And then there was none, is the story of my life rather like Mother Hubbard's cupboard.
I was a kid when I came across sad sack cartoons and immediately felt a bond of kinship.
I understand losing well. I identify with it. I expectantly dread it. I guess that's how I woo it.
I start by doubting myself. I think I am the direct descendant of the original doubting Thomas.
I lose at card games and board games regularly, unfailingly, with mathematical precision. Rounders in table tennis and badminton too, yet to win once. In schooldays, I could serve drop dead aces and win games for my partner but never any glory for myself. So, I was often instructed by my partner to serve and then go “stand in the box! Just leave the rest of the game to me, ok?”
It's been a long and winding road since those befuddled breathless childhood years. I am kind of winded, rushed and sort of wishing all this effort of living would wind up someplace meaningful, or just kind of wind down quietly and quickly, with some dignity.
But life is like a dosa hot and crispy near the edges and soft and delicate in the middle.
While you see your hopes burning and fading out of vision, your insides still churn with a softness. Notions perch like birds at the back of your head.
Ever seen butter sizzle in the middle of a heated pan? That's exactly how evanescent ideas in the brain vaporise before you can grasp them. The thing is you have to know what you want. I am only good at recognising what I don’t have.
I don’t have children yet. I don’t have strong feelings about motherhood either. I am like an old grandma, I think, my head twisted like an observant owl, this sun bright Chennai afternoon. In a breezy chiffon peaches-silver and saffron sari I perch, still slender at 34. Swinging idly on my sister in law’s porch, on her white cane swing. Idly ruminating.
This sister in law, younger by six years, ,married with two boys, her first child born the same year she married is devout. Both sisters in law are, but the elder one is prayerful, rosary counting and reserved. The younger one is, more, proclamatory, I suppose, in an innocent sort of way. She has done up her home with bright and garish Jesus and Mary placards...
On a wall it states in a righteous manner:
"If the Lord be with you who can be against you…and if the Lord be against you who can be for you?"
LORD is somehow capitalised in my mind. Like Lord and Master, ordaining my fate to which I am blind.
Nisi Dominus Frustra..a terse pithy epigrammatic mouthful. But it does strike dread and awe in my mind!
Far more dramatic than the English attempt to strike awe in the readers hearts.
Indeed ..Scoff not! Nothing belongs to you, that you deserve permanently.
He can take it all away. These lazy sunny afternoons, this peaceful interlude, between wifedom (almost as stately as queendom) and motherhood. Anything suffixed by hood sounds crazily shady to me by the way.
This placid sojourning on the borders of girlhood and womanhood. Hood again! When I am a mother what will I be raising ? Thugs, goondas or brothers under the hood ?
There I go! Observing, measuring, contemplating, mocking, not living life.
There is a cute plaster owl on the wall. I adore it with a strange fierce devotion. Which the Mother Mary and Joseph posters and bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus posters miss by a mile.
We, Owl and I , size up this alien place we are in, soak in the over the top ambience of piety and devoutness. Sniff the faintest whiff of conformity, and an overt aura of complacency.
I have a Hindu family with tons of garish pictures of our brave monkey God Hanuman, our Valiant Maryada Purush, (The Ideal Man), Lord Rama, The blue God Lord Krishna, and the elephant God Ganesh, Black Mother Kali and Blue throated ash smeared Lord Shiva on the walls. But no proclamation, of any supreme God, who is mightier than the rest, nor any covert or overt competition or one upmanship. So it is rather like a convention of trekkies, and superheroes, a family picnic of gods. No statutory warning about false gods, or idolatry. The more the merrier, all are welcome. In fact Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus Come would not be amiss. We are easy fodder for conversion, without strictures and warnings vis a vis apostasy, blasphemy or heresy. I like it. It is more chilled out to state it simply.
Like a soul hungry for happiness, I search for the essence of religion, both mine and theirs, (my Christian Roman Catholic in laws), as in both I spy that which has eluded me and that which I have been denied. There is a peace in their holy communion, their sense of community, charity and helpfulness towards the unfortunate. But it is confined to either within their community, or extended with attached subtle strings, of attendance to their retreats, and as a incentive towards eventual conversion. I have faced this umpteen times, so I kid you not. At parks, with Christian mothers of my sons’ schoolmates, at a tea shop once, and even at a BPO I once worked in. There is an incentive for adding new souls to the flock, it is a preached imperative duty. I wish it was not, as then we could truly integrate in harmony that is richer for the differences, and not aspire to a plastic similitude.
Done already grandma? Enough ruminating, I berate myself. I pause, bitter about my childlessness, self-imposed, from a sense of indignity at the lack of volition in this most important decision of maternity. I had wanted kids, in 1999, the year I had married and joked to my then affianced, that next year we will be shopping for onesies. He was dead serious about the impossibility of it, since his family had two sisters to marry off, then. I was hurt, and protested, I can wait for one, but both of them? The younger one is six years my junior, I will become old by then! Well here I was, I have worked in two BPOs, remained childless, rebelling against my MIL’s injunction to promptly deliver a baby, the moment this younger sister in law got hitched in 2004. “Are we still without child? Isn’t Amrita going to the hospital yet?’ This within two months of her youngest daughter’s marriage. I was no longer very interested in becoming mom, not quite thirty five but adamantine about a career that was also not successful; I suppose my naïve girlishness had hardened itself.
How soon will you learn to fly? Perched like an owl you hoot and you decry pain. Every sorrow every shame every defeat leaves you clenched but still chained. Much too fearful to gain. Yes, in my mind, lamentations sound like weird poetry, they echo in rhyme.
How soon your time will fly the cage, I recite to myself in a daze. You have pecked open the door but are afraid to test the air with your wings. Is it the owl speaking or me? The wise owl, The snow white owl, mount of Holy Mother Laxmi, Hindu goddess of prosperity, not the screech owl or eerie barn owls of Halloween and witches. My mother recalled how a beautiful snow white owl glided to our window cornice, and stayed there regarding her, on the eve of my birth. It was considered auspicious, however, I am sceptical. It only means that I am the bearer of wealth, but not wealthy.
Still afraid to tread emptiness and glide through opening space. Still afraid to walk over water
Though waters close over your head. Time to tread out, trade off cold security and freedom taste.
I am going strong, self-flagellation on, full steam, Grandma gulp some fresh air in it will not be the kiss of death. Or sit rock and swing it out, alone and angry with this pathetic childish grasp of adulthood. Be a wooden doll that adorns the walls, totter along on fattening thighs and pigeon feet. Sling out your sluggish barren belly in full frontal reverse, you hunch backed Notre dame. But know that you visited this, upon yourself and know this too:
All god ever wished for you was, “Belief in yourself.”
Nisi dominus frustra
look sadly at the placards
claiming, who can be for you
If the lord be against you,
and fail to see it the other way,
if not with the lord then
All is in vain.
But the lord is with me every day
Who can defeat me? None I say.
Pray baby pray, the lord is with you
the lord is with you, the lord is with you
I still do.
I do love children, I discovered, once both my sister in laws kids became toddlers, I especially loved four year old Jose Marshall. And I was still terrified of holding babies, when my Luke was born in 2008. I thought they might break, looking so delicate and fragile.
But the Lord, and all my gods was with me, and he grew taller than me, in 2023.
All things work together for Good as the Bible says.
© Amrita Valan 2014, originally written Jan 17 2008 revised 2014
