Mother, Mortality, and Mourning
Congenital
after Forough Farrokhzad
I was born with
A poet’s heart.
It was cold and hard
And remembered
Everything.
Lord, please
Forgive me.
I gave up
My mother
For a poem.
*****
Under the bright hospital lights, I see her face more clearly. I see her body. The site of her pain and pleasure. The site of her living. Which was, once upon a time, the site of my living, and which has now been wrecked and riven by the ravages of time. Her back aches, her chest feels heavy, she believes the bones in her knees are slowly dissolving away into her bloodstream. It’s my mother’s body, at fifty-six-years-old, staggering towards death while her skin is still shining from all the lotion and talcum powder and tubes of fairness cream.
As I watch her disappear into the MRI scanner, I am reminded of a quote I had once read in a book on the aesthetics of ruins: A ruin can be beautiful even if it is not functional.
*****
Her body always hurts her, she says. It confines her. She is conscious at all times of being in her body; she is straitjacketed in her body.
The limits of her body determine the limits of her life.
*****
I don’t know her mind, but I have known her body intimately. The biopsy; the blood reports; the X-rays of her damaged lungs; the activity of her weak heart externalized on a pink graph paper; I am acquainted with this inner drama of life and death that constitutes much of her existence now. When she falls sick—which is often—I cook for her. I clean for her. I accompany her to the hospital where, in a well-lit, air-conditioned room, surrounded by a coterie of doctors and nurses, she is fed a long, thin tube through which a bit of her pulmonary nodules is sliced and stored and sent to Delhi for a thorough examination. At the pharmacy, I buy brightly coloured capsules for her pneumonia and heart-shaped pills for her blood pressure and mint-flavoured Ayurvedic pills I sometimes borrow to remedy my own indigestion. On Sundays, I wash her urine-stained sarees that have been left soaking for days in the bucket. I wipe the bathroom floor with phenol to banish the smell of her vomit and I scrub the toilet pan with tufts of coconut husk to remove the stain of blood and then clean my hands with a compressed lump of Lifebuoy soap that produces little foam no matter how hard I rub it on my skin. Once I drop at the nearest diagnostics centre a matchbox containing her stool sample and collect the reports after a couple of days.
I hope this is enough for her. For me. For my idea of myself. I hope that, by forcing myself to tend to her needs, by putting my body in the service of her body, by carrying out what is asked or demanded of me, I am being useful to her, I am being more than just myself.
*****
Sometimes I am reminded of a quote of uncertain origins: Love is a form of conduct and not a condition of the mind.
Love—I don’t know if I can bring myself to own that word. I don’t know if what I do for her is out of love or a sense of duty. I don’t know if there is any word in Odia or Hindi or English that might explain what hangs in the space between us.
The limits of my language determine the limits of my life.
******
What changed or why, I don’t know. I can’t ascertain whether it was my mother’s cruelty or my idea of what entails living a life of the mind that put a distance between my mother and me. There is no one incident that might bring clarity to my life, that might define my relationship with my mother—and thereby the rest of the world—in simple and unambiguous and irreproachable terms. What I know is that things weren’t always like this; I wasn’t always like this. There are albums in a small drawer containing old photographs that can attest to this fact, though they are from a long time ago. Before I was a poet. Before I had a “self”. Before I had a mind or even memories. In one of these photographs, my mother and I are standing in front of a temple, a stream moving by us. I must have been three or four; I don’t remember. I am inconsolable, water running down from my eyes and nose and mouth. She is holding me in her arms, and my hands are belted around her body. I don’t know why, but these days I am always apprehensive of looking at this photograph, as if it contains the contents of a crime I am guilty of committing, as if I don’t want the world to find out about it even after I am gone from the face of the earth. I don’t know if I am more embarrassed by who I am today—cold, distant, analytical—or if I am more embarrassed by who I once was—a boy who loved his mother.
*******
To agonize over words. To walk the tightrope of language and logic. Is this the temperament of a son or that of a writer? Is this what Czeslaw Milosz meant when he said: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished? How can I separate form from matter? Ethics from aesthetics? Art from its less noble origins? How can I separate grief from love, own one without having owned the other? By writing about her, am I trying to write my way back to her? By imagining her dead while she is still alive, by cremating her again and again on the page, am I preparing myself to grieve her or give her up? Did something die or change within me the first time I imagined the death of my mother? Does this further prove that I don’t know how to be in real life, that I can work out the matters of life and death only in the realm of ideas, hope to sublimate this studied detachment from everything and everyone by writing from that very perspective and extolling it as an indispensable part of my artistic temperament? Am I to be held accountable for reducing my mother’s life to a puzzle, a problem, a mere thought experiment to serve my own intellect? Am I not a writer? Isn’t that what a writer is supposed to do anyway? Isn’t a writer also a patient, a sick man, a man suffering from great pains and passions, trying to describe the symptoms of his malaise as accurately as he can, hoping to be believed and understood by someone, even though he might secretly enjoy luxuriating in the symptoms, even though he might never wish to be cured of it? For what is he, when he is not in pain? What shall be left for him—left of him—if he is robbed of his pain?
I think: I am in pain, therefore I am.
Does my mother think the same?
Does that make her a simple woman with simple thoughts in her head?
I wonder why we are quick to ascribe to our mothers feelings but not thoughts.
*****
I am in pain, therefore I am.
A nice philosophical statement, but what does it really mean? What does it say about me if I am never more than my suffering? What does it say about the quality of my suffering if I have overestimated it, if, contrary to what I had once sincerely believed, my suffering has at least up until this point not been unbearable? What if I am not persevering but perseverating: labouring under the illusion of my pains and passions even after the cessation of the original stimuli because of my inability to forgo my idea of myself? How can I give credence to what I see when everything I see—including my own suffering—passes through my suffering like the cataract in my eyes? How can I claim to have known my mother’s suffering when I am not even infallible about my beliefs regarding my own suffering I have formed based on feeling it and thinking about it deeply for years?
Perhaps this is how we move forward in life: seduced by a mirage of meaning.
*****
Time passes.
Her condition worsens.
An ultrasound report of the lower abdomen reveals “multiple calculi in the lumen of gallbladder, the largest two measuring 18 mm and 20 mm.”
Laparoscopy, the doctor tells us the name of the procedure. A routine surgery—his words—in which general anaesthesia is administered to the body and four small incisions are made in the belly so that the gallbladder can be removed using the laparoscope and other instruments. To explain further, he shows us on his phone images from a successful surgery: a woman in a sky-blue gown lying on the operating table; a dissection of the cystic artery; and a pear-sized gallbladder and a few coarse stones collected in a stainless-steel bowl that is stained with blood.
I examine the images while my mother just sighs. It’s as if she is too tired to speak, too tired to endure this bureaucracy of living and dying.
Outside, we wait for the autorickshaw. To distract myself, I take out my phone and open twitter. I fall through the swamp of national and international news until I come upon a video from a small town in Uttar Pradesh that has gone viral in recent weeks. A woman in a burqa is mourning her son who has been lynched to death by a mob of Hindu supremacists. She is holding tightly his shrouded corpse while a few members of her family are trying to wrest it away from her. I have seen this before: a mother responding to the death of her child in the most primitive and graceless of ways. Shouting. Wailing. Flailing her arms. Beating her chest. Passing in and out of consciousness. It’s as if her body is only a medium through which grief is manifesting itself like a sickness. Notwithstanding the political nature of her loss, I have always taken that somatic experience as the truest expression of grief, far more profound than the words of any great poet. It’s the kind of experience in which the “self” is transparent, so that there is no distance between one's appearance and one's reality. An experience you can’t not give credence to, that is real, total, and seemingly impervious to the subjectivity of the subject experiencing it. An experience in which people are behaving in an ethically bona fide manner in which I am incapable of behaving myself.
Is it okay to borrow someone’s death for your own purpose? To search for your own humanity in the tragic spectacle of others?
*******
Still, at night, after my mother has gone to bed, I return to the desk. To the page. The only place where I can make sense of the world, where I can bear things into my Weltanschauung. If writing involves cruelty—and it does, to some degree—it can also be an act of great care, I believe, born out of attentiveness, a desire to notice and remember, to not let things fall through the sieve of time or memory, to rescue them from the violence of erasure. Whether it is the sunset, an old colonial building, the rot of the world or a human body, or even the color of your mother’s urine or stool sample. The dead belong to poets and politicians, I remember reading on the internet. My mother might die before me, and I might live to write about it, her life, her death, my trying to figure out how to mourn in the event of her death, as I am doing now, the pages of my notebook littered with words written in the shape of a poem that grows heavier with meaning as I read it loudly in my mind.
The Politics of Elegy
These days, I’m thinking of death.
When I water the Chrysanthemums in the garden, or look at the stars in the night, or find myself unclogging the kitchen sink with one of my mother’s knitting needles that haven’t been used in decades, I am thinking about the relations between death and beauty.
Refaat Alareer wrote: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story…”
Can my mother’s pain be my story, her death be my story?
Can I walk from theory to experience, from reason to emotion, know that I am not merely carried by a raft of words but changed by them on a molecular level?
When my mother dies,
I want to live.
I want to bask in the light of her death.
I want her death to make something of me without my making something of her death.
In other words, I want to feel deeply without wanting to feel deeply (for the sake of art).
A female primate grieves by carrying the corpse of her child for weeks and sometimes even hitting it with a stick, I once read in a book titled Every Creature Has A Story.
When I read that, I thought: Grief is primal.
I thought: Grief need not be subjected to form and beauty.
When my mother dies, I don’t want to embody it or stash it in a poem.
I don’t want to powder my soul with sadness to look deep and wounded and beautiful and I don’t want to spend hours worrying if I should aestheticize or de-aestheticize my suffering to maintain that fine balance between beauty and believability.
Like sugar in a cup of tea, I just want to be dissolved in my grief.
NOTES
The quote by Forough Farrokhzad: “The god who gave me a poet’s heart will know how to forgive me.”
The quote “Love is a form of conduct and not a condition of the mind” is taken from the internet.
Every Creature Has A Story is a non-fiction book by Indian author, Janaki Lenin.
