to my ma

When I sit down today to write, my main objective is to go beyond myself, to make myself not the protagonist, the victim or the central character. I want to, for the first time write about things that happened in my life involving my family, but I want to see my family in the main role being the spectator. It will be a hard job, but I will still try.

          What prompted me to bring this change in mind is my mother’s blog about the night my father tried to kill himself. I know this is not a topic everyone would face in public, let aside talk about it. But that very night so many things changed and reading my mother’s writing after six years of that incident, I can look back with a fresh eye. I can look back not being a victim of a bad marriage between my parents but as a spectator. I start with my mother’s description, “At times she reassured him that all would be well, that he had nothing to worry about. At other times she spoke of all the good times they had enjoyed. She did not really know what she was doing but believed that he could hear her; that he would not slip away as long as he knew she was around.” I was so surprised reading this! The surprise came because I thought after more than 25 years of bad marriage and seven years of extremely abusive relationship, by the time the incident happened that night she was not in love with my father. But now reading this I come to realize I was wrong and that makes me look back on the incidents.

            It was a usual hot and humid early august evening in 2007. I came back home from a movie where I went with my friend after  lab. I expected to be  greeted by my mother’s students, who I was not particularly fond of for no reason and my mother when I enter our old but huge home in north Calcutta. But that evening something was different, the moment I entered the house I smelled something strong and obnoxious. I immediately knew that it was my father who had done something wrong, and that alarmed me. More than the alarm what irritated me was the fact that my mother was in her usual mood with her students, not with my father trying to find out what was wrong, her traditional house wife role. And hence she was the victim of my sharp tongue; I blamed her for not being a good woman, an attentive wife let alone a good mother. I can still see the sudden pain in her eyes; an insult that she did not expect will come in front of her students. But there I was with all my frustration venting it out on her. The moment I was done making her realize how horrible a person she was, I went inside and did the same with my father, who was half asleep. I knew that evening looking at him there was something wrong. But could not gauge how bad it was. I just saw a dark shadow on his face which was darker than the usual caused by seven long years of depression. But once my rage was out I thought my job was done, so I sat in front of the TV with my dinner and cared nothing about the hurt that I had caused my mother or the wrong that was going on with my father. Though this is a story to go beyond myself I must qualify here that I was not a total loser, whatever I did was to fight my fear of not knowing what was coming. I knew something wrong, terribly wrong was coming! Interestingly as the night progressed my mother and I patched up, dealing with my father’s long depression together we had learned to patch up and stick together, not exactly because of just love, but because of the expectation that when the whole world turns against us, which happened so often, we will save each other.

            We will fast forward few hours here, and around midnight when I was going to the bathroom I smelled something terrible from the drawing room, which was my father’s hiding room since he started having depression. I turned the light on and saw the most awful sight of my life, my father unconscious or dead, "sleeping" in his own shit. The alarm which I hard in the back of my mind that evening, and which eased a little after seeing him having dinner and as usual throwing tantrum over the menu of dinner, started ringing loud. So loud that I screamed and my mother came from her bedroom. At that instance we, ma and I were one, we knew we had to act. In next few minutes the doctor was contacted, ambulance called, my friend from school was on his way to help us. Ma and I gave baba a bath to clean him, he nearly dead and limp in our hands. And when it came to cleaning the room before the ambulance arrived, I showed my first annoyance and told ma that she should do it as it was her job. Looking back now, I do not know why the hell I cared about cleaning the room? Because it was unpleasant or because I wanted to get back to the normal room and tell myself nothing had happened?

            We were rushing to the hospital, baba on the stretcher, ma and I next to him and I was thinking should I be sad? Is my mother sad? Or she is in a way relieved that my father was finally dying? For last seven years both ma and I always thought there is no escape from the agony unless we die or he. And I was thinking, sitting next to him right then, may be we are free. I did not know what my mother felt till another 6 years passed and she wrote about that night. She did not feel free, she felt pain, a pain of losing her not so great, but still the only companion of more than 25 years. How stupid I was to think that she was over him. How insensitive I was to imagine she wanted him to die. And even if she felt free, can I blame her, although I did every day for next one month or more, for being a horrible wife, for being the reason baba tried to kill himself, but can I really blame her? When do we lose our right to be happy? The right to be around people who love us an away from people who try to harm us every moment, the right to protect ourselves? When we are born as a woman, when she gives birth to her kids, and brings them up with sheer determination and will power? I do not know. What I knew was I needed a punching bag. And my mother with the shock of her life, was the perfect one. So since that night for next couple of months whenever she was analyzed and scrutinized by everyone, including her flesh and blood, I was either grouping against her, or at times was protecting her, thinking she cannot survive without me. Stupid of me, she did not need me, as she knew she was by herself. I remember one evening, she surrounded by her cousins, all of them trying to comfort her that evening when the doctors said baba was brain dead and it was just a matter of time. There was another  group of people, my father’s side grouping and discussing how horrible my mother and to some extent I was. When everyone left I went to my mother, this time as her child, lost and confused, and asked her, ma what do you feel? And she replied, I do not know, everyone is treating me as if am a widow, but he is still there. I can still see him breathing through the machine, so I do not know. It took me another six years to find the meaning, the love, the insult, the shock in that statement. She knew she was being blamed, framed and cut off from anything civil in a middle class Bengali life because of him, but still she did not accept the fate of a widow as most probably she still loved him. Or may be not, may be am reading her wrong again, may be she was as selfish as I was and am. But what I see is a new perspective. A light that helps me in understanding a little bit why she even now, after five years of separation with my father, never kicked him out of her life when we all, including the ones who were so worried about him and blamed ma that night have banished him.

            This is not a story, neither a way to say sorry; I did and react the way my brain told me to at that time. This is a note to tell my mother that I understand you a little bit more may be, and everyone who are in similar situations, come out of yourself and the pain can be shared.