Mother Sometimes I look at the regrets of my mother trailing along the corners of her eyes As she wonders about her place in the world too often There is no secret to motherhood, I suppose Just a constant feeling of doing it wrong My father consoles her, calls her beloved A sincere way of reminding her of their own vows Yet when she wakes up at night, feeling the clutches of past on her throat, she simply lets him sleep without saying a single word I believe it is when a relationship turns into partnership as time moves along the edges of their bodies, Sometimes becoming a game, as they team up together, shake hands, pat each other's back, constantly reminding themselves about the love that blossomed years ago This is how I see my mother, constantly juggling between motherhood and being a wife On most of the days, this is all she can offer Yesterday when I read about the case where God was being sued for damaging a man's house, he won it because God couldn't/wouldn't show up in courtroom I want to do that too, Charge him with the felony of breaking my mother's hope too soon Have that kind of justice which nobody speaks about But it is when I remind myself that faith has no witnesses, and the act of dreaming is still not covered in the law books or what punishment will suffice when they are chased off, like cats when entering the house My mother seldom prays and when she does, it is the symptom of her surfacing anxiety Every gurbaani I know is because some days my mother can't remember the difference between faith and repentance She has shed more tears for what she didn't do and no God has ever tried to tell her otherwise But then I remind myself this is how prayers work, To fold hands means begging in some cultures Last night I dreamt of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly I could see its little face with dove eyes and tentacles like my mother's embracing arms Everything reminds me of her But mostly this poking need to fly away I see her angry and I see her calm On the days when she doesn't make a noise, I see her being both And now when I am old enough to notice that mothers too wake up with sweat on their foreheads, racing heart or dizzy head It becomes difficult to see her as just a mother and not a grieving woman in her forties, who once dreamt of travelling or buying sarees, have jewels or sit in Ferris wheels I sometimes forget that mothers too carry their mothers' longing, or a young girl's little wish for freedom Sometimes she tells me about the time when I was born, her first child The mistakes she did, all the awkward ways she held me in her arms, The stories she told to put me to sleep Or the secrets she confessed when I couldn't comprehend confession from noise But time has grown over her body like vines She wobbles sometimes, cries like a little child Says words she doesn't mean, Gets sad over a poem I write Stops midway and asks me what claustrophobic means Sometimes I offer her my lap to sleep on And other days, frustration takes over her as she looks at me But I suppose this is how motherhood works You bring a child into this world And spend the rest of your life convincing yourself that you did the right thing ** Lessons on cooking Sometimes we grow up to be women first then daughters Our hands still young from the nostalgic childhood, And heart ripe enough to be broken, Our grandmothers constantly warn us of the homes waiting for us, Their kitchens empty, like forlorn lovers, waiting to be touched by the hands of a new bride Our rage buried under the layers of skin, The first lesson we learn is to be silent. Mothers talk to us in language of past Their wishes never excavated, they become the living fossils of rushed growth Perhaps this is why when my mother tells me how much turmeric is good enough to add colour to the food, She pauses for a while Her countenance, a snapshot of fine lines of wrinkled time, folds itself into the size of her red bindi I believe this is how we mimic our mothers Layer by layer, Unravelling our own skin, forming bridges between hearts of each other. There is always a tussle between all that a daughter could be and what she has to become eventually And our mothers know it so well They start conversing through sacrifices. My mother and me never talk about how we really feel But when we do find a chance, We rather reminisce how weather reminds us that rain once meant freedom and not this urgency to take the clothes off the clothesline and rush inside home My mother sometimes resent how I do not take seriously, this art of cooking food Says, one day, the house will fall upon my shoulders like lightning striking at a tall tree that doesn't bend too much in storm And I laugh I say, "mother you aren't going anywhere" She neither agrees nor refutes I fear she must have imagined a thousand times how to run away from this home The thing about mothers is they never learn to say that they can choose themselves too without adding the "but's " Some days, I tell her all the useless facts about the world How the dust on the windshield of our old santro is nothing but dead stars' remnants Or if we look at our thumb, millions of neutrinos strike it at a given second I tell her about gravitational waves and the bend in our space And that the universe smells like gunpowder or burnt almond cookies To which she casually replies," perhaps it is the only way God learns to devour things he love; by burning them around the edges a little too much; it gives them a nice crunch, a proof of how when things end, they leave behind a sound" She then reminds me how yesterday when I forgot to turn the gas off while boiling the milk, The smell of burnt milk resided in the hand towels and the utensils She laughs saying our home was universe too, we were closer to god than today, And then scolds me for not watching it, Tells me that the only way to cook good food is to let it simmer slowly, add salt only when the onion turns brown and gives away a shriek when water is added As she consoles me that it is by practice that I will learn to know the difference between burning and cooking, She whispers while gazing at the television behind that the only way we women have forgiven the world is by not setting the kitchens on fire. ** Untitled I have never been to a city alone Or travelled in a bus without worrying if I will be able to shout at the driver to stop the bus when my destination arrives I wasn't supposed to grow like this Wondering all the time about the ways I could leave this earth behind without causing too much damage Which seriously is a way to evade trigger warning in my poem The irony of living with this idea of dying young is that When you say a simple sentence like "mother I will comb my hair tomorrow " She mistakes it with "Maa you won't see me ever again" Which, I believe, is still scarier than the thought of death itself I have begun to accept that for people like me, Youth is a makeup palette kept in some drawer and forgetting it afterwards Or even if one remembers its exact location, they still suffer from the idea of choosing a colour to put on their face Shimmer or matte Black eyeshadow or green This is just another way of reminding oneself that sometimes it's not a therapist's advice that saves someone but the "Charlotte Tilbury Matte Revolution Lipstick in Pillow Talk" A good reminder that revolution and lipstick do occur together I wasn't supposed to grow like this To believe that happiness is a by-product of success, stems from the homes of children who once dreamt big and failed I think as much as we ruin the place we grow up in, It ruins us the same. Today when I have grown like a wounded child, Or perhaps like a parrot with bruised wings Or an afraid cub I think, it is still feral This need for happiness There are days when I cry on seeing a hungry cat eat its food Almost entranced by how even an animal knows about navigating its way through the world which doesn't feed enough And then I look at myself, searching for "does antidepressants cause extreme hunger" Trying to find ways to stop eating every other hour But there is no other way to fill this void than to keep my mouth full to compensate for a needy heart It has taught me more about silence The ways it answers back when father asks what plans do I have for life Because truth be told, sometimes life doesn't come with a milestone And even though father denies to accept it, he knows that we are as lost as before Silence moulds the sharp edges of my words Yet my father hurts still the same When my sister calls me to ask," where did you keep your eyeshadow palette?" I say," it's here only, in the drawer next to me" But what she doesn't ask is if I have tried to create smoky eyes with it She always knows what questions to pass This is how we have learnt to converse And on the days when nothing works We choose Charmacy Milano Star Bomb shimmer and apply it over our hooded eyes She believes it's better to mimic light sometimes I think this is how we have learnt to survive By cramming the names of our favourite eyeshadows I think it's funny, This pressure to be a person always Sometimes I am merely an overfilled water mug Spilling too much And revelling in my own mess I believe this is the first lesson in learning makeup too You see, it takes a little highlighter to get a glass skin Perhaps this is how we tell the world that we too are brittle around the edges That our fragile hearts will do anything to be whole...
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Bharti is a 24 year old student from India. Her works have been published in magazines like Aaduna, oc87recoverydiaries.org, the sunflowers collective, two drops of ink, Livewire India, Feminism in India and is forthcoming in the anthology, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry. She lives in a small village surrounded by mountains and finds solace in poetry and stars.
