Corinthians 13.11 “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I
understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a
woman, I put away childish things”.
She was dropped on the earth like an imperfect midnight
song, her shrieks, and cries ending on plummeting notes. “Look
how she cries as if she would suck the entire earth.” An elderly
aunt remarked, seeing the infant for the first time.
The youngest girl of the family was odd, uninvited and
brittle like a torn page of an old, dilapidated book. “If you really
have to choose between saving the mother and the child, please
save the mother”, they had said hours before she emerged, a tiny
mass, in the operation theater.
A truant girl with thick glasses, she runs and stumbles over
unlikely places, rusty bicycle spokes, smelly insect repellants,
smudged kitchen utensils.
“Arey, chhnuye felishna, ogulo shob entho, nongra” (Why did you
touch those utensils in the kitchen, you dirty girl? Don’t you
know they have our leftovers?) Elderly voices scream, at the
sink, at the open courtyard.
As the evening tiptoes, she reads in her science textbooks
about the planets, the moon, and the galaxies. The moon is a
teardrop away; with her hands, she carves a long, imaginary
smear on the sky’s elusive contours. She stumbles and falls again;
the threshold of the brick and mortar world summons her,
rebuking, severe. It is the world where nobody holds on to dreams
so close.
In the mathematics class, everybody is solving algebra
problems, their minds straining to internalize numbers, their
strange, calculated concoctions. The hands are crafting words,
shapes and colors in the back pages of the algebra copy,
weighing their beauty and sanctity in the finite space of the
room.
“Aye brishti jhenpe, dhaan debo mepe/Aay rimjhim borosharo
gogone” (Come soon, dear rain, I will bestow you with my
harvest. The monsoon sky beckons you)…..the Bengali rain
song swirls and twirls in her mind, lovely, rich, buoyant. The
lilting music sucks her away from the finite space of the room,
outside the precincts of the school, to a drenched, green yard.
A sharp, tingling pain in one of her cheeks, followed by a
sudden, hard slap. The world of music and rhythms dangling in
the page, have been torn and crushed, like submissive dirt. After
the ‘time out’, she tries to hide beneath one of the benches in
the class, become a pale white corpse nobody would notice. The
room around appears as a scrunching reality of a space, a tiny,
blurry dot. Poetry, to her, is not a way with words, but a way of
talking to her life, to the earth and the cosmos.
Dreams have chased her, or rather, does she chase
dreams?….. “Good acts will give you good dreams, remember.”
A motherly whisper lulls her to sleep… She has all kinds of
dreams: angel dreams, demon dreams, crisscrossing in the
narrow by-lanes of her sleep. Dreams in which a part of herself
is slashed in pain, dreams in which she has been chaperoned by
a resurrected self, dreams where she has picked up her fallen,
slain self. In dreams, there has been a carnival of absolution.
In dreams, the evening soap operas have had wings, the
black-and-white television set has been a paper boat sailing in
the summer wind; cadence and rhythm have burst in sudden
rain, in poetry.
…..The household is a strange, solemn concoction of mad
rage, empty sobs, and nothingness. Nothingness encompasses
the petty family fights, the sharp, stabbing pain of the slaps of
Sunday morning defiance.
“Why argue at the slightest chance? Try and respect
elders!”
“Why shout and dress like a man? Cover yourself properly
like a respectable girl!”
“Remember, no defiance will be allowed inside the house!”
The voices collide with each other, as she hides in the attic
and in neighbor’s houses, the voices spin off her head in her
evening strolls around the congested street corners. The voices
echo in the rusted railway platforms mingle with the shrill,
demanding sales calls of vendors at both sides of the platforms.
“The pleasures of odds and ends…”
– Sylvia Plath
Amidst the growing nothingness of the damp rooms, of
the sweat, soot, heat, and oil that evaporates from the kitchen
window, the mind creates its own resonance. The curious eyes
find beauty in glided notes of class friends, in the scales of fish
and young goat meat being washed in the open courtyard which
has the pet Bengali name of “koltola”, in the fiery dry scarlet
colored chili and turmeric dancing on the bodies of the
marinated fish.
Everywhere around, there are bodies blooming into new
meanings, forming into wild dreams. Everywhere around, bodies
speak, turn and look. She gazes at the lifeless body of the
rubber doll dressed in a laced satin frock, her curves telling her
the story of growing, exploding. She sees the dismantled body
of the tanpura, the untouched, abandoned musical instrument
that remained the treasure of sacrifice in a family tainted by
useless diktats, chaos, and mistakes. There is the body of the
morning newspaper with carefully woven words that disguise
what one could know, what one could hide.
The living room has been swarming with the bodies of
men, neighbors, relatives, acquaintances, sneaking into, playing
cards, burning with the ashes of smoked cigars. These are the
bodies which she has stumbled on, brushed aside in the
threshold of womanhood that has unleashed the awareness of
‘body’. The body, which has been abused, caressed, revered,
gratified. The body which has been stalked by roaming eyes has
been swept by awe while encountering other bodies, in a road
that leads to delight and discovery. ‘Love’, the four-letter word,
sweeping her off her feet in various phases, has turned the body
into a dormant volcano, an evening Sonata, a bird song.
In the beginning of knowing the body, knowing the
blossoming of breasts, the ache and throb of growing up slaps
hard at the stupor and confusion of childhood. The muffled
sound of innocence fades and dies alongside drops of blood in
the soapy bath water. Growing up has ever since been a venom
of fierceness and beauty, a scribbled bliss in letters, scrapbooks
and photographs.
In a child’s bubble, two decades after, the tiny shreds of a
girlhood blow away in the dusky sky, blow away like alive poems,
remembered wind. There it goes, a life lived in the naiveté of
childhood, a life lived in the murky darkness of adulthood, a life
lived like a taunting song of womanhood. There you see it form
and breath. There you see it rip off like an old family album,
drowning in a deep, abandoned well.
Written By Lopa Banerjee
This excerpt is a chapter from her memoir/narrative nonfiction book ‘Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey’ published by Authorspress (2016). The book received Honorary Mention at the Los Angeles Book Festival 2017 and is available in Amazon India, Amazon.com, and Flipkart.
Lopamudra Banerjee is a writer, poet, and translator, currently based in Dallas, USA. She is the co-editor of Defiant Dreams: Tales of Everyday Divas, published by Readomaniain collaboration with Incredible Women of India. She is also the Creative Editor of Incredible Women of India and a resident editor with Readomania. Thwarted Escape, her debut narrative nonfiction work, has been First Place Category Winner at the Journey Awards 2014 hosted by Chanticleer Reviews and Media LLC, USA. Her literary works have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, both in India and the US. She has received the Reuel International Award 2016 for her English translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novella Nastanirh (The Broken Home) instituted by The Significant League, a renowned literature group on Facebook.
How far can one truly go away from his/her ancestral roots, filialties and the claustrophobic grip of traditions and the reminiscence of an emotionally fraught childhood and puberty? The book begins with this particular quest, and it is this quest which gains momentum as a woman seeks the essence of herself-identity ten thousand miles away from her Bengali hometown. With the lens of a time-traveler, her narrative journey encompasses her first sexual abuse, her first tryst with death, austerity, the strangeness of rituals, the inexplicable feelings of puberty and also her surrendering to love, procreation, motherhood. In herself-chosen exile in the US, she discovers that deep within; her ancestral roots a real soothe well spring of her psychological, spiritual existence. In the process, she keeps on oscillating between assimilating and disintegrating, which forms the core of her journey.
You May Follow Her Work here mistressandhermuse.wordpress.com
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