“A Faint Resemblance”
Dear Ma,
I did it again today, but I am happy to tell you that I have finally found it. Today while gardening, and staring at the beauty of the sharp bougainvillea, I felt a familiar wretchedness. As is the norm, I rushed to your picture frame first, but it yielded nothing. No, not nothing. A certain distaste, that felt like tar in my mouth, heavy, unrelenting, dark, putrid, unpleasant. I stared at your smiling pretty face, laughing in joy, looking down at me, a nondescript, dark, solemn child, as if I knew at birth that life would come to me in fits and starts. I don’t know why I have kept this particular picture of you on my book shelf. I never remember you this happy, you have never showed me the delight that frames your eyes, you have never looked at me the way you look at me in this picture. Was this a lie, then? Perhaps my mind conjured up all the times that your eyes flashed anger, disappointment, suspicion, hurt and sarcasm as they looked at me. We never had many words between us, but I do remember the way your hands would stroke my temples when I fell sick or your sudden despair when I returned home with a broken arm or scraped leg. Did I fall so many times deliberately Ma? I know I did. I wouldn’t have any affection from you otherwise.
Why did I not have your skin, your hair, your face, Ma? Why do I look like Baba? I have tried and tried in all these years to find any resemblance, a sign that I am yours. Remember how I used to pin a towel to my head and roam around the house pretending I had long, lustrous hair like yours? Or, how I would scrub my face with vim gel to wash the darkness off my face? People told me I had your voice, that you could sing like the nightingale, that people would stop in their work to listen to you sing. Why have I never heard you sing, Ma? Why would you always hum and be silent in embarrassment if I came into the room? Do you know I resented you for that? I never told you that, but I did. And I felt you grudged my entrance into the room, in your life, as it were.
It feels strange now that you are gone, a curious absence of words, an inexplicable void, as if there was no one to hold responsible for my mistakes. I still look at the mirror quite often, but today when I did, I smiled at my foolishness for trying to find you in me, for revelling in my difference, on pining for a similarity. It was then that I discovered, when I smiled with my lips closed and looked at myself in sadness, the faint contours of your small smile. I rushed to the picture frame, held it to my face and smiled, broadly, as genuinely as I could, and saw that that I have remnants of your sparkling smile in the contours of my mouth. Why had no one told me that? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you hum so that I could sing, Ma? Did you smile small, so that I could smile with abandon? Its too late to know now. But the tiny spark you left in me is my brightest light. I hope you know that, wherever you are.
Love,
Manu.
Monograph Magazine, Vol 9, June 2022
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