I carry my love within me—in jars and pails, liquid and plenty—gently dripping into my blood stream every hour of the day. It travels across this being of mine, the affectionate brush of my fingers, thighs that fold into a nurturing lap, eyes that glisten. On and on it voyages until I’m brimming with it, a moment away from tipping over with love and love’s boundless grief.
Of all this love, mother holds claim to a lion’s share, the oasis of her existence keeping me afloat. How I swallow hurt and hopelessness, secure in the knowledge of her shelter, her warm palms that on some days cool my scalp, on some wipe my tears and yet on others close behind me in a motherly embrace. For as long as she is alive, I will forever be her child.
And thus, I am sundered with fear. That secret, secret fear that is no secret at all. Colonising the heart and mind with grief and terror, the inevitable possibility of life without her. It is the death of my childhood and the death of my mother and it shatters my heart, and strangles my lung with its ill-begotten surety. She will die one day. I know this. I must accept this. I must prepare for this. I cannot even comprehend it.
Then the fragile jar tips over and I weep for the loss of my mother even as she lives. Life without my mother, life without my mother, life without my mother, life without my mother, life without my mother; I destroy myself and remake myself, brick by brick by brick, the new structure is untenable and unhinged. The nightmare of a dream that is reality, wrapping its meaty fingers around my neck.
When the night changes hands and the sun rises, my grief dons her morning clothes, dyed in anxiety. Every moment my mother leaves home, leaves my sight, all I can think is of her not returning. The clock pendulates and so do I, every hour of the day, sunk in the grim fantasy of my mother who could be dead in that very moment and yet incredibly alive until I learn of the truth. There is no such thing as certainty in this world, I know this. Nowhere do I know and feel this more than in my mother’s uncertain existence. I don’t know for how long she’ll stay by my side, I don’t know for how long will I be her child, the uncertainty of it all is slow poison. It is agony. When I watch her hair turn grey, when I watch her grow old—beautiful and graceful—I weep mournfully, the scale forever tipping in the favour of the truth, never in the favour of my love.
V.S. Radhika is a student of Literature and a Young India Fellow.
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