there is no theory to back it. No ism, as my students say in shorthand, particularly before exams. Once, I overheard a conversation between two girls in a women’s toilet:

  ‘Which ism will be asked this semester, you think?’

  ‘Feminism and Socialism were asked last year.’

  ‘We might get that multi-ism this semester then.’

  ‘Not multi-ism, man, multiculturalism.’

  ‘This paper should be called Multiply-ism, so many isms, just too much yaar!’ The reliance on isms bothers me as much as it does them. I suppress laughter thinking of Priti’s suggestion to have a paper or course called ‘Relationships’. Surely no stupid theorist will turn that into an ism – Relationshipism?

  This is what they’ve done to Literature – like photo filters on our cell phones that exaggerate or diminish something from the original and seemingly imperfect or incomplete photo, these isms, imported from across the corridor, from the Social Science departments, are supposed to be filters through which we look at literary texts. It is as if these texts have no existence outside of this, as if everything is to stand for everything, to mean something. I call it ‘Meaningitis’ in class sometimes. The students laugh, I imagine that as their support, their call to be liberated from these isms.

  Sabiha, the best poet in this group, quiet for so long, speaks up at last. ‘It is as if the poet has decided to treat “My Better Half” literally.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. I sense all the students looking at her.

  ‘Like the person’s discovery of his partner, his “better half”, the poem too follows that pattern – it is the better, no, the best, part of the poem. Marriage might be generic, as Amla said, but his partner is not – hence all these unique metaphors and comparisons. Her infinity, which is what must seem to a newly married man, is quantified through metaphors of the unmeasurable: the summer ocean, the huge sky, the stars...’

  I am loving her interpretation. ‘Whoever compares a lover to an antelope?’ That’s Amla, the principal dissenter in class.

  ‘If you can compare a lover to a teddy bear, why not to an antelope?’ Priti will always have something to say.

  ‘That’s for a reason,’ says Sabiha calmly. ‘The man’s gaze is narrowing – from her seeming infinitude, the ocean and the stars and the sky and their vastness, the distance between the man and the woman is growing smaller. He can now see her – she is the antelope, with horns yes, but don’t miss the word “grace”. His vision in the marriage is growing sharper: the endlessness of the ocean and the sky, the blur of the misty dawn, and even the halo that she seems to be carrying around her... At last, we – and he – can see her up close. For even when he sees her in bed, she is distant. Then she sits opposite him, eating lunch, this creature of light, an angel, and she becomes a woman. And, therefore, the marriage must die...’

  I want to clap. But Amla is a bull waiting to strike. ‘So, distance is best in all relationships. Even in marriage. Is that the moral of the poem?’

  No one answers. I’ve decided that I won’t.

  ‘What is the moral of a marriage? If a marriage has no moral – I don’t mean morals – then how can a poem about a marriage have a moral?’ I sense a hint of annoyance in Shruti’s voice. She rarely speaks in class, and certainly not in this assertive tone.

  Amla ignores her, as she does almost everyone else, beginning with her parents. ‘I noticed something else,’ she says, and without waiting for us to ask – she never does – continues, ‘I notice that as long as the woman is only an object to be seen and viewed, things are fine. The marriage and the metaphors are beautiful. As soon as the woman begins speaking – “Listened to her while we ate lunch” – the marriage begins to collapse, at least in the poem. It reminds me of an essay by someone called Mary Beard, on the history of women’s forced silence...’

  I’m beginning to grow tired. I feel like a marriage counsellor. I am relieved that I’m not married.

  How can they say

  the marriage failed? Like the people who

  came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

  and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

  I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

  but just coming to the end of his triumph.

  I read these lines very slowly, almost coaching myself to believe in them, as if they were a DIY-thing for happiness in relationships. ‘We are returning to Icarus at the end of the poem. Why?’

  ‘Return to singlehood. As alone as Icarus after the marriage.’ Amla again, her responses almost always immediate.

  ‘Is the man going into the forest the same as the man coming out of the forest?’ asks Mayurika. I know she’s a philosophy minor. ‘We see the marriage and its end in the poem itself. And then we see the lonely man, failing after flying, and hence the title – “Failing and Flying” – of course. But it’s not the same man. That is why the first and the last lines of the poem are not the same. How can they be? I’m not the same girl I was before the summer vacation.’

  We look at her, all of us – the effect of her words are immediate. Her face is in her hands. We see the tears we can’t see. The silence that follows is unbearable, longer than any stanza break can accommodate. I don’t know what to do – it’ll be an hour soon, and I still haven’t spoken about the craft in the poem. I’m unable to get myself to Mayurika’s chair, to comfort her. The place was pretty but its food greasy – the thought from the poem refuses to leave me. It comforts me – how prettiness is not all. My insecurities about my appearance return. Would my marriage have ended the moment I became visible from a close range?

  I am brought back from my self-obsessed thoughts by the sound of sobbing. Sadness is contagious. I feel the urge to cry but I fight back my tears. I think of Arup – I wonder which of us is Icarus, him or me. I wonder whether he still writes poems. I still read poems, like I used to. Why would he stop writing then?

  There’s mascara on Mayurika’s cheeks. Sadness is pretty only in a poem.

  The classroom is handicapped by decorum, the students and I paralysed by some invisible glue that doesn’t allow us to move towards the girl in tears. It is as if the governing ethic of the academic essays – with their yoke of objectivity that keeps the self at an antiseptic distance – has seeped into our blood. The isms are all good theoretically but they do not penetrate beyond the skin, they do not change us. There is no ism for sadness, for failure of relationships, for tears.

  ‘What happened in the summer, Mayurika?’ I ask, walking towards her, slightly unsure of whether I’ve used the correct preposition. Should I have said “during”?

  The girls get up from their
chairs as soon as I do from mine. We walk towards her. There are no words. Later, when we’ve gathered around her seat – and she’s the only person sitting – she pulls the sleeves of her sweater to near her elbow. Near her wrist is something that looks like a scribble but must be a tattoo. I adjust my glasses to look closely. The girls have their heads focused on the tiny inscription (what else does one call it?). Their eyes are like microscopes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t make out either.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s like a smudge.’

  ‘Is it a fly?’ Sabiha asks shyly, as if saying something inappropriate.

  ‘K.’ That’s all that Mayurika will say.

  ‘Kafka? A spider? You like...’

  ‘K for Krishna,’ Mayurika clarifies.

  ‘The K looks like a fly.’

  ‘That was the idea,’ she explains, wiping her nose on her sweater sleeve.

  ‘What happened? Why did you break up?’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Flown away. Like a fly.’ It’s Amla.

  I’m scared – and sad – that it’s a cruel joke, but I see Mayurika sniff and then smile.

  That gives Amla courage. ‘Failing and Flying,’ she says.

  I leave the classroom three minutes before time. Just before the door closes behind me I see Shruti inspect the tattoo closely.

  ‘Close Reading,’ I hear one of them say.

  On the Brink

  ‘For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted – made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world – as did Anne Sexton – as do we all. …After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.’

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  I’VE COME HERE TO die.

  I’m sitting in Café Weiner Platz. Though the weather prediction says heavy showers, I’ve chosen to sit outside. I sit in a corner at a table for four – as if I’ll be joined by my family soon. But I’m by myself. Company blinds us – humans distract, human talk distracts without consequence, we fail to notice things. I see things I’ve never seen before. I see myself in the glass window to my left. There is always the initial shock – is that really me? I adjust my hair (since one cannot adjust the nose or the eyes) – that unsettles the self.

  The waitress asks where I’m from, when I ask for an English menu.

  ‘Ah India,’ she says, ‘that’s why so pretty.’

  I know I’m not pretty, and that this is part of her job etiquette, that her words are the equivalent of a ticket collector’s ‘Ticket please’, but I allow myself to smile. I soon notice that she begins all her half sentences with ‘So’.

  Gnocchi and a glass of fresh orange juice.

  It is afternoon though I’m confused. I’m still living to Indian time. The day has almost ended there. Here the sky is still choking with light. Summer, the enchantment of Europeans. I say this phrase to myself as if I were a writer. I’m not sure whether I smile when the phrase erupts like acne. For, two men pass by smiling at me. No, it’s not because I’m pretty. It’s because I’m alone.

  Poor men, I say to myself. Not having a range of options with their clothes – shirts and tees, shorts and pants – they have concentrated all their experimental energy on their hair. The first man who passed by, the one in the yellow tee, has a reptilian mohawk. The second – I’ve already forgotten the colour of his clothes – has some secret code in his undercut. Their hairstyles give them an odd mix of hilarity and seriousness.

  A few feet away from me is the traffic crossing. On the other side of the crossing is a fish house. The smell of fish frying in deep oil, as if it were an extension of its life in the sea, the hot oil a natural continuation of the cold seawater – the smell moves like a fly in my brain. The fresh anchovies – I’ve so far seen them only in food shows on YouTube – remind me of morola, boroli, and other small fishes. The fresh orange juice is here. At first, I want to push it away, as if it were someone else’s order, or an order placed by an older self. Its citrusy fragrance is like a moral, an indictment against the deep-fried fish.

  People collect around the traffic lights as if the signal were food and they animals congregating around it. For some reason, only the women stick to the eye. The men pass by like clouds. The women walk with focus – their destination is written on their faces and in the pace of their walk. No, it is not the women I notice but the children with them. They are everywhere – straight out of fairy tale storybooks, inside prams and on their feet, still unsure about the world and how the world was a thing, a noun. After long minutes of observation, it suddenly strikes me that there is something new about them that I hadn’t noticed before. I begin to look like a scientist.

  Yes, I wasn’t mistaken. There it is, another pair. It’s this new trend called ‘twinning’ – people, usually a pair, a couple, siblings, friends, wear ‘matching’ clothes. I’ve seen it on the Internet, on fashion websites and on Instagram. All the mothers are twinning with their children. Just as the gnocchi arrives and I spend a few moments thinking that I’ve ordered wrong food again, that I wouldn’t be able to finish such a large serving even if it were divided into my next three meals, a mother and her daughter cross the street hurriedly. I’m not sure whether I’m seeing correctly – I wipe my glasses with the loose end of my shirt sleeve. No, there they are, walking on to a connecting street. Though I say walking, they’re not really walking – the two of them are on their bicycles, and their bicycles are twinning. Even their hairstyles are – both have their summer hair collected into a messy bun on the top of their head. Their dresses are replicas of each other. Everything else – their faces, of course – matches each other’s. Everything except the mother’s pink bra strap, visible even from this distance.

  After this, that is all I notice. Mothers and tiny daughters, related to each other not by blood or facial similarities alone, but by clothes. If the child is a boy, it’s usually the colour of the pants that matches the mother’s trousers or dress. How did this come to be? My mother never wore anything to resemble mine. But that might also be because she had hardly any saris except the ones she wore to work, and I had only a few dresses – clothes were bought twice a year, during Durga Puja and the Bengali New Year. Also, how was a sari to twin with a dress? Other thoughts crowd my head – about how the mother’s clothes make her look like a girl and how the same clothes sexualise her little girl.

  The gnocchi burns my tongue. I rush to the glass of orange juice, almost dunking my tongue in it for relief. I don’t have children, I remind myself. There is no regret in that statement, only an awareness of what is not allowed to me – I will never be twinning my clothes with my daughter’s, just as I won’t wear purple lipstick or heels.

  There’s a man I hadn’t noticed until now. Perhaps he was lying dormant, and is suddenly active, now that his food is here. I see him rolling long threads of noodles around the teeth of his fork. It seems that this process will never end. At the centre of the table is a tiny pot of cactus with a red flower. The red flower could well be a blob of ketchup. But my eyes are back to the man’s wrists – he’s like a weaver, a craftsman. Anyone without hands wouldn’t be able to eat spaghetti.

  I’ve come here to die, I remind myself. Destination Suicide, like Destination Wedding.

  I wear no make-up. I have no ideology to back this decision – I tell myself it is because I want my face to be as clean as the inside of my mouth. Wearing no make-up in a world, where almost everyone does, makes me feel slightly naked, as one would feel if you wore no clothes in a world of fully clothed people. To wear make-up is to presume the presence of one more person besides myself in th
is world. But I’m the only inhabitant of my world. (I want to die.)

  Not make-up alone, everything seems to be structured for socialising.

  Cafés are places to socialise. There are no social places for solitude. Go to a forest – that’s the dictum, turned into colloquial. And where does one go after the forests are gone?

  There’s another solitary woman beside me. She’s drinking beer. No, she’s finished. She’s getting up. I read the note on her T-shirt. It’s in English, and I’m surprised by the joy of that familiarity – it’s perhaps also because I know the quote. I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. It’s by Anaïs Nin.

  I make a sound with my drinking straw. It is a childish sound. I want to remember the age of this sound inside me but I can’t. I can’t remember most of the things I want to. It’s not the problem of my memory but the nature of the things I want to remember – my first spit-bubble, my first moment of sexual passion, my first drawing of a line. What did it feel like? Will I remember all this tomorrow, after I die? If death is the opposite of life, then all the things we were denied in this life ought to be given to us in death? What use would it be to die otherwise?

  The café smells of fries. That smell reminds me that I’m outside the house. No kitchen or house smells like this.

  My eyes turn to the wall, to the wine bottles arranged on it – full and semi-full, how they’re décor, in a way plates of French fries would never be.

  I think too much. I don’t like myself very much. I dislike that I have little control of my self. My fingers feel for the undulations of the strip of ten tablets inside my bag. Yes, they’re still here. I trust them more than I’ve trusted people. I change ‘people’ to ‘men’. I’m tired of my life as an editor. My head runs to ‘track changes’. My dreams run to ‘track changes’ too.

  I ask for the bill. There’s always a moment of eroticism in this waiting.

  I wish I could understand – or know – what the couple at the neighbouring table is talking about. I remind myself that love, like death, is a foreign language, that I’d never completely understand them. But I knew love once. Perhaps.