My father cracks open the Friday wine. His fingers clink against the bottle as he pours, the folded fifty dollars he pried from his wallet flushing into Italian alcohol. It’s past midnight now, though I’m not sure by how many minutes. His eyes are turned away from mine, tracing what’s visible of my mother between the crack in the bedroom door. Our dog, Leo, has circled himself by her chest. Even in sleep, her fingers rub his temple gently back and forth.
My father takes a sip of his drink; he turns into a storyteller by his second glass. The Turkish lamps above paint him auburn as he recites his past like a folk tale. On warmer nights he tells me of his childhood village in Kerala, and on the others the streets of Silicon Valley he spent his late twenties walking down. Tonight, he settles on painting anecdotes from Kharagpur.
He tells me about the autumn of ninety-nine; How he met my mother studying for a master’s degree in architecture he didn’t care for. How neither of them spoke much Hindi at all, coming from the south. Between sips of wine, he speaks of evenings they’d spend picking up the language through dramas that aired on television. It’s hard to picture them as kids cramped in a university dorm, scraping passes to keep their scholarships and sneaking their Hindu-Muslim affair past my god-fearing grandparents.
Actually, when I think about it, it’s only difficult to picture my mother that way.
I only ever get to know the woman she used to be through my father’s eyes. There are parts of her that’re easier to stitch into my imagination — her firmness in her beliefs, the melody of her laugh. Sometimes those similarities are the only proof that it’s really her in those time-frayed photographs. Then there are the foreign parts, the ones I cannot needle into the fabric of my understanding.
More than anything else, it’s her freeness that startles me. My father builds with his words a person who’d speed on bikes without a helmet, cut university lectures to take road trips to the countryside instead. A person so spirited, so comfortable in her colours. I see her in glimpses only in the womb of the night, when she crawls into bed and kisses my sister and Leo goodnight. Her face is traced
with new lines, but she becomes young again when she smiles. I can almost see our likeness then, as she cradles Leo to sleep.
In those moments, I remember a conversation between her and my father that he’d told me about. It was another night, another Friday wine. As he popped the bottle, he asked me if I’d ever read the opening of that Erich Segal book— Love Story. The male protagonist, Oliver, goes on about his agitation over never being alphabetically first in his female counterpart, Jenny’s list of favourite musicians. I said I hadn’t, only Doctors. He sat up then, shifting his weight, and told me it reminded him of something my mother had said to him. A year or so into marriage, he’d asked her who her grand ‘list of loves’ were. She didn’t even pause to think, but simply told him then that her two dogs— Chintu and Pintu— would always place before him. That there was no room for some great ‘ love of her life’ in a world where they existed. She’d said it so casually, as if she were talking about the weekend groceries. This— as Erich Segal put it— bothered the hell out of my father. He sounded a little offended even now, looking to me for the agreement that her sentiment was insane, undecipherable.
But I couldn’t. She made absolute sense to me. Now that my father had mentioned it, I realised that there wasn’t even room in my heart, young as it was, for some— as my mother put it— ‘great love’ either. Not because my capacity for it was limited, but because I could never love another the way I loved my dog. Not even my family, and I told him so.
We sat in silence for a moment. I began to think that maybe I’d angered him, offended him again in the same manner my mother had twenty years ago— but he just laughed to himself.
He told me then that I was more like her than I thought. I didn’t know what to say to that.
No one had ever likened me to her before. Not in character, at least. I’ve only ever been told I have her face. Sometimes, when we brush our teeth at a shared sink, I try to search for her in my eyes. I watch her in the mirror as she looks down, forcing the last of her ayurvedic paste onto frayed
bristles. She says the spice of it reminds her of home; Its flavour cleanses her mouth where it burns mine.
But past the few physical features I’ve inherited, it’s always been difficult to find any semblance of her in me. Even as a child, she felt foreign. She’s always had this almost magnetic pull to her, a certain magic that hides itself in the parts of her I always wished I’d inherited. I felt just out of reach from her enchantment, like I lived in the shadow of this beautiful, spellbinding woman whose blood never felt like mine. I sometimes joke with my father, asking him how he ever convinced her to marry him. He laughs around it, saying that he bores himself with the same question. It’s nice to see the love alive in him still, after over two decades. He somehow always understands her, even when it seems he doesn’t. I don’t know how to make sense of it, but he recognises her in a way that I can’t— in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been able to.
A little over a year ago, I found a poem I wrote at seven in the back of my closet. It was about an astronaut circling a lonely planet — how she would try to get close to its surface, but was stuck orbiting it from afar forever. I remember reading it to my mother, at that age where I would read out a misspelled shopping list I’d penned like it was Shakespeare. She smiled and praised the way she always did; I never told her it was about her.
Most of my writing is about her, in one way or another. It’s my attempt to try and understand her, search for parallels between her world and mine. It sounds dramatic, but it’s true. She once told me that it was this dramatisation of life, my inability to feel anything normally that made me the person I was— an artist. I couldn’t contest that— I’ve always been deeply emotional, for better and for worse. The question of who I got it from would claw at me, the need to figure out every aspect of myself rabid in youth. Most of my family were— and still are— caricatures to me, like characters from an Indian made-for-TV serial; I couldn’t imagine it was from any of them. But, as I’ve aged, I’ve realised it’s the one person I thought entirely alien who passed me the trait— my mother.
Every night, I would cocoon between bedsheets and plead with her to tell me a story— not from a fairytale or mythological text, but one of her own. Something that could only be hers and mine, no
one else’s. She would paint my slumbering mind with tales of foxes and lions— her characters were always animals— until I could almost swim in the tepid oceans of her fiction. I like to think that her stories are somewhere in me still, begging to spill between the spaces of my words. That she is the centre of my writing because she is the reason I write, the reason I craft these tiny universes to slip into. Sometimes, my mother tongue doesn’t feel like a language— I find my mother between my teeth in something deeper than alphabets or Sanskrit characters. My mother tongue is within these stories, this secret language that brands me her daughter.
In many ways, her tales shaped my morality. My adolescence is painted with her narratives of fictional creatures, and the living ones that poured colour into her memories of childhood. She’s always loved animals— Growing up, she’d take care of strays on the streets of Bangalore. She’d even bring some of them home from time to time, give them a bath in the small space between the road and her front door. She grew especially fond of the dogs. She’d feed them five-rupee butter biscuits, and every morning they would show up at her doorstep for the treat. According to her, they would only ever eat it if the food was cupped between her hands. I’d listen to these stories, and blow wishes on fallen eyelashes for an animal of my own.
The first time any of them came true was when I was nine. A family of pigeons had built their nest on our balcony, beside the air conditioning compressor. I named the birds the minute I spotted them— the male one Iku, the female Piku. I’d feed them grains of hardened rice every day after school, watch as the eggs they laid hatched into timid babies. Caring for them was the first time I’d ever had to care for anyone. I became almost maternal through the year they made my home theirs. I loved them, even if they were just strays.
But, even before this, I somehow always knew that I had a connection to animals. Caring for them was innate to me, like it’d been coded in my blood.
I felt this all from a young age, when my parents first presented me with choices in my diet. My mother’s a vegetarian where my father isn’t, so they were open to me exploring my options before restricting myself to any one. I don’t know why, but even at the age of four, I refused any kind of
meat. I couldn’t bear the thought that at some point, that animal was alive, breathing. That he or she might’ve had a family waiting somewhere, in one of those Fantastic Mr. Fox-esque houses I imagined animals lived in at that age. I remember there being a time when I would kick up a fuss any time my father brought meat to the dinner table. I also remember my mother’s half-smile whenever I would, something akin to pride between her lips that said yes, that’s my daughter.
We share this one thing, this one love. In all that is different about us, there is one stray trait that proves, through something deeper than genetic code, that I am hers. It’s part of what my dog, Leo, is to me— a bridge to her. She doesn’t talk much about her own two childhood dogs, but I can see the way she must’ve loved them in the way she loves Leo. I can see the part of me that’s her in the way I love him, too. My father once told me that before she became my mother, she was a woman a lot like me. That we probably would’ve gotten along in the nineties. I wasn’t sure if the thought left me more comforted or scared. Everyone likes to think that they can escape their bloodline, that they’re the anomaly in a tapestry of invisible strings; in some way, it felt liberating to think that I was nothing like her. That I’d be nothing like her. But there was warmth in the revelation that she existed past my surface— my face, or the pigment of my skin. That she existed in me.
I don’t know that I’ll ever understand her. I suppose it’s impossible to understand anybody completely. There’s a line of dialogue from one of my favourite films, Before Sunrise, that reminds me of this. That if there’s any kind of magic in the world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, or sharing something. The character who speaks it, Celine, has always reminded me of my mother. Watching that film is like observing her in an alternate dimension sometimes. Even in movies, she’s hard to decipher. But the best I can do is try— to love her, and to love the part of me that is her, in all this chaos.
***
I force my eyes open; it’s past four in the morning now. My father’s ditched his wine, peeling the skin off roasted broad nuts. I’ve moved myself to the couch, staring at the glow of a lamp reflecting on our ceiling. I hear an uneven rhythm on the marble floor— Leo crawls out of the master
bedroom, leaving my mother between tangled sheets. His small frame sways in half-sleep as he jumps onto my chest, curling until he becomes a bird’s nest of fur. I caress the curve between his nose and forehead— my favourite part of his face. My father looks up at the scene; I hear him let out a whisper of a laugh. He tells me, as he’s done thrice already in half-drunkenness, that I look exactly like my mother when I hold him.
And this time, I smile.
Fiza is a fourth-year Literary Arts student at School of the Arts, Singapore.