On The Art of Draping Your Mother’s Sari
Stand behind her as she creaks open her trunk
Notice
how her back arches,
the grunt that escapes her lips…
As she rummages through the heap of fabric,
Wait for the colours that spill out
From her hands.
These saris have always been more than she could contain.
Philomela’s fabric,
Each sari, has a tongueless tale:
A tale that was woven each time a sari was bought
and draped around your mother.
Each time a little bit more of her tongue
Was bit down on, ripped out, tied up.
Soon your mother will turn,
Saris entwining like snakes about her hands
Fabric spilling around her
Flowing out of her almost
As she holds them all up to your eyes,
The witness to her stories.
Now is the time for caution:
You are now the hero of the Myth of Er;
Now is the time to choose a tale.
Like a baby elephant that seeks out the tail of her mother,
Entwining her trunk around it,
Beginning where her mother ends.
You too must seek out the tale of your mother
That will entwine you, that you will drape around yourself.
It is a choice to trump all choices.
It is the choosing of a story, a life, a soul.
Watch
Your mother’s hands glide along the weave
The silk
The cotton
The jamdani, the baluchari,
The benarasi from her wedding night,
The dhakai from a land across the borders
Of memories,
And dreams,
And consequently,
More stories.
This dhakai, I am sure, was the tale she had chosen
When her mother had similarly burst before her in an explosion of drapes
This was her mother’s tongue, her mother-tongue, even
A tongue fought for, a tale fought with,
Memories forever fought against.
And now this tale in this tongue
Is another one of those weaves
She cannot contain.
You might be surprised,
When you too run your hand along her fabric,
To find that one is as thin as the sky
As brittle, as crumbling, as easy to tear.
One you will find is too prickly,
Starched and pressed,
Hardened as her heart —
Yet one more cloudy in its tenderness,
Worn out with use,
Softened too, as her heart.
The one your hand rests the longest on
Is yours.
Your tongue, your tale, the warp and weft
Of the story you will weave.
Do not be startled if the pleats do not sit snug on your shoulders
Or if the skin bristles where it touches the sari,
You see, that is the catch —
As you settle each fold against your stomach
And line your breasts with the border,
As your fingers gather the pleats at your navel —
Do you feel her words between your fingers?
Do you feel her tongue wagging wagging wagging
Do you feel her story
Pin itself down on your shoulders
Draw blood,
And mark its spot on your body?
Unrecognizable in front of the mirror,
You realize you have no words to describe how you look.
Shundor, your mother says.
The word means nothing to you.
Tell you what?
It has never meant anything to her,
Save, perhaps, the prick of a story-holding safety pin on her shoulder,
Drawing blood,
Making its mark upon her body.
Unrecognizable in front of the mirror
You realize, startled,
The words of your mother tongue cannot describe this woman
In her mother’s sari,
Or the ghost hovering behind her,
In the sari, yet, of her mother,
And that there is no tongue that can wag enough
To compass the magnanimity of this tale
Right now
In front of the mirror.
Only the tail of the sari flutters,
Wags,
Its own tongue, telling its own tale.
You realize (oh what realizations with the draping of this sari)
Your mother-tongue was never your mother’s.
At this moment, your hands flutter.
Like the trunk of the baby elephant seeking out its mother’s tail,
You seek out too the umbilical cord
The cord of all cords that is your mother’s tongue,
And grab hold of the tail of the sari.
At this moment, you return
Down the tongues of your mother and hers
And hers
And hers
And you wrap the tale of the sari
Around yourself
And your mother returns,
Her story a body
Her body a daughter
Her daughter her mother
And you are become a woman.
***
I Remember I Remember the House Where I was Born, said Thomas Hood
Recently, my house has acquired a smell.
A smell that has penetrated its walls, termite-like, gnawing at the mortar,
Rotting the bricks.
It is not easy to place my finger on it.
It comes and it goes, never lingering in one place for too long,
Never taking root.
Everytime it leaves me behind,
I linger where it had been.
Too long I spend standing in its wake;
I long to meet it again.
I met it today as I entered the kitchen, and reached out for the coffee.
It was not where I have always found it — straight ahead, on the safe-top, third jar to the left.
As my hand hovered vaguely mid-air,
I met it.
It was gone in the second it took me to drop my hand,
But it had been there.
I am sure of it.
The smell, you see, is so elusive,
I don’t know what it smells of.
It smells of paint, I would like to say,
Like fresh houses do,
Newly constructed.
Or newly glossed over, at least
New paint covering childhood doodles
That a toddler had mischievously left on the walls.
The smell, you see, is so illusive,
I don’t know what it smells of.
It’s more like termites, maybe –
Like raindrops that seep into walls
Damp
Cold
Like a blotch of moisture spreading out from behind photo-frames,
Washing and bleaching the faces on the walls,
Reminding me of the monsoons.
The smell, you see, —
Can you?
I drop my hand at the kitchen shelf, clutching air.
I think I have been dropping things for as long as I can remember —
Butterfingers, I have always been a loser of things.
Lost at my kitchen shelf,
I meet that smell.
Paint-like, termite-like, damp-like.
Lost, I flit around, turning my head this way and that,
Looking for the jar of coffee
My mother wanted to drink.
“You know where it is, love?”
“Of course I know where it is, maa.
This is my house.”
Image by Sarita Chouhan