Unmothered

“Oh My! You look exactly like your mum in this picture”.

“Wow! When you talk with excitement, I feel as if your mum is sitting right here”.

“You cook exactly like your mum, and the delight I see in your face is exactly like hers when she used to present her creations to us. Amazing likeness!”

And so it goes. People keep commenting on how much I resemble my mum. The way I talk, the way I smile or frown, the way I cook, my love for books and reading, my compassion, my love for acting in amateur plays, my immense energy reserve, my diligence in keeping a home, my caring nature, my listening skills; the list of parallels is long. So I am my mother’s clone in many ways. But I find these comments extremely difficult to process. Are they compliments? Or, are they mere statements and don’t mean a thing? Should I let them go, or should I hold on to them as sweet knickknacks in a shoebox, and play through them occasionally with tinges of nostalgia? I don’t know. It hurts.

Mum and Me, 1976

She is gone six years now. Her family and friends still remember her fondly. And when I hear the comments of correlation between my mum and me from these people, I wonder if they are trying to empathize with me and say these things in an attempt to make me feel good or whether they mean it. It is hard to know what the deep intention is behind other people’s words, sometimes they themselves don’t now, they say the words and are done with, and often forget what they have said, they walk away. And I am left here, listening to the echo, wondering which part of it was real.

I was born of her, so I suppose that was the physical space I came from, having been locked in her womb for nine long months. The law of karma claims we are born to a person with whom we have a connection of some kind in our past lives, and that is where the explanation stops and urges us not to explore further, citing the intricate workings of karma is unfathomable and imponderable, so we should accept it as is and move on. That takes care of, to some extent, the consciousness connection to my mother. And as science proclaims, the genetic connection to her gives me access to her skills and talents, passed to me as an intricate inherited code through the tiny fiber of the x-chromosome. And after that, spending almost 18 years in close vicinity of a small household, I might have picked some habits and traits merely by environmental osmosis. So, I am, as it appears to her family and friends a remarkable replica of my mother.

But my personal relationship, understanding, and connection to her are different. The apparent truth to society and the world is not the reality of my experience. I will be shunned by societal harmony guardians for saying this, but I don’t enjoy being called her image, nor do I feel she loved me the way I wanted to be loved, and I will forever carry within me a deep void of unanswered questions. This is painful, the hurt wells up at inopportune moments. Sometimes when I am sitting immersed in a big gathering of friends and their famile watching the loving play of family chit-chat. Or when I chance upon a mother affectionately cuddling her baby in the park or on the train. A sharp searing bruise often swells in my heart while walking on a solitary beach when the wind brings to me the words she often uttered to me – “Why don’t you die! Why were you even born? If you die right now, I would be the happiest one on the planet!”

I was born in India to an engineer father and a homemaker mother, both from humble origins and with a load of familial responsibilities on their shoulders. The first decade of my life was spent near the poverty line; our dinners were fried okra or eggplant and roti, with a single egg curry a week, and maybe mutton or chicken curry once a month. My father had to send 80% of his salary home to his parents, for their upkeep and the education of his siblings. My mother managed her little sansar with as much adeptness and frugality she could garner. They had a “love marriage”, and so she was barely tolerated, let alone loved by her in-laws. She had to live with them during the first couple years of her marriage while my father was out on field assignments with his work. They abused her, and made her work like a slave. She kept it going because, she had nowhere else to go as her family did not have the wherewithal to support her, and she believed she could one day win her in-laws’ hearts by her kindness and gentle demeanor. She also had me during that time. When I was about a year or so old, we moved to Ranchi, where my father rented a small flat, and also took in a paying-guest in the spare bedroom to make ends meet. When I reflect on our relationship I think that deep in her mind she might have resented me because I reminded her of the hardships she had to face in those early years, and every time she looked at me she probably saw pain, failure, abuse, and the sad feeling of being unloved in spite of doing her best. I will never know, for as an adult, I never asked her, there was no untangling of knots.

When my sister was born, and I felt very lonely, and I remember her being dreadfully angry and hateful to me for months. On a four year old’s tender heart, it left a deep scar. Over the years, there have been countless instances when I doubted whether I was her daughter, being utterly confused by what society said about a mother’s pure love for her baby, and comparing it to my painful reality. She had one day burned my little fingers on the hot stove, and one day strangled and left me fainted in a dark room for a whole evening and night. All the time I did nothing to deserve the punishments, she was just angry. The more she hurt me the more I strove to be a good girl who does nothing but color between the lines. I put in as much effort as I could to win her affection, to feel worthy of it, and this had a serious detrimental effect on my self-esteem as an adult. As a child I spent hours staring at pictures of Gods and Saints on the wall of my home, asking them with tearful eyes to give me some hope, to prove to me my mother loves me, like they say in the books and proclaim in the movies. My happiest moments as a child were not related to activities or interactions with my family or at school, instead they came in moments of solitude, when I was away from everything, like sitting alone on the staircase staring at peeling paint on the wall, there was peace in that moment and it felt good. I remember sleeping in the same bed with my sister, and expertly cry in silence for hours into the night, my heart wrenching in grief. Next morning, before anyone at home could find out and scold me, I would take the wet pillow to the roof terrace to dry out. Even then I recognized that my mother did not have the strength and ability to support me in what I wished and dreamed of, but my young heart craved for someone to listen, someone to belong to, and someone to feel nurtured by. All through the years, I felt she barely tolerated my existence in her vicinity, but that was not enough for me, I wanted connection, a deeper and wholesome feeling of emotional contact. I even married my high-school sweetheart, because I was so desperate for affection that the first one who showed any interest in me made me want to cling on to him, and dream of a fairytale life. It took twenty years to untangle that tight weave of delusion.

I moved to the US in 1998. My parents were very proud of me. Being an engineer, married to a smart young man, and both on scholarships to earn their graduate degrees was something my parents had planned for me, and I ticked all the boxes. My parents came to visit me several times, I used to make trips back every two to five years to see them, and I called them religiously every weekend. In the ensuing years, I finished my masters, moved across the country back and forth few times, and then spent two remarkable years in Australia working on record breaking projects, my career zoomed. My sister got married, had a kid. My father retired, and my parents lived a joyous life in Kolkata, surrounded with friends and family, with parties, plays, travel, embroiled in the regular drama of rich social life. In early 2011 my parents visited me in San Diego, it was the first time I asked my mother why she was so cruel to me. Her answer was – when I was a little baby, friends and family saw the indefatigable energy in me and predicted that I will grow up to be an immensely successful person. She saw me as a genie, someone extraordinarily bright and one who can accomplish a lot, fulfill their dreams, so the best way to control me was to bottle me. And this explained all their emotional and physical abuse; it was an attempt to control my free spirit. Around that time, I was finally ripening in my own life-wisdom, learning to let go of the past, and so this explanation made sense. In their mind, they were right and the goal justified their means. So many people in this world live by that criterion, so how could I blame my parents for that? They did not know any better.

Later that year, she fell sick. She was in and out of hospitals for three months and the doctors were pumping her with antibiotics to supposedly kill the large abscess in her liver. In December, I went to India, and forged a new line of investigation with biopsy and specific tests. It resulted in a diagnosis of terminal occult primary cancer with metastasis in the liver, lungs, lymph, and humerus. My father, sister, and rest of our family were shocked and unprepared for her impending death. She was 61. I spent the next two months by her side, sleeping with her, reading to her; managing her care and comfort, and watching life fade out of her gradually. I wanted her to have peace, to die surrounded by her family and friends who cared for and adored her so much. During my time with her, I sometimes wanted to ask the many questions, I wanted to sort out the tight and heavy knot of emotions I had from 36 years of our connected being, but I had no words. In a way the questions did not have meaning anymore, a chapter was being finished, and it was better to close it as is. All I did during those days was try to make her comfortable, so she could breathe, and smile at the hundreds of people visiting her everyday. I spent all my energy arranging and managing her care, and at night I held her to the countless bathroom trips, and gently caressed her when the pains arose. After she passed away, there was an overflowing of messages and stories of her beautiful heart, her loving and empathic nature, her engaging and vibrant life. I believed every word that was said. Other people’s experience of her was different from my personal experience. And this is how reality is, full of different colors, seen by different people through their personal viewfinder; all of which is the truth. There is no ultimate truth, no distinct good or bad, nor a definite black or white; it is always the collection of colors, and the angle at which the light hits our personal prism makes all the difference in the colors we perceive. I am my mother’s daughter, a reflection of her for those who miss her and want to see her, and I am also my own unique individual who is no better or worse or equal to anyone else on this planet.