Remembrance
Photo: Karan Madhok
Personal Essay: ‘Now, at twenty-one, I draw bodies: bodies that its owner probably hates, but a lover would describe it as squishy, bodies like soggy noodles and bodies like Manda peetha, bodies like sushi.’
Three days in a row, I feel so happy I die. Thrice a day on a burger and a cold coffee. I die holding my food in my hands—yes, both hands—full of it with a full mouth, but seldom a full belly. It has taught me scarcity and abundance. It has taught me things my mother couldn’t.
I feel a hunger so raw and lethal that it’s hard to believe this is the body containing it, housing it. It takes all of the space inside. Sometimes I need to take a good look to find my friends, to ensure that the other-worldly loves are still there.
Once when I was in a romantic relationship, I wore the same skirt every other day for weeks. Now, I haven’t worn it in so long. It doesn’t feel like a burger I can eat every day, it feels like something I wore once during a high fever. I like the sweets in my hometown so much better because you can eat a lot of them before actually feeling full. They felt nicer in my hands, too. Where I live currently, the sweets are heavy (in my first language—Odia—the word is nida, that is the kind of heaviness I am talking about, which is reserved for food), you can’t have a lot of them at a time, or keep having them for days.
My mother and I don’t get along, but we have a way of communicating in common: storytelling. I have noticed whenever I become close with someone, I tell them stories, mostly from my own life, from different times and phases, creating a variety of tastes and mixing of colours, leaving them to interpret or take as much as they’d like. All the good parts of my memory contain food, a texture or a smell or an image, around a street or rain or voices. In my head, I must separate the food from its surroundings, leaving only its taste as all that it contains. It’s an impossible task: only a certain level of filtering is possible while telling a story. It has to be authentic.
My mother and I share a lot of traits, traits that make us dislike each other, and make us want to run away from home. I am yet to tell her how attached I am to the food she cooks; it doesn’t matter what aesthetics it clears or fails, my hunger is simply drawn to it. We both keep forgetting what we look like: the exact texture, if we don’t touch our skin, the exact shade, the shape of the brows and the amount of hair and its distribution, I keep taking pictures: of self, of anything I’d like to remember. She prefers forgetting. She already remembers things like how to make a Thai curry, and I can’t even do a simple baigana bhaja without rushing to google.
I don’t feel much of a connection with my name. I wonder if it's the same for my mother and her mother. I am still a little startled every time someone uses it.
Is there a feeling officially described as ‘pre-motion sickness’? It’s something I feel, a feeling on the night before a long journey that will make me sick. Calling it ‘anxiety’ will only trivialize the feeling. It’s different, as different as anger is to resentment.
I think my body knows how much I was not in love growing up with it, so it punishes me with painful aches whenever I suffer a fever. I have the exact same body as my mother, the same texture, like a well-fermented dough, but a smallish-medium thing. I’m only a few inches taller than her. But, this body grew on me (quite literally) and it brings me joy by simply existing and making me comfortable.
Ma and I are taking pictures. She turns away from the frame. It might be her favourite thing to do. So, I take a picture of her back. Its sameness is beautiful.
I kept drawing homes when I was young, different types, different landscapes, like the one in my village, the one in the city I currently live, the one in my hometown. No matter in what ways I moved my pencil, in the end, I would find a home on the paper. Now, at twenty-one, I draw bodies: bodies that its owner probably hates, but a lover would describe it as squishy, bodies like soggy noodles and bodies like Manda peetha, bodies like sushi (described as a ‘type’). And yet, no matter in what ways I move the pencil, in the end, I would still get a home on the paper.
Is there a feeling officially described as ‘pre-motion sickness’? It’s something I feel, a feeling on the night before a long journey that will make me sick. Calling it ‘anxiety’ will only trivialize the feeling. It’s different, as different as anger is to resentment.
After-lunch is simultaneously the most creative and laziest time for me. I remember pouring that laziness into my first poem (at fourteen); it became an act of comforting, of dozing off and away, rhythmic and (seemingly) never-ending. That was my first time feeling afraid inside a poem, my direction-navigation skills suck and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find the way out of my own verses. I was tired of navigating forward, and the weather was dry; and yet, it was a beautiful poem: so smooth that I would have liked to wrap myself in it.
This fear never really went away, but it taught me to trust myself. It taught me that I would always know when it’s time to finally stop and leave the poem. Yet, sometimes I have to keep walking for so long that it feels like it’s not me but the poem that has the final say on when it wants me to leave. I have a feeling my aaima (Ma’s mother) is still finding her way out. Or maybe she doesn’t wish to come out at all; maybe she has finally found a poem nice enough to stay in for good.
I have seen her live as only two identities, a woman and an artist, and she is never one without the other. Even when she physically stopped writing, she couldn’t stop being an artist.
Lately, I’ve been rejecting things as a reader. I’ve been an insincere reader for a while, now after much experimenting and pondering and bouts of stress, I can admit, that I am more into reading essays, fiction I can identify with. That’s what I need now, a lot of it. Sketches of memories, of steamy novels (none I ever dreamt of actively indulging in, but only passively consumed to witness desire, or to attempt to understand desire in my early teen years), of a passive-obsessive interest in romance (to witness without involvement), of trees everywhere, and always having a moment for them, of my first time trying lychees, of buildings and shapes. These sketches are everywhere, some neatly stacked, some stuffed into folders and diaries and in places and homes. Sometimes I look at a place for too long and pick a paper, and draw on its other side instead of taking out a fresh unused one.
It’s confusing, feeling a loss of a sense of belonging to someplace you had been so drawn to for years; but perhaps, that’s that’s how identity works: it comes with its own muddled feelings and feelings of euphoria, ebbs and flows and all. The place (in the physical sense ) I belong to in the truest sense has been living a life of its own, a full life, out of sight, out of reach.
A full, bright marigold in my balcony, beloved to none and neglected by all. It sits alone most evenings, surrounded by other plants, and looks you right in the eye, as if making a confession, or daring you to acknowledge its existence. Then, once in a while, the separate lives briefly come together—an intersection, like my mother and her hometown, me and the transient nature of the sense of belonging, the actual act of remembering, and memories like moving portraits on water.
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Mukta Malini is a student from India majoring in Mathematics and indulging in poetry and writing in her free time. You can find her on Instagram: @mukta141592.
