Thursday, December 21, 2006
â™ 12:15 PM
The Body
The body, like God, moves in mysterious ways. How a body that we occupy, that we have worn like a coat from the moment of our birth - from before birth, even - is still a stranger to us. The body remains a mystery, a book that we have never read. We know more about the depths of the ocean, are more acquainted with the far corners of outer space than with our own organs and muscles and bones. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real, perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties. But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope - that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell.
Motherhood
For my daughter's sake, I can be anything - brave, strong, fearless. For her sake, I can walk on crushed glass, lie down on hot coals, wade through ice-cold waters. But my daughter is here on earth for a few days, I know. Soon, there will be another funeral pyre like this one. Only this time, it will be the body of the baby I gave birth to; the infant who bit my nipple each time after I nursed her; the six-year-old girl who once vomitted after eating six bananas at one time; the eleven-year-old who came home crying from her job at Benifer Sodabottleopenerwalla's place because she had started her menses and thought she was bleeding to death; the sixteen-year-old who grew quiet and grave after her father left us behind like an abandoned pair of shoes. And after this second funeral, after Pooja turns into ashes before my cursed eyes, after I have witnessesd the horror of my own child dying before me, I will want to melt like ice, I will want to crumble like sand, I will want to dissolve like sugar in a glass of water, I will want to stop existing, you understand? Because, Hyder, try and understand - once I had two children, and now I will have none. And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, then I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist. For a woman like me, Hyder, death would be a luxury. I would welcome it, as I once welcomed love. Even though I'm already dead, I know I will have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves. Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. In and out, left and right. There is no breeze in this place, the fire has eaten the breeze, it seems, so hot and so narrow, like the entrance to Ravan's forest, and the smell of dead flowers and cobwebs and mothballs and decay, this smell that is inside my head and it will never leave me, I know, this smell that will trail me the rest of my days, I can feel it entering my bones, settling like dust into my blood.
Death
So this is how history gets rewritten. This is how it begins, with exaltation. Now it is not enough for a man merely to have been a man; now the etiquette of grief demands that we change him into a prince, a king. Now the flaws of a man have to be ironed out like creases in a suit, until he is spread out before us as smooth and unblemished as the day he was born. As if the earth would refuse to receive him, as if the vultures at the Tower of Silence would refuse to peck at him, unless he was restored to his original glory. In death, all men become saints, she thought and she both welcomed and rebelled against the thought. Perhaps it was better this way - this erasing of bad memories, this replacement with happier ones, like changing a dirty tablecloth. But if this was true, what to do about this heavy, lumpen body of hers, this body that cried out its true history, this body that wanted to testify, to bear witness to what had been done to it? Would this body - this knitted sweater of muscle and bone and nerve endings - would this body have to be dead, would its blood have to freeze into immobility before anyone sang its praises and called it the body of a princess or a queen?
Thrity Umrigar.