Vidya Chathoth posted: " On sleepless nights, when I catch a glimpse of my mother's shrunken silhouette next to me, I wake up to reality. The bed is warm, and the silence of the night is broken by the rhythmic sounds of her breathing. Even as her life shrinks, she is the fir" It's all in the Mind.
On sleepless nights, when I catch a glimpse of my mother's shrunken silhouette next to me, I wake up to reality. The bed is warm, and the silence of the night is broken by the rhythmic sounds of her breathing. Even as her life shrinks, she is the first to wake up in the morning. She bustles about the house with the energy of her maternal spirit, even as her bones and muscles are wasting away. On such sleepless nights, I think about the night when her body would no longer be next to mine…when the bed would be cold, and the night engulfed by a strange silence. I think about the mornings when I would wake up to a house that longer bustles with her energy. I think about the days when I would have to wake up to a world without her.
The only way I can survive her absence, is through her imagined presence. As it is, the perception I have of her in my mind, is more vivid than her physical body. Everything we have shared and is precious, is intangible., and can be found in my mind. My mother has lived in my mind a lot more than she has lived in my life. And so, our relationship would continue to exist- in my perceptions and memories; in the books and people we talked about; in the animals and birds that we tended to, and most importantly, in the words that we used to warm up the cold reality of our lives.
I cannot recall when the quality of our relationship changed, but at some point, it did. It moved beyond the reactivity and the bickering, the cooperation and the confrontation, the nurturing and caring. It progressed to something far more intangible; something deeper that had always been there, waiting to be uncovered. Without realizing it, we stepped into new horizons of a mother-daughter relationship.
As some of the most important people receded from our lives, we held on to each other. My father died; my brother chose a life of which we were not a part. I did not miss my brother much because we had never been close; he had always been emotionally distant. My friends had always been my emotional world. When we moved to Kerala, I was separated from the friends I had always cherished by a physical distance that was eventually widened by my circumstances into a psychological distance; our lives were so different that we had nothing in common.
For the first time in life, I realized that poverty did not always have to do with wealth; there were other forms of poverty that could reduce you to a less privileged being. In Kerala, I suffered from loneliness- not the kind of loneliness that comes from the absence of people, but the kind of loneliness that comes from the absence of warmth, sincerity, affection, and kindness- the kind of loneliness that comes from the absence of people who genuinely want to understand you.
My mother and I erased the emptiness that people left behind in our lives, with the meaning we learnt to create through our interactions. It was the emptiness and loneliness that brought us closer. The more people wounded us, the more we learnt to cherish each other. We learnt to laugh at the ironies of life, and we learnt to stop pining for the things that couldn't be. We learnt to find happiness in the here and now. We learnt to find happiness in each other. We learnt to derive joy from what remained when everything that we had cherished until then, was gone. We learnt that even when much had vanished from our lives, there was enough left to derive meaning from.
We learnt that life was generous, if we chose to see what lay beneath the ordinary elements of life. We learnt to see the stars that twinkled on the darkest of nights. In Kerala, the presence of people made me lonely; I slowly learnt to love the other kind of loneliness that I feared earlier- the loneliness created by the absence of people. I filled it up with nature, books, memories, music, movies, and words. That was when I stopped feeling poor. My poverty had led me to a kind of wealth of which I had not been aware.
The most important exchange between me and my mother has been the world we created with the power and magic of words. Through words, we created an alternate reality between us- one that was uncorrupted by the struggles and sorrows that characterized our lonely lives in Kerala, or by the ever-changing emotions that we displayed on the surface. My relationship with my mother is not a transactional relationship; it embodies a truth- a philosophy of love. It amounts to a human experience- one that has enriched me and awakened me to the power and possibility of a mother-daughter relationship. This relationship awakened the humanity in me, and from this humanity, was born the writer.
If we did not have the power to distort reality, would our vulnerability survive the assaults of life? Would we endure the struggle, the pain, the fear, the loss? I have often wondered why we humans were not designed to be logical; I have the answer now. We see the world the way we want to, just so that our reality is bearable. We hold on to our beliefs, simply because they blanket a mind that would wither away if exposed to the cold reality of our lives. These beliefs keep us warm on the coldest of days.
I keep my kindness in my eyes, gently folded around my iris like a velvety, brown blanket that warms my vision. I keep my shyness in my hair tucked away into a ponytail looking for a chance to escape on a few loose strands in the air. I keep my simplicity in my soul spread over me like a clear sky reflecting all that I am and all that's ever passed me by. -Sanober Khan
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