na kajre ki dhaar

mother

It is my mother’s birthday, or at least it was, when I started writing this. She is visiting her own mother in the cold Uttar Pradesh winter, and I picture two women, similar silhouettes in similar floral shawls, sitting on a charpai. A Salman Toor painting comes to mind, an Amrita Shergill painting comes to life.

She has turned what? 40? More than that. Our parents belong to a generation that never kept a record unless Big Man from the Government asked for it. My grandfather, my father’s father, was an intense notebook keeper, he has the records of all his children. Date, time, place of birth, his initial emotions regarding it. The notebook is gathering dust somewhere in the ancestral house, I need to rescue it and keep it with me. I can feel closer to my father then.

My mother used to keep diaries with song lyrics and poetry noted down in deliberate, neat handwriting, like a schoolgirl’s. She promised it to me when I was really young, I hope she remembers that.

When I was young and she was my only companion, we would play elaborate games. One of them was TV. She would pretend to change channels and announce them casually… Oh I feel like watching the news. Heera would turn into a newscaster, announcing random tragedies. Maybe a Govinda movie. Heera would repeat Govinda’s dialogues and moves verbatim. I used to always think he looked a little like my father, the typical UP genetics fooling me.

Another game was us preparing for a quiz. The premise was that one day I would get kidnapped and she could only rescue me by correctly answering questions about my being. Not even in our wildest fantasies were we rich enough to pay ransom. So we had this elaborate game. I would ask her the questions as well, because I had always had the fear that she would disappear one day, never to come back.

Favourite Colour?

Heera: Blue

Heera’s Mother: Pink

Favourite Song?

Heera: Chhoti Si Kahani Se

Heera’s Mother: Jaane Kyon Log Mohabbat Kiya Karte Hain. Na Kajare Ki Dhaar while making chai in the morning.

Favourite Fruit?

Heera: Mango

Heera’s Mother: Of course, what else.

Favourite Actor?

Heera: Shah Rukh Khan

Heera’s Mother: Arjun Rampal… that man…

In order to save memories of her, I started stealing her bangles and bindis to pack in my suitcase when I was leaving home forever in 2022. I also started compiling all the songs she had ever hummed in a playlist titled “ma’s favourites,” and when I told her about it, she cried. Then she named five more songs to add to it.

She got matching sarees for us recently. Mine is blue. She learnt how to transfer money via UPI just in case she ever has some and I need some. The day never comes.

Our television would always be on when I was young. We had a small Nokia keypad phone, and a Panasonic radio. We would listen to Neelesh Misra in the afternoons, and then Abhijeet Bhattacharya cassettes. She would listen to me explain all the novels I would be reading. She wants me to call her when I see a good looking professor who seems marriage material. She wants me to stop studying so much, to be in my head so much. She also does not like anything I do. She wishes I was better. She wishes I wouldn’t ruin my body by getting more piercings or changing my hair again and again or god forbid, get a tattoo.

She wants me to get religious, to believe in God.

On days when I am truly alone on my bed, bathed and lotioned with no energy to pick up a book or turn to anybody for help, I try thinking of her, but it only scares me, the way it would scare me when I would go to kindergarten in a city that was new to both of us, her husband a new man to me, only then beginning to be a father. I would cry in school, worried that she would get run over crossing the road without me, or forget the way back home. Now I am just worried she will forget her way back in her head. Or get truly sick and not tell me because I chose to be the bad daughter who doesn’t call her everyday.

Then I turn to the small corner in me that still exists, our double bed in our home, floral bedsheet smelling like detergent and lotion and hair oil, and her her her. I pretend I am laying on it, summer vacations, the sound of our cooler drowning outside, a book in my hand. I turn to that image, and I pray to whatever god believes in her existence. Let her be safe and sound. Let me be good enough in her eyes so that she doesn’t have more to worry or get angry about anymore. Let her have strength to be disappointed in what all I will go on to do.

Right now she must be fast asleep in the same house she grew up in. The structure has changed but the verandah remains the same. Twelve years old, Heera before Heera, wishing to be a singer, copying lyrics from the radio in her notebook to practise. Forty something Heera’s ma, listening to songs on her phone, hopefully dreaming of things that don’t scare her anymore. Like any other daughter, I would exchange myself for everything she has missed out on, but it is never possible, so I will try to be good and not detest her for turning out to be the way I am.