}} My mother is writing a memoir by Nabina Das |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










My mother is writing a memoir by Nabina Das

My mother is writing a memoir. She has a ruled copy book and a ball point pen she neatly keeps on her bedside table. The table is crowded with vitamins, a green Boroline tube, eyedrops, Ponds sandal talcum, Dabur coconut oil, a flower-patterned hanky, a little notebook with phone numbers and addresses handwritten, and as a sequel to the latter, a tiny black un-smartphone that only has numbers and names and no fancy apps or games. The memoir starts at the gate of her memory. The gate had shut a couple years ago in a hospital room. The room was eggshell white perhaps. I wasn’t there. She was delirious when the doctor left. She spoke of getting off of the patient’s bed and walking away at midnight. Perhaps that’s what all women want. To get up and leave at midnight for the love of darkness and stars. For the flutter of koel wings getting ready to sing with the first ray. And for the love of unknownness of the dragonfly’s flight in moonlight. Women like my mother and I will get away at midnight for finding love. Like million other women. I tell her, let that memory-gate be the stamp of time. From where to take imprints and footfalls. Then my mother walks backwards to her childhood through that gate. To her playmate river Surma. A playmate who wore kajal in the monsoons, sand bangles in summer, and saras crane feathers in winter.

She waded deep into the river
deeper in further
where the heart was a splinter.

My mother is writing a memoir. About her parents, apparently good people. About her own children, men and women of her husband’s family, and her pets and companion trees. What about those uncles of yours, I butt in. Those strange alpha males (tinged by emotions in cases of love and loss) who would fight others with sticks and swords. And would run away when a body fell. Mother is pensive. She doesn’t think the uncles were murderers. But social hybrids are like this, she says. They fight, love, fall and escape from all things temporal. But will you write, I ask. She says no as though milk had curdled somewhere in front of her. Something of the minute tilting, seconds pouring, tilting further. She writes about me too. I’m a fairy with a dragon’s tongue, I say. She smirks at that. Memoirs are about virtues, she repeats. Virtues are seedless fruits, you know? She knows. Seeds are descendants of our moral turpitude. Where do they go? How far do they travel? Questions are endless, says mother. She simply advises me to eat the fruits.

Eat them fresh buri-ma
fruits will become your flesh
eat them all Nina-ma.

Next to her bed a carton full of old books, magazines, and knick knacks from her earlier apartment. She hasn’t been able to open up the box since she moved. There’s her tiny suitcase on the box containing the saris she hasn’t yet given away. Saris she wants me to take and wear. Saris that say woman, that say seasons, that say love me. There’s one with a crimson border. Will she write about the saris too in her memoir, I wonder. The crimson border makes me think of another woman. Will you write about Ieit, I ask. Who’s Ieit, she asks. Our Khasi aunt, the wife of my eldest paternal uncle. The uncle with a filthy bad temper, crazy scholarship, and dysfunctional family life. I tell her that I remember seeing Ieit’s photograph in jethu’s house. A black and white framed photo where the aunt wears a crimson-bordered sari and a red round bindi. My mother cannot remember the photo. First, you don’t talk about your eldest uncle like that even if that’s how the whole family has been, I’m rapped mildly. And are you sure it was your Khasi aunt in the photograph? Single photo, no jethu? Mother is doubtful. She has seen the aunt only twice, most probably in a jainsem. How did I even know her name: Ieit. Didn’t they call her by another ‘normal’ name? She was made to look and sound normal, I say. Button rose, naphthalene balls in folded laundry, pillows embroidered with ‘wife’s virtue lies in her husband’s virtue’, old cloth strips folded thick for menstrual pads, Thursday Lokkhi panchali, brass prayer bells — all normal items stitched on to aunt’s life. Her real life was a cobwebbed photograph for the rest of us. What I saw was a cobwebbed film on the red bindi-ed forehead and the red border of that long fabric starched with rice water. Ieit stayed framed.

All of the dead that remained
was sounds. how they were named,
their stories tamed.

My mother is writing a memoir. She can dance but she hasn’t mentioned it yet. I remind her we had danced together one Magh Bihu evening. Dew had collected on our heads. Dew is like a woman’s speech. Comes stealthily, loves till the morning shines. We danced and my father watched and the bonfire crackled in laughter. Women had stopped dancing in those years. It was night for the others, but for us light everywhere.

Night just short of midnight
starfish in the sky
swimming bright.

What about your lovers, I get curious. My mother picks up the Boroline and squeezes the pasty whiteness on to her palm. Dry summer has caused the skin to itch, old allergies to resurface. Lovers are a never-ending manuscript. Now she lets off a glint in her eyes.

Casting a dice she smiles —
the jeweled specter
of cooked rice.

Write about Ieit, ma, I nudge gently. Write about her. And the landlord uncles who killed a peasant. Maybe that’s why you got married to a peasant-thug-turned-genteel family. She balks at that karma-talk but remains calm and shining like clarified butter and floats above my insinuations. In between sipping from a carton of cranberry juice, sifting through an old hand bag with useless scraps of receipts, arranging safety pins in a box, rubbing a lip balm for her discoloration, my mother is writing a memoir. What is the meaning of I-e-i-t, she asks after a brief pause. It means love, Ma, I tell her. I’m writing. It will be about good people and love, she says.

And she is lit.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Nabina Das is a poet and writer based in Hyderabad. Her latest poetry collection SANSKARNAMA (2017) is a critically acclaimed book. She has published two other poetry volumes — Into the Migrant City and Blue Vessel. Her fiction books are The House of Twining Roses — Stories of the Mapped and the Unmapped (short fiction) and Footprints in the Bajra (novel). A Commonwealth Writers correspondent; a Charles Wallace, Wesleyan Writers Conference, and NYS Summer Writing Institute alumna, and a Sahapedia-UNESCO and Sangam House fellow, Nabina teaches creative writing in classrooms and workshops. An MFA from Rutgers-Camden, Nabina has happily been a doctoral dropout and incorrigible dreamer.