Aai
For my mother, Gauri Deshpande 1942 — 2003
I wrote this on mother’s day 2004, the year after my mother died. Reading it today, I realize that it takes much longer to heal than they promised. Here it is, with a few changes.
It has been over a year since my Aai died. I sit here in the early morning light, the house all quiet, no sound but the drip of the coffee machine. I think how her Khandu is so grown up, almost as tall as she was, with his long curly hair, his beautiful brown eyes, his kindness and calm, I think of how he will play his saxophone, fall in love, come home with a girl who might have her great-grandchildren. I miss her. I miss turning to her as we sip our coffee (mine sweet and white, hers black and bitter) and saying, So! What do you think?
I miss showing her the pages of my book that come flying out after midnight when everyone is in bed, fed and fussed over. She would have said, Go sleep now, stupid girl(Moorkhe mulgi, zopee ja, kiti usheer zhalay.)
And, the cat drags in a cardinal, beautiful red feathers, black bandit eyes, and I am disgusted, it’s still twitching, bloody, and she will stroke the cat’s head and say, what a clever cat, what a good fellow.
Aai. I think sometimes how quickly I have recovered from her death. But I know that what I have recovered from is the shock. From the actual going of her, the way she fell ill, the hospital in that frozen foreign place, the weakness, the helplessness of her, so alien to how her life had been. The first months after I came back home, that’s all I thought about. Images of her as I had last seen her, dying, had taken up all my head space. And then, one day to the next, those images were replaced by memories of our life together, our good times and bad. Of when we got along and didn’t, when we talked about everything and dogs, when we played card games and word games (she beat us all every time,)and we rowed on her lake and we got hysterical. Memories of walking with her. Those thousands of steps we took together. Down the cobblestone lanes of Dubrovnik with my brand new Saheli, looking up at ancient walls covered in rambling roses smelling so sweet we got high. Through tiny winding back alleys in Kyoto searching for some temple that she just had to show us, but wouldn’t ask for directions, striding ahead, tall and impatient, Saheli now old enough to whine, dragging her feet, me between the two of them trying not to lose either, both of them trying to lose each other. Korea, winter still hanging on, garlic smelling people, small dogs in cages (dont look now, and stop crying, silly girl but I saw the dismay in her eyes.) Hong Kong: clothes markets, bird markets, vegetable markets, antiques markets, me pregnant with Khandu, hoping, no, convinced it was a girl, the one I would walk with when my Aai wasn’t there to walk with me, Aai preventing me from buying all the pink frilly things I tried to (idiot girl! What if its a boy? It is possible, you know.) Spain: Cordoba, Sevilla, Cadiz, Tarifa. Saheli now old enough to have a boyfriend, not walking with us, Khandu who turned out not to be a girl, whining age, me pregnant again, full of hope that our line would continue this time. She loved Spain best of all. We walked on the beaches of the impossible blue Spanish Atlantic, in the old towns, she evoked other times for me, Moors walked with us. And then California. Oh she loved California. We didn’t walk so much, I had my driver licence, I drove her everywhere. And she was so thrilled with me that I had learned to drive. She delighted me by calling me a clever girl, which she had never done when I was actually a girl. We drove out to Santa Barbara and took a cruise to look at gray whales. That was one time she was speechless. She just held my hand, and we watched that perfect tail fluke as the sun set palely in the Pacific, the absolute end of that day anywhere in the world. Vinchurni: walk to the neighbor’s farm to fetch milk. Try to get home before sunset. But we never did, because she would stop to listen to larksong, look at lapwings, the sky, some microscopic flower (all right, we won’t call it a flower, we’ll call it a spray,) the five-oclock snake (really, there was a snake that we saw every day that summer, she said he was going home after a hard day’s work.) And everywhere, she showed me things I would have missed. An old woman in the shadows, gorgeous men in Spain, cats on rooftops — the pink cat in Hong Kong which was pink from mange, which made us laugh and sad at the same time. Smells — she had such a sensitive nose it was a blessing sometimes and a curse sometimes. Can’t you smell that? and when we all said no, she would translate the smell into words, and we could smell it. She could translate everything into words. And then finally, we walked together in the hospital corridors, and she would stop when she was tired and we would discuss the intricacies of the collages on the walls. And when she was too weak and tired to take even those walks with me, she just sat up on the bed and pointed out the parakeets on the electric lines outside, and the jacarandas blooming, whisper quiet purple, I would have missed them entirely if she hadn’t shown them to me. She gave us adventures, stories to tell. Our imaginations grew, she fertilized them.
She didn’t always know or care if we had had dinner, or if our homework was done. But she knew our hearts were in the right place, because she had put them in the right place. She made us all. Not just me, and my sisters. Everyone. Husbands, her own and ours, boyfriends, girlfriends, her students, her readers, her grandson Khandu, who I overheard proudly telling a friend, my grandmother calls me a shitty bastard — he heard the love and admiration rather than the words, her other grandson Sukhi, who at seven, had some extra sticky bond with her, who has some part of her in him that the rest of us don’t, he was heartbroken when she was gone. He had started walking with her in California, he says she told him the homeless lady on the corner was not someone to be afraid of, and they would walk to the grocery store and buy Margarita mix or tonic for her gin. He still drinks tonic water in her memory. He didn’t judge her, I suppose, he loved her unconditionally.
Now I have a new kind of pain. Not of death, not from old memories. This is different. This is from what could have been. What should have been. Not in a large general way, like we could have changed things, we could have helped her, we could have put her in rehab, or she should be here. This is more specific. I can see precisely where she should have been. At her grandson’s performance at the Lincoln Center. By the track watching her other grandson run faster than the wind, faster than everyone. On my back porch, watching the owl watching us. Helping me wash the flea-ridden dog. I see her absence in exact places, tiny perforations in the fabric of my life letting in the light of reason, of inevitability. More and more holes, until, I suppose, the fabric is all gone, and my life joins hers.
She had a light touch on our lives, if I look at in terms of the actual time she spent with each of us sisters. She made a huge fuss about my move to California, she blamed my husband for taking me away. She would let me hear about it every time we spoke, which was at least twice a week. She wanted me to come back home. I listened patiently for a couple of years, even internalizing some of the guilt. Finally I pointed out to her that she herself was in Korea, and even when I moved from Bombay to Pune to be near her, she was hardly ever there. To which she said, that’s not the point. But to me, that was the point. She was my home. Not the country, or the city. It was she.
I live in a Christian town. Friends point out that one must be thankful for what one has. I am, for the most part. Not, perhaps to the God they want me to be thankful to, but I am thankful for the small everyday things, thankful that I see them, appreciate them. The things I may have missed if Aai hadn’t taught me how to look at the world, simply by the way she lived. The things I wish she was here to see. Cardinals, red as strawberries, in the Spanish-moss laden oak trees. Canada geese, down south for our warm winters, who didn’t go back. Alligators, drifting, log quiet and mind still in the opaque green rivers of Wakulla county. Manatees, cement colored balloons, floating just beneath the water’s surface, brushing our oars. Great blue herons (Aai had a special love for these), with their imperious arrogance. The oak snake visiting my unruly backyard. I see all this through her eyes. I think I know how she might have responded to these things. But Aai never made it here, she never saw North Florida. So I don’t really know. And then, with her, one never knew. She always had a new view, a surprise that might delight or horrify me. That’s gone. I feel like water which has lost its vessel, scattering in drops and disarray. I feel like I have a giant hole in me that I must grow to fill in. I guess that’s what she meant when she said to me, you are never really, truly an adult until your mother is dead. And I said to her, then I’ll just stay a child. And she said, idiot child.
Just because I can’t call her doesn’t mean she isn’t there right? Existence isn’t tied to life, Aai, because I see you in us all. I see you here in me.
