மோகனீயம் - Sindhu's prelude

The Saturday I surfaced from sleep, Amma was already on the chair beside my bed.

For a few seconds she still belonged to the dream. The curtains moved. Thin evening light ran across her saree and stopped on the side of her face. Her hands were gathered in her lap. She had the look of someone who had come with a question and had practiced every harmless version of it.

“Amma?”

Umaiyal smiled. The smile did not reach her eyes.

The saree was perfect. Gold border, no crease at the shoulder, pleats in straight lines. Her hair was the problem. It was still faintly damp at the temples. A few black strands had come loose and curved against her cheeks.

Damp hair took me straight back to another morning: Amma coming out of a bath, soap, composure, me in a towel pretending I did not know what the composure was covering.

“Sindhu,” she said, “there is something I want to ask you about that night.”

The words were soft. Nothing in me received them softly.

She went to the window, as if the trees and bleached roofs were easier than my face. I sat up against the headboard.

The sentence I had been living on these last hours was a small one: she would not speak of it. People who drink that far do not come back with minutes. They come back with a headache, a dry mouth, a vague thanks for whoever put them to bed. I had counted on that. I had counted on Parvathi — not as a person, as the one who could have pulled the saree and found the sheet. If it was her, we did not have to talk. I did not want the night to need any other name, and I did not want that name to be mine.

She had not let it go. She had brought it to the window.

A small cold went through me, stupid and exact. I did not want to help her remember. If I started, I would have to go further than the blanket.

“What do you want to know?”

It cost her to go on. I could hear the cost. This was not the woman who told me to dry my hair, who stood in the doorway of a practice room and waited for the last bar to finish, who could correct a pallu with two fingers and call that love. That woman had subjects. This one was hunting for a subject that would not disgrace either of us, and failing in small pieces.

“I remember being in the bedroom.” A breath she did not need for air. “I remember laughing about something.” The laugh, in her mouth now, was an object she did not trust. She kept her face to the roofs. “And in the morning I woke beside you.” Another pause, longer, as if the next clause were a step down a stair that might not be there. “Neither of us was dressed.”

She said it the way a traditional woman says a medical fact to a daughter — late, precise, and with the hope that precision will keep it from becoming a life. She was involved with me. That was the cruelty of it. An uninvolved mother could have asked this as an accusation. She could not. She had spent years inside my hours. Now she had to stand at the window and ask for a night back, and she did not know which words would turn me into a stranger.

I felt that. It moved through me as heat and as pity and as a wish that she would stop. If she stopped, I could go on being the girl she had dressed for the world. If she continued, one of us would have to supply a story, and I already knew I would not supply the true one.

The true one was simple enough to say. I was not going to say it.

“I heard something fall,” I said. “That was why I came downstairs.”

Umaiyal turned a little. The sun still hid part of her face. Even the turning was careful, as if a full look might oblige her to ask the next thing.

“You were alone. The power had gone. After the air conditioner stopped the room was impossible. I tried to wake you. You didn’t.”

I kept it in the voice she had taught me to use for practical matters. A fall. Heat. Sleep. I had told myself the same order in smaller pieces until it sounded like the sort of night a daughter could admit.

“I stayed because I was worried. I tried to sleep there. The heat didn’t let me. My clothes were damp. I took them off. I must have fallen asleep.”

Nothing in it asked to be examined. A cut wire. A drunk sleep. A girl who had done the decent thing and then been defeated by weather.

She faced me at last. For one second I thought she would not allow the smallness. Her eyes had the look of someone who wanted a kinder story than she trusted, and hated needing it from me.

Then her shoulders dropped.

“That is what I hoped had happened,” she said.

The hope should have closed the morning. It did not. She remained at the window, and I understood she had not yet asked the thing that had dressed her so carefully the day before.

“I was frightened I had behaved… wrongly.”

The word was too small for her and still too large for this room. She waited, as if I might spare her the rest.

“That I had thought you were someone else.” Another breath. “Parvathi. She has stayed. I was not myself.” She had given me the name and looked, at once, as if she wanted it back. “Tell me I did not.” There it was. Not an accusation. A fear she wanted killed. She was asking me to give her back the mother who did not reach in the dark, and she was asking it of the person who had been the dark.

I should have said the name had been spoken, and that I had answered it. I arranged my face into injury instead, as if the suggestion itself were an insult I had to absorb for her.

“No, Amma.”

Relief moved over her face and did not quite clear the doubt under it. She kissed my forehead.

“Get ready. I’ll prepare lunch.”

I put my arms around her waist and pressed my cheek into the saree. Sandalwood soap, and under it the smell that had always been hers. Her hand came down and stroked my hair.

The tenderness should have closed the night. It opened it.

The power died not long after Parvathi left.

The air conditioner stopped first. The fan died a few turns later. The heat of the night came into the room all at once and sat on the skin. I told myself I went to her door only to check on her. That much I still keep.

“Amma?”

Cloth moved in the dark. Moonlight lay across the bed. Umaiyal sat near the edge, fighting the saree. Her hair had come down. Sweat shone on her forehead and throat. When she looked at me, her face softened.

“Parvathi,” she said.

I stopped. She said another woman’s name while looking straight at me. Drink, heat and darkness had put Parvathi’s face over mine. I understood it at once. I should have corrected her.

She tugged at the cloth on her shoulder. “Help me remove this. I’m sweating terribly.”

Parvathi was Appa’s friend’s wife, close enough to be an aunt and never called one. It had not occurred to me that Amma could ask that woman to strip her and stand there without shame. The thought lasted a second. Then I gave myself the useful answer: she had bathed me, dressed me, seen me through childhood. What harm in returning that, now, when she could not manage the pins.

That answer explained the pins. It did not explain why I did not say my name.

There was nothing of invitation in her voice. She thought she was talking to Parvathi.

I took the pin from her shoulder. The pallu came down into my hands. I pulled the pleats free and gathered the saree before it could make a sound on the floor.

The blouse was worse. Tight, hooked in front, stuck with sweat. I tried to work the hooks with only my fingertips. It was impossible not to feel the weight under the cloth. Each time I did, I pulled back as if the accident might look chosen.

When the last hook gave, I almost stopped. The blouse hung open. I could see the shape of her brassiere — an ordinary thing I had seen on the line a hundred times — and in that room it was not ordinary.

She sat in the open blouse and the petticoat. The brassiere fastened at the back. The sleeves still held her arms.

She lifted her arms for me. I worked the damp cloth off one side, then the other. The blouse came free.

She turned onto her side. Her hand rose to the strap, tugged, let it snap back, three times, never waking enough to know what was wrong. The band was dark and too tight.

The saree and the blouse had been her request. What came after was mine.

I did not know how she slept. Brassiere and panties. Petticoat. Nothing. She was my mother and I did not know what she wore when no one was looking.

I sleep in an old T-shirt, no brassiere. If that felt better sober, I told myself, this had to feel worse on her now. I said it until not doing it felt like leaving her in a punishment.

I opened the hooks. The band went slack. One strap came down. The other was caught under her. For the first time there was no cloth on her chest.

The first thought was crude and quick, and I hated that it was first. She was not built like me. Fuller. Motherhood written there, and still a firmness I had no right to measure. I caught myself hoping I would keep that after a child of my own, which was a small, ugly vanity to have in that room.

I looked longer than the hooks required. I did not touch her breasts. I did not wake her. Looking was already more than the errand.

When the last strap slipped, the brassiere came off. For a moment I did nothing, because doing would have been a way of pretending this was still hooks and sweat. It was not. She was my mother, and I was looking at her breasts in a room that had no childhood left in it. A child does not keep this. A child keeps the smell of milk, a shoulder, the idea of being held. This was not that archive. This would not blur into the general fact of having had a mother. I knew it while it was happening: the mind was cutting a plate that would not wear smooth. They were not mine. That was the first, stupid recognition. I had expected a version of myself, only older, as if time were a copy machine. She was fuller, the weight settled differently, the skin marked by having fed someone — marked by having fed me — and still not collapsed into the joke daughters make of their mothers’ bodies. The nipples were darker, larger than mine. I looked at them the way I looked at a raga I could not yet sing: not for use, for the shock of a structure I had lived under and never seen.

I thought of the blouses on the line, the ordinary cotton, the way I had passed them without interest. Those blouses had been lying. Or I had. She breathed. The movement made them living things again, which was worse than a still picture. I could have covered her then. The cotton was not far. Covering her would have been the daughter. I did not cover her. I sat with the knowledge that I was choosing the looking, and that the looking would have to be carried into every later room where she stood dressed and severe and mine. There was no tenderness in it that I trusted. There was also no simple hunger. Hunger would have been cleaner. What I had was a fact with heat in it: this body had been hidden by competence — pins, borders, the morning face — and competence had come off with the strap.

I did not touch her. 

That sentence I gave myself like a medal, and it was worthless. Distance is not innocence when the eyes have already done the work. Only after that — after the plate had been cut — did the room come back: the dead air, the windows that might still pretend this was weather. I went to them and forced them open. The air that came in was hardly cooler. I should have left. I sat on the edge of the bed instead and watched her breathe, which was no longer care and not yet a name I would admit.

The petticoat cord was cutting her waist. Having come this far, I told myself, I might as well. I loosened the knot. The petticoat slid. Her panties, stuck with sweat, began to go with it. I tried to separate them and had to lift her. She made a small sound, moved her legs, and sank again. I drew both garments off together. 

She eased at once. Breathing deepened. Her legs closed — a last scrap of posture. 

That closed line hid most of what I had uncovered, and still I looked. There was no dark hair to meet me. The skin above her thighs was bare, the panty line clean, so clean it could not have been accident or old habit. She must have shaved very recently — a day, perhaps less. The contrast landed harder than the nakedness. I almost never did that. After my periods, if I remembered. Some months I skipped it and lived with the laziness. Amma had not skipped. Even drunk, even in this heat, her body carried that private discipline. I stared longer than I meant to, trying to see past the closed line of her thighs and getting nothing but the smooth, freshly kept skin and the knowledge that she tended herself for someone. I turned away and looked for something light enough not to trap her in the heat. The heavy blankets were useless. Under them I found a thin cotton one, washed soft. I spread it over her from shoulders to feet and put the covering back in one motion.

I should have said goodnight.

She opened her eyes.

“Why are you standing there?”

She shifted to the far side of the bed and made a space.

“Come and lie down.”

I had not asked. I had not climbed in. She invited me. That became the second fact I later used as innocence.

One word would have fixed it. Amma, it’s me.

I took her hand and lay down.

She murmured broken sentences meant for someone else. I answered none of them. The hand that held mine went slack. She slept.

I looked at her the way morning would not allow. Forehead, mouth, the authority gone out of her face. The body I had come out of, close enough to smell, under a sheet I had put there.

My own clothes were glued to me. I told myself I took them off for the same reason she had asked me to take off hers. Heat. No current. No one watching.

I stripped and got back under the sheet.

She was naked against the mattress. I was naked beside her. She had called me Parvathi. She had made room for Parvathi. I used that. I did not give what I was doing a better name.

What I did then did not arrive as a plan. It arrived as the mind giving up its second job. I put my hand between my own legs under the sheet, slow, frightened the bed would speak. I watched her sleeping face because looking away would have been another kind of honesty. One breast had come free of the cotton. I kept my other hand on my stomach so it would not travel.

Nothing in the room changed. Her sleep made it worse and easier. The end came short and private, with no lift in it — only wet on my fingers, the same heat, and the judgment that had been waiting at the windows.

I reached for my clothes and did not make it. Five minutes, I thought. Then dress, go back upstairs, leave her the story that Parvathi had helped her through the night.

The five minutes went through me. When I woke, there was sun. My clothes were on the floor. I was still naked under the sheet. Her side of the bed was empty. The pillow held the shallow print of her head.

She had woken first. She had seen me. The explanation I had meant to avoid was already waiting outside the door.