Dear God,
Not that I believe in you but I think I met you or something that resembled you last night. One minute I breathed and clutched for my life and clothes as yet another man that I had trusted with everything tried to snatch them both from me. I couldn’t do anything. Again. So, I’m sorry for thinking that life was passing okay for the most part in December.
But I don’t think that’s when I met you. I think my brain and body has become used to exploitation. How much do I even have left to give?
The guests were gone and I saw my mother take a bowl of kheer and play her favourite show on TV. What is it about mothers and the sad singularity of the things they do for themselves? I had gone to tell her about what had just happened but I saw her laugh for the longest time and wipe some milk off her lips. I hope you don’t deny me, but there must be another life where happiness isn’t fleeting and leaves a trail of all its glory. My mother has been living in pockets of brief heaven — stealing moments in solitary, sieving seconds from hours. As if her time belongs to everyone else but her. her shoulders are heavy from carrying my father’s anger. her hands weak from holding onto me. I had gone to tell her about it but she was laughing and I couldn’t bring myself to take that laughter away.
I want to leave, you see, I refuse to become a disclaimer for a collapsing family. But I saw her laugh for the longest time.
So, there must exist a parallel world where she walks on wet grass like she did when she was 16. She doesn’t run back inside to heal a broken home — but lets her broken heel turn itself near the jamun trees. Please don’t deny me; in another life, happiness coats my tongue pink with its aftertaste. which is to say somewhere I am my mother’s daughter and I leave milk and cookies on the dining table only for me, I oil her hair and she paints my nails. My father puts a blanket over us when we sleep. He fights men off when I tell him that they touched me in a way I did not want. He doesn’t touch me in a way I did not want. In another life, my mother looks at me build a home of my own and is proud that pain isn’t her only legacy. I let her look at me because in another life, my mother doesn’t see a mirror, but a face inherited from her mother. We hold our ice cream cones tenderly and let them melt all over our slippers. I beg of you to not deny me, in another life, I get to see my father soften under the sun and we water the garden tulips together, my mother plants a few more jamun trees.
In another life, I am not afraid of my home. I am not afraid to stay. So, I stay. I do.
Lovingly and in despair,
Vini
