The Mother is Dead, Long Live the Mother.
by Sreedhevi Iyer
“I am not your mother. You are not my daughter.”
The front door is open, and the fan above creaks. Her right arm chops the air in declaration, her eyes never leaving yours. The ring on her finger glints. Ghosts circle the living room, swishing, floating, witnessing. They whirl with the wind.
Both of you had been looking for car keys, so you could drive to the bank together. You were leaving the next day.
Later, she comes to see you off at the airport, and waves as if to a friend. She still waves as you pass through security. The ghosts go with you.
***
They call Borderline Personality Disorder the woman’s disorder. In that if you’re a woman, you’re likely to have a disorder. You first read the term when you were sixteen, in a dusty copy of Diana: Her True Story. You thought it had something to do with borders. About being on the edge, all the time.
Your mother saw no borders when she prayed. She prayed to the Devi – the Mother Goddess, in every variation – Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswathi, Parvati, Lalita, Ambika, Kali. She prayed to them all. She did regular prayers to the other gods, but the Mother Goddess remained constant. The Goddess was the cause, the Goddess was the reason, the Goddess was responsible. When you texted her your law school grades, she texted back, “It’s a miracle. I must go give thanks to Durga. It is all her doing.”
Once, your mother had sensed your grandmother’s spirit while driving to buy groceries, a few months after her death. She had quietly asked the spirit to leave, to be at peace. It did.
Her devotion became known. Piety in the married woman was a treasured thing. People in the small Indian community went to temple to preen, to see and be seen. Your mother actually prays, said a high-school friend at recess, in tones of adult disbelief. Your mother is sincere.
***
“She didn’t mean it,” your uncle tells you over Skype, a few weeks later.
“She doesn’t mean much of her words anymore. You mustn’t take it to heart.”
“Eat properly,” your mother tells you on Whatsapp, as if it never happened.
“You cannot bring this up,” says your father on the phone. “She no longer understands it.”
“But we have to be accountable,” you tell him. “Its what adults do. She has to see the truth.”
He has nothing to say, except, “She is no longer the person who raised you. If you want to talk to her now, you must fake it.”
***
“Sincerity is a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.” Lionel Trilling.
Until recently, women were not real people. Because they acted with emotion, not logic. Because they apparently had no sense of responsibility, accountability. 3,000 years ago, Homer, Hippocrates, and Aerates said personhood meant having multiple states – impulsive anger, melancholia, mania. They were “spells” you vacillated between. In 1684, a Swiss physician, Theophile Bonet called these behaviors folio maniaco-melancolique – a list of sadnesses that made one human.
Personhood meant to account for yourself – to have your story, your list. A singular tale solid in all experiences in time and space. Today, an accountable woman still moves between different labels. Daughter. Sister. Wife. Mother. Aunt. Grandmother. And when she is none of these, Whore.
But accountability is only recognizing what is already present. Self-truth– coming out, changing identity, screwing up–is really telling your story to those who know it but are hearing it for the first time. The truth tale takes on the form of the hearer–it is now up to those who have received the story, to respond, and make meaning.
In much of European culture, sincerity is a moral bedrock, setting the boundaries of truth. For a person to be a person, they have to present themselves as they are. Authenticity meant a certain resistance to society. Almost a hostility. No shadows, no contradictions. Just be yourself. As if the self was already there, all the time, present and automatic. If you were actually sincere, you would not have to act as such. You just had to be.
Your mother would have confounded Europe. It would not know what to do with her. Her idea of sincerity comes from different ghosts. To her truth is not self-evident, but performed from multiple predetermined scripts. Her truth, like her self, has to be made and made and made, again, again, again.
In China, you say what is right at that point in time, to that person in front of you. Nothing stays the same across every situation. Resisting others is redundant at best, selfish at worst. To lacquer the truth with the sheen of politeness, like a delicacy, is an art form. It takes skill. The more the lacquering, the more the skill. The more it is respected. Honesty is a simile of naivete–the lot of peasants, children, minorities. Those who do not know better.
***
A first memory is your mother scratching your back to put you to sleep. An act of hypnosis that calms, settles, subsides your restlessness. Her nails are never too sharp. Every area of skin she touches itches more, inviting more. She loves you like this, prone, skin against skin. She draws you in to her, her breath on your neck a lullaby. Sometimes she flattens her hand on your baked back, and you feel the cold metal of her ring like a solid promise.
The ring is made of fragile strands clasped together. It is not her wedding ring, but something she bought for herself with her first salary at fourteen, when she began voicing herself on radio. She wriggles this finger when doing chores but cannot admit to her boredom. She clenches it when she will not think what her marriage really means.
On your back, her fingers are a siren call for slumber.
***
Truth is double-shelled. Sir Christopher Wren wanted the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral to be visible to all, whether inside the cathedral looking up, or standing outside. A single dome could not aesthetically do this, so Wren manipulated perception. He built two shells: an inner dome small enough to seem near and intimate, and an outer dome of a greater height, visible anywhere in London. Between the two, he inserted a brick cone. It supported the weight of the outer dome, and allowed the concave of the inner one. That way, from the outside, the dome looked the same, no matter where you stood.
To achieve eternal beauty from all perspectives, the thing itself becomes artificial.
***
In “The Canterbury Tales,” the Wife of Bath tells the story of the Loathly Lady. An errant knight is brought to court for punishment. The Queen interrupts the King’s sentence, by asking the knight to find the answer to her question–what does a woman desire the most? The knight roams far and wide, asking the question, never finding a satisfactory answer. He then finds the Loathly Lady, an ugly old woman. She tells him she has the answer, but that if it saves him, he must do exactly as she says. Reluctantly, he agrees, and brings her to court. There, she whispers the answer to the knight, who proudly declares to the Queen-–all that a woman wants, is sovereignty. The Queen smiles. It is the right answer. The knight is free.
But not yet. The Loathly Lady asks her price. She asks to be married to the knight. The knight is appalled, but marries her, to fulfil his word. On their wedding night, the Loathly Lady gives him a choice. Either she could turn into a beautiful woman, and respond to the flirtations of other men, or she could stay ugly, but remain faithful to him. Which would he prefer? The knight thought long and hard. Thinking of the answer to the Queen’s question, he replied–you choose.
The Loathly Lady smiled. Once again, it was the right answer.
She turned herself into a beautiful young woman, and still remained faithful to him.
A woman’s sovereignty is to choose for herself–sometimes even when she does not know the choice.
***
When in school, you’d ask your friends what their mothers were. The answer was usually “housewife.” You had a different answer, and more than one–radio artist, stage actress, English teacher. She knew everyone–a people-collector, a hobby she did unthinkingly. She collected to her full capacity, always. Up to the brim.
Your mother had disowned you because you had refused to go to the twelfth temple she had planned on her list. Your refusal had been one too many energies, and it was flowing over, and she had to push you away so she could tether herself back. Make room again for something else.
***
The Ramayana has an unpopular epilogue. It is a woman’s ending, and so it is not much talked about. The traditional end to The Ramayana has Rama return to his kingdom after vanquishing the demon who had kidnapped Sita, his famously chaste wife. Rama is welcomed back, and the story ends with his coronation. As with many things, a man’s victory is a performance. There is much pomp and ceremony, and is the official finale to an epic tale.
But in many versions, the tale continues. Rama is king. Sita falls pregnant with twins. Rama hears rumors among his subjects that questioned Sita’s chastity. She had, after all, spent a long time in the domain of another man. Even if it had been against her will. Even if she had been pining for her husband the whole time. Even if she had already proven her chastity in public by jumping into a pyre and emerging unscathed by flames.
Rama makes a cruel decision to protect his public reputation among his subjects. He sends his pregnant, innocent wife away to the jungle. The place away from civilization, and man-made rules. Sita gives birth to the twins under the protection of a sage. At the age of twelve the twins are sent to Rama’s court, and when the king realizes they’re his sons, he embraces them, and sends for Sita as well.
Sita arrives at the court, nervous and uncertain. Rama lovingly and publicly asks Sita for another demonstration of her chastity. She had done it once before, when he had doubted her previously. She had stepped into a fire then and remained whole, unscarred. As proof. Prove it again, he had asked. Prove it just like you had the last time, like I know you have, like I know you are. Prove it for these people here, so that we may be united again.
Prove you are a person, Sita, in a way I never have to.
This time, Sita disobeys. It was one thing when her husband had publicly rejected her. But to be asked to do it again, on purpose, knowing she could – was he fucking kidding? What did he think this was – a magic show? A street play?
No. He could take his obsession with her chastity and shove it. She had no performance to satisfy public opinion. Her peace of mind came first.
And so she called on her mother. She asked to be taken back home, underground, to be sublimated, a place where she did not need to act according to others. Where she could just be.
The earth split, her mother came, and bidding goodbye to her husband and children, Sita returned.
***
You are and are not your mother’s daughter. You still protect her by not talking about her–by adjusting the singular truth so everyone outside only sees beauty. You care for all you meet, in the hope of atoning for the sin of not receiving hers. You whore yourself to become chaste once more.
You see her just outside the airport, waiting beside a McDonald’s. Somewhere a bell rings from a machine. You slide your bag to a halt.
“How was the flight?”
“Long.”
“Did they serve you food?”
“Yes.”
“How was it?”
“Okay.”
She nods. We were meeting for the first time. We were meeting for the millionth time.
“Mother Durga made your flight arrive on time.”
You look beyond her face, to the crowds outside, the taxi rank, the humidity, the possibilities of the next few days. You look back at her.
“Yes, she did.”
In the taxi you both sit at the back. She begins a rant about a neighbor. You listen. You put your head on her shoulder, and close your eyes.
Sreedhevi Iyer is the author of Jungle Without Water and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Award in 2017. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US. Her work has appeared around the world, including Hotel Amerika, Drunken Boat, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Bellingham Review, Asian American Literary Review, and Ginosko Literary Journal in the US, Two Thirds North in Sweden, Free Word Centre in the UK, and Asia Literary Review in Hong Kong. She has also guest edited Drunken Boat’s Hong Kong Special Folio and special issues of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. She currently lives in Melbourne.