What would she have taught me about raising you?
I text one of my mamis to ask her if there are any Gujarati sayings or proverbs about raising children that I should know about. She asks why. I say that without my mum around, I could do with the occasional piece of homespun wisdom, otherwise I’m doing all of this in the dark.
One of the proverbs she sends me translates to ‘children who wake up early are healthy and wise’.
‘How cruel,’ I message my aunt. ‘I don’t want them to wake up early. I want a bloody lie-in!’
She replies that Gujarati sayings are cruel. I smile. Because that is my mum. She was cruel. Ecstatic that I once found a five-pound note on the street, I showed it to her and talked about the album I was going to buy with it. She told me that the money wasn’t mine and it no longer belonged to the person who had lost it. The only thing to do was to donate it to charity.
You remind me of my mum. Not in personality. Physically. You have my mother’s fingers (as well as my eyebrows and your dada’s ankles). As you grow, I can see the composites of my family in you. One night, as I go in to tuck you in and stroke your hair before turning off the landing light, as I do every night, for a second, just a fragment of a second, a pregnant pause that startles me, I see my mother’s face on you.
It. Freaks. Me. Out.
Lying there, still, eyes closed, mouth neutral, still and at peace.
Like the last time I saw her. On the table at the funeral director’s. I had gone with Dad to say goodbye. I didn’t want to but we were both convinced it was something we needed to do. My aunt had dressed Mum in a red sari and painted her fingernails red. This was why I’ll never forget her hands. Because on seeing her red fingernails, I crouched and let out a guttural uncontrollable yelp, before tears streamed down my face. Mum never painted her nails. I couldn’t be convinced, that on dying, she should be immortalized in flames, cremated, with nail varnish. It didn’t feel like my mum. It felt outside of the moment.
I look again at you and you have her face. It was only that one second that you looked like my mum. Only that one-second flash. A quick stab of an image change, like you might see in a horror film for effect. Except it wasn’t scary. If anything it was comforting.
Thinking about the last time I saw Mum, and how I cried and cried about her having nail varnish, I take your hand, and in the dim landing light, turn your fingers over and look at them.
You have my mother’s hands.
There’s a picture of Mum overlooking your bed. You know she is dead. Occasionally you will remind me.
‘Daddy, your mummy died, didn’t she?’ occasionally you’ll ask.
‘Yes,’ I’ll reply.
‘Are you sad?’
‘Yes, darling, I’m always sad,’ I tell you.
‘Why did she die?’
‘She got sick,’ I say. ‘And she didn’t get better.’ I don’t quite know how to explain lung cancer to you yet.
‘Am I going to die?’ you ask.
‘Yes,’ I tell you. ‘But not for a very, very long time.’
I tell you that you have hands like my mummy and that reminds me of her. It makes me feel close to my mum.
Often we think about the traits or memories or trinkets that remind us of those we have lost. It’s not often that we think about skin in this way. Your hands, imprinted with the same look and feel as my mum’s, bring me closer to Mum. Knowing she lives on, in this tiny way, helps me grieve.
When Mum ballooned in weight because of the course of steroids she was on, her hands remained her hands. In her final weeks, as she became gaunt and haunted, her hands remained her hands. It was only on that funeral director’s table, with the fingernails painted red, that she suddenly felt not there anymore. Because her hands were no longer her hands.
You don’t really understand it when I tell you that your hands remind me of my mum’s. You accept this fact and carry on living your life.
‘Who is your mummy?’ you ask as I remind you to hold my hand. We’re walking to the shops to buy chocolate to make a cake for your mum’s birthday.
‘Her name was Jayshree.’
‘She died,’ you remind me. ‘I have her hands now.’
You let go of my hand and hold one up. You’re wearing gloves. I stop and smile. I take a glove off and turn your hand so the back of it is face up. I trace my finger across it.
‘My mummy’s hands looked like yours. When we sat together and watched TV, she wanted to hold my hand, always. See your little finger and how it is bent ever so slightly. My mummy’s hand bent like that too. Every time I look at your hands, it reminds me of my mummy and I feel happy.’
‘Not sad?’ you ask as I put the glove back on you.
‘No,’ I tell you. ‘Not sad. Because I have you to remind me of her always. I’m sad you two will never meet, but I am happy that you make me think of her always.’
‘I’m sad,’ you say, but you’re smiling and I don’t think you know what it means.
I think back to that airless day inside the funeral parlour, crying and staring at Mum’s fingers as I accepted that she was finally gone. I wish I could go back and tell myself that it was going to be okay.
You become worried about dying. You tell me one morning that you’re going to die when you turn eighteen. Maybe to you, eighteen is how I feel about turning ninety: that’s properly old. Later, I ask what is worrying you about dying. You don’t know. You’re three. You can’t quite articulate what it is that’s bothering you.
We’re sitting in your room, getting ready for nursery. I’m trying and failing to brush your hair. You’re trying your best to not yelp in pain as I drag an unflinching brush through your curls. I look up and see the small photo of my mum that sits on your shelf.
I start to worry that the photo is the thing that’s making you obsess about dying.
You like to cycle through various members of our family. You want to know who my sibling is and how she is related to you, and why if my birth sister is fai to you, why are my cousins fais as well, and why is that different from the English side of your family, who your cousins are, who your grandparents are. You will ask me who my dad is, who my sister is, and then make the connection with who they are to you. You want to understand the hierarchies and how they manifest depending on the side of the family.
When you first asked me where my mum was, I was taken aback. I didn’t initially know how to answer you. Do I tell you the whole truth? A half-truth? A complete lie? I hate it when parents tell saccharine lies to their kids: they’re on holiday, they live on a farm far away, they’re having a long sleep. A half-truth is that she’s no longer with us. Sure, it’s true, but it doesn’t answer the question of why she’s no longer with us. The whole truth?
She’s dead. She got sick. Too sick to get better. And her body gave up. She had bad genes, bad attitude to health and exercise, bad luck. And she’s dead now. She was there and then suddenly she wasn’t, and her body and spirit stopped working. She’s not here because dead is dead. Something like that? I remember you once asking me what praying was, because two people in a book you had were doing it, and I wasn’t able to work out how to explain it without it unravelling everything: to explain prayer is to explain religion is to explain god is to explain why you might pray to a god is to explain why I don’t believe in any of it is to explain the very nature of life itself. If I can’t explain the living, how can I begin to tell you about the dead?
I chose to be honest with you. I said, ‘My mum isn’t around anymore. She’s dead.’ I paused. ‘She would have loved you very much,’ I added, almost meaninglessly.
You asked me, ‘Do you miss your mum?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel sad she is not here.’
After that, you kept asking where my mum was, and whether I felt sad. One day, you said, ‘What happens when you die?’
I told you that it meant you weren’t around anymore.
‘I don’t want to die,’ you told me.
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I worry that you are developing an existential dread when it comes to death. That’s how often you bring it up. It’s not so much about the dying, it’s about the simply not being there, the void created by your absence. It’s a lot for someone your age to take in.
A visit to an Egyptian exhibit at Bristol Museum further confuses you, because the mummies and the coffins and the death rituals that I explain to you, as we walk past coffins and sarcophagi and mummies, don’t really answer your question about where my mum was.
How do you talk to kids about death?
There are some great books that help you talk about grief and loss with your kids.
I like how Michael Rosen’s Sad Book tries to encapsulate the emotion of sadness and demystify it, make the reader feel like it is okay to feel sad, because we all do.
Really I’m sad but pretending I’m happy. I’m doing this because I think people won’t like me if I look sad. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
I know exactly how that feels. Most days, I feel like I’m wearing a mask with a hastily drawn smile on it.
Oliver Jeffers’ The Heart and the Bottle is another tear-jerker about loss and dealing with the death of a grandparent. It talks about the numbness of grief, how it dulls everything around you and inside you. In the book, Jeffers describes perfectly the dulling of your soul that comes with a big loss.
In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars . . . and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything . . .
Both of the books delicately help kids navigate the emotions around loss and bereavement. The particular issue I seem to have is, my mum’s been dead for a while. Before you were born, even. How do you functionally explain death to someone who has no emotional attachment to the dead person, because they didn’t know them? How can you grieve someone you have never known? Will she be forgotten once I’m not here? How can I instil her heritage in you? Maybe these are the wrong questions, but they’re the ones I keep circling back to. Mostly because I grieve my mother every single day and I wear my pain at her death very overtly. You, being empathetic, can sense that that picture of my mum is important to me but how can you possibly connect to someone you’ve only really experienced in abstractions like photographs and other people’s rememberances?
The conversations I have to have with you about death need to be tangible. You’re a kid. While I work out the best way to talk about it with you, you are still processing it as a concept, checking in with me about what it means.
While death is something we’ll all experience in some way, is three years old too early to be dealing with the preciousness of life?
It’s early morning. We are lying on the sofa cuddling, waking up, as we often do. It’s one of those rare days where you have woken before your sister.
I’m lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and you’re curled into the nook of my arm. Everything is still. Everything is okay. The gentle breeze from the greeting of a summer morning, welcomed in by an open back door, shifts across the hairs on my bare legs. Your big toenail, always rough and long and gnarled from where you bite it, is scratching at my thigh.
‘Daddy,’ you say sleepily, ‘I love you and I want to be with you forever.’
I make a sound to indicate acknowledgement of this way-too-early-in-the-day existential thought.
‘Me too,’ I say, croakily.
‘Even when you die,’ you say. ‘I know how you can be with each other forever, even when you die.’
I sit up. Does my daughter know necromancy?
‘How?’ I ask, smiling supportively, my eyes open, my brain whirring. Good morning, day. Let’s have you.
‘All you do is, when someone dies, you hold their hand and you can be together forever. When you die, I will hold your hand and then I will be with you forever.’
I hug you, a tear forming in my eye. You reach across my chest and place your hand on mine. I grip it tightly. I want to hold your hand forever, Ganga.
So how do you do this then? What is the secret?
There’s that old cliché, so overused it’s attributed to no one in particular. Probably some greetings card writer in the Sixties tasked with writing twenty-five empty epithets about grief before lunchtime: ‘if you try to control everything and then worry about the things you can’t control, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of frustration and misery.’
It’s sadly true. On a daily basis, an hourly one probably, Twitter users will quote-tweet Donald Trump and call him a dickhead, like that’s going to be the one post that catches, the one he sees in a sea of worship and abuse, that makes him take stock of his life and think, ‘What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing? I’m the bad guy here. I need to make some changes. Guys, impeach away, actually, you know what, I’ll step down willingly.’ When nothing changes and the world crunches on towards impending doom, and we watch another clipped two-minute inspirational speech by Greta Thunberg, and we continue on with our lives, watching television, double-screening with our phones, passing time, worrying, thinking the world is shit, action becomes a quote-tweet c-word. It becomes a release that’s as cathartic as screaming at the top of your voice into an empty plastic bottle. The muted noise dissipates, the lungs get a full work-out, but nothing changes, no one notices, the world moves on.
I think a lot about what I can control. If anything, it’s what my mum was good at. Finding solutions with what we had. Our house was the original life-hack catalogue of solutions. The shower was broken so we ran a hose from the tap into the bath. We all knew the right angles to press on the remote control buttons to change channels. The volume button was broken so we had a rota system for volume change. None of the butter, yoghurt or ice cream tubs in our fridge and freezer had butter, yoghurt or ice cream in them. They were all bulk batch leftovers of rice, dhal, shaak. The curtain pulley was decorative. On every curtain in the house.
Everything was torn, broken or had multiple uses. Once, when a German foreign exchange student came to stay, he noted, with arched eyebrows, my special hacks for how to use the shower, how to close the curtains, what was actually in the yoghurt tub (though, this is a desi thing, because yoghurt tubs are actually for carrot pickle). A week later, a school friend told me that he had been cussing me to said school friend and his own German exchange student.
‘Everything in that house is broken. Nothing works.’
But we made do. And because we made do, we appreciated what we had and what came into our possession. Like, when my twin cousins gave me hand-me-downs. I had two of everything because they were made to dress exactly the same growing up. One size was always bigger because your Bahul mama is bigger than your Mayur mama.
I’m not saying that the way to raise a brown baby is to make do. To make do with broken things and unspoken relationships and yoghurt tubs filled with dhal. I guess so much of our contentment as a family growing up was a sense of solidarity over the broken things in our house, and the routines that meant my mum and your dada were hardly home and when they were they were too tired to talk. We were all in this together. United as a family with a common goal: get by, get through. That sense of control made us happy. And so often, when I’m feeling anxious or untethered, I try to think about what is within my control and what isn’t. So, brown baby, I can’t control institutional racism, but I can control what’s happening on our streets and in our home. For the most part. I can control my reaction. I can control how I deal with it. I can’t control climate change, but I can control my small corner of the world and its own carbon footprint. I can’t control systemic patriarchy but I can control who I am as a man in a patriarchal society and how that can impact on others.
You need to think about what you can control. How you put good into the world.
The way to put good into the world isn’t to call one of the biggest leaders in the world a dickhead on social media. Don’t waste your limited energy.
&nb
sp; Yes, I’m about to do my motivational speech.
Don’t waste your limited energy on elements you can’t control, like people on the internet.
Start with yourself. How am I doing? What am I doing? What can I control? Where do I have power and control and influence? Who do I want to be? Where’s my head? What help do I need? Who do I need to help? Once you’re working on yourself, you can work on your home. Where am I? What and who is around me? Is my living situation healthy? Then when that feels like it’s in motion, you think about your street. You can start to do good there. Is this the street I want to live on? What can I do to make life easier for me and my neighbours? What can we all do? How do we get to know one another? How do we find that common ground? Because Brexit voter or not, party dickhead or not, curtain twitcher or not, we all want the street we live on to be a safe and pleasant place to come home to. And we won’t always be living on the same street as our confirmation bias echo chamber. We may follow people online who reinforce our worldview and thus never stray outside of the comfort of opinions we’re already largely on board with. But that isn’t the world. So now you live on a street where all the residents, irrespective of their personal beliefs, have a common purpose. Now’s the time to look at your city, town, village. Now’s the time to petition the council or run for office or do that grassroots petition. And then the country and then the world and then you can quote-tweet whoever is your generation’s Trump (hopefully not Donald Trump Junior) and call him a cunt.
Obviously, this is a super simplistic way to think about putting good in the world and obviously each of these segments overlaps but that’s what those incomprehensible Gantt charts were invented for. You have to work on you before you can take on the world. You have to think about your street before you can tackle your city.
Gandhi may have wanted us to be the change we wanted to see in the world but the problem there is the piousness of his position. We are works in progress. And sure, when you watch the news, you may think, why am I so angry about Virgin media failing to fix my wi-fi when people in x, y and z have this civil war and this famine and this riot and this dictator. What kind of selfish prick am I? I know, I’ll call Trump a prick on Twitter. That’ll make me feel better.
Brown Baby Page 19
