Memory and Mother
------------------------

One morning I asked my mother the meaning of the English word, ýLife.ý She told me it meant ýJindagi.ý Thatýs how I understood what she meant when the night before when she had cried in utmost hopelessness- hey bhagwan, are we never to have any happiness in life? She stopped pounding on the clothes that she was washing and asked me why I wanted to know. I said ý tesai. She could not hide her relief not to have to explain the grim realities. But I could tell that she knew that I was aware of everything.

My earliest memory is of the time when Sir locked me up in the bathroom because I had accepted a rupee note from one of his friends who had come to visit. He was there when his friend handed me the bill to ýbuy chocolates,ý but he waited for his friends to leave before handing me the punishment for bad manners. The time I spent locked inside may have been an eternity. The loneliness and guilt welled up my eyes and as I looked in the mirror, hot teardrops fell down my cheeks. Like Mother I had learned from early age to cry quietly, silently so that only I could hear the bawling noisy sorrows that erupted inside me.

Mother used to say that he was a saint when not drunk. The only time she was happy was when he was away. He traveled frequently for his job. There were two times when he went away for extended periods- two years in England and two in Delhi. He wrote all these letters about how he had quit drinking. But when he returned he was not a saint.

Mother and I we called him ýSir.ý Right after she was married to him, they lived in a government quarters of his work where the peons called him ýSirý so in jest she had picked it up. And I learned from her. When he was in England he wrote to her. He addressed her: My Nuisance. I have her diary where she copied her letters to him. She began her letters- Dear Sir. And ended them ý Your Nuisance.

Mother had this fascination with arts, music and literature and knowledge. She never threw away old books. I had my books from kindergarten for a long time. She was a teacher of English for a long time and later worked as a librarian. She would come behind me while I was reading my lessons and would be amazed to find out that a certain flower was called ýChrysanthemumý in English. She helped me pronounce it and said, ýEven I did not know that.ý She taught me never to disrespect books- ýnever soil or tear the books,ý she said. She would put a cassette on the tape recorded and just record whatever I said in my child-speak. Most of those tapes were lost and I never got to listen to them when I grew older. There was one surviving tape: I hear myself describing how I would grow up to be a night-bus driver. Mother breaks into her innocent laughter and then Sir scolds me in his drunken garble that I should be an engineer like himself not the lowly driver. And he shouts at her ýYouýve ruined him.ý I burned the tape in rage. I do miss the sound of her laughter.

I have never been able to sleep. When young I pretended to fall asleep as soon as I heard the door slam and he returned home at night. I closed my eyes as hard as I could but I really did not was to fall asleep. My childish sense of responsibility would not let me leave Mother alone lest he harm her. I fantasized about growing big, tall and strong like Tipu Sultan and fight Sir if he laid his hands on her. I heard the shouting, his drunken demand for sex in the filthiest words, her sobbing and sometimes him hitting her. I did not have to be asleep for nightmares. She tried to hide it from family and friends but he was a shameless one-man road show. One morning some of Motherýs friends came to ask her to join them to a visit to a temple. She lied that she had much things to do. But the blue spot above her eyes was screaming the truth. When I was older, about 8 or 10 years, she would send me to the neighbors to call for help when he was uncontrollable. They came and their children, my friends tagged along with them, to watch the spectacle.

Sir once went to Motherýs office and fought with the security guard who did not let him in as he was too drunk. The whole office must have found out about it. I wonder how she faced her co-workers, how humiliating and degrading it must have been.

During monsoon he would come home late at night, his clothes filthy with mud and slime. One afternoon from the window of my class in school I saw him slumber inside the school gate, with his soiled, muddy pants and jackets, on drunken, unsure foot going into the business office. I was on my seventh grade. If it had been the lunch or break times the whole school would have seen him that way. I just wished he were dead right then as I had done many times before.

Mother tried every remedy. In her hopelessness she was went to a dhami/jhakri who gave her a bottle of alcohol that he said was ýprayed uponý which should really help Sir. Sir did drink that and got merry-drunk. My family held pujas and saptahas on his name to cure him with divine intervention.

Mother sometimes sang to me and my sister before bed. In the dark her low voice rang peacefully. She did not sing lullabies but songs from old Hindi movies. Her favorite one was: aage bhi jane na tu, pichhe bhi jane na tu, job hi haiý, bas yehi paal haiý

Sir had gone to Russia for his engineering right after his ISc. That was where he found Vodka. He never went back to Russia in the eighteen years since he returned. We had stacks of engineering books in Russian and numerous slides of his projects and travels. One night as he fell to an inebriated stupor, he blubbered something about a Russian woman named Oxana. That was the one and only time he mentioned that. Mother was in the kitchen so I donýt think that she heard. But the next day I ransacked through all his papers and books. I squinted at all the slides for a hint. No mention of any woman. There was one slide of a group of students. He was standing in the side with a shy smile, his head then full of hair. There were some girls on the picture but he looked too young, too shy, too out of place to have had a relationship with any of them. But I never trusted him so I never found out.

(.....contd)

(......contd)

Even when he was not drunk he was too short, too impatient with me. I remember him helping me with some mathematics sums and he could not stop shouting at me for the slightest delay. For the entire time I did not focus on what I was doing. I just was bracing for when he might lurch forward and hit me. I never took my homework to him again. Because he was either at work during the day or drunk at night I rarely had any conversation with him. Most of my talks to him were one word like yes or no.

Once when I was about twelve he dragged me from the playground in front of our house where I was playing with my friends. Once inside he lurched at me. With all my might I pushed him back and he fell on the floor. That night I ran away from home. As I rode the bus to my unclesý I sat at the window seat looking out at the darkening night and worried if he would pour his wrath on Mother. When I returned after three days she made me promise never to do it again. You do not run away from problems, she said.

When Mother was in a hospital in Bombay Sir was there. Some of my uncles were also there helping out. They said that he took good care of her during her illness. I never saw that. When she died I was fourteen and for a month or so he remained sober. He came home in time, cooked food and did the chores. If the talk of his good care had softened me a bit, I never resented him more than during that month. Firstly, because I blamed him for her death and more importantly what he did upon her illness and death, he never did during her life.

Growing up without Mother was lonely. When I went to my friends houses I saw their mothers and a strange jolt of emptiness came upon me. I could not talk about her or all these things to anybody. Never. I did not even say the word ýmotherý or think about her- that was too painfulýI had missed out on her friendship, guidance and love. I read about oysý mamu in his memory lane and it just makes me feelýI called her ýmamuý too. Thanks for sharing oysýit would have been exactly the way you described. I finally saw her in a dream for the first time last year. Actually that was a hallucination.

After about a month Sir went back to drunkenness. There was no question he was profoundly sorrowful- one only realizes the worth of a friend when she is lost forever. He was a wreck more than ever. I had grown so bitter that every time he said a word I would start a fight with him. He started sleeping with a khukuri under his pillow and he turned Motherýs picture face down on the bed-stand. He blabbered about how her memories were haunting him. There was an old lady in our neighborhood whom we all called Grandma ý she was also a far-off relative. One day he went to her dead-drunk and told her that Mother was calling him and he would soon leave. And he did in two months, exactly three months after Motherýs death. As I lit the funeral pyre on the banks of Bagmati I could see his bearded face eerily calm as he lay on the firewood platform. Tradition demanded numerous rituals but I donýt remember any details other than the sense of immense freedom I felt when the fire finally cracked his skull. People say ýforget and forgiveý and I am not a hateful person but I will just be happy with forgetting.

-------
dyam...mG.

Greatly poured out your heart. Until the end thought it was an imaginary story, I guess not. Very touchy.....

A mother's love:

nice writing mG. that was deep and beautiful.

nice pic, thaag!

mG.
If it is not a fiction, I feel for you. I've gone through some of the experiences you went through. I know how it feels to be so helpless and not be able to defend someone who you think is your only hope in life and the one you love the most.
Great writing.

Ok so, this is about something you went through for real? If so, I should say you must be bold enough to take all the hard feelings. Take it easy bro. Well narrated. Enjoyed it.



Lizard King

loved it !!


there are bloody wounds inside of us, which we want to share, but we never find a person to do so, we just look for them...MG i wish i cud write like you, so profoundly, so boldly, with understanding..maybe i will too one day ....greatt!...really touched my heart.....

Narrative at its best. Simply brilliant.. mg Keep up the good work. You have all the qualities and flair of a great writer. And, I think you have the abilities of Ernest Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, and John Steinback all wrapped up in one.

Thumbs up taste the thunder aha

Great narration. i couldnt' stop my tears.

mindgames,
Enjoyed it. Hope to read more. narration is just a tool, expression is the real deal. With a narration no matter how superb a writer can go only so far without charging the narration with emotional-does not have to be a bias one- expression.
you did well.

It was nice to go through...Truth hurts and it did...!

Dyamn bro , tht was too goood touched the heart! morover i feeel so lucky to have such a loving parents , who had sacrificed so much for me!!!!
nice one bro!!!

Mindgames, heartrending and poignant!

Many of us spend much time asking questions of "WHY?", "WHY ME?", "WHY US?" fueling the fire of hurt, betrayel and co-dependency. The "need" to forget and forgive surfaces only because that is what "a good human is supposed to do". Not true! There is no "good" or "bad" human, only humans with their human-ness.
"Sir" was as much a sufferer of your hell as you were his. To paraphrase what Khalil Gibran says: How is it possible to condemn the one with the tortured/twisted soul; he creates his own hell to burn in while burning those around him. When you understand "Sir's" human-nes you won't feel the need to "forgive" or "forget". The shackles of pain will fall away.

Just expressing my thoughts on "forgiveness"!

can anyone summerize? too long to read

understanding's another human's " human-ness" is worthless. everybody has their own defination of what "misery" is and "pain" is which no other man, than himself/herself can understand it well..yes, no one is great, the biggest mistake we can commit in this life is making ourselves great..

like SItara said, there is no good or bad human, like wise there is no "wise" or "understanding" human. We all fall when sorrow makes it way to US, and we ask questions "WHY" "WHY ME". this is our nature, a Human nature. There is no way to change that, no matter what.

dont forgive, but forget those moments, take the right path, and at last when you look back at them, make them REALIZE....

towards* US

oh damn.....if all that was true....i so feel for u deeply mG....u written in such a way that i felt some pain of wat u had to go through...it touched me to the core, n well, we appreciate for bein so brave n tellin us all here of ur terrible experiences..helps some people realise how lucky they are n appreciate their stable backgrounds..n helps others to realise that they are not alone in this world goin through bad experiences..

..what we share of ourselves helps us to move on from the past n helps release our inner demons..

Thank u either way mG, true or not.. :ox

Domi

Appreciate the fact that you posted your memory...

Forget and forgive.....

i feel so sorry that you went through a lot of pain and abuse. my heart cried as i was reading your story. i felt very fortunate to a have very loving and caring parents.

i am sure you will meet someone one day and heal your pain and sorrow. time will slowly cure and erase your dreadful memories , but you have learn to forgive . best of luck buddy.

preeti