Memory and Mother
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One morning I asked my mother the meaning of the English word, ýLife.ý She told me it meant ýJindagi.ý Thatýs how I understood what she meant when the night before when she had cried in utmost hopelessness- hey bhagwan, are we never to have any happiness in life? She stopped pounding on the clothes that she was washing and asked me why I wanted to know. I said ý tesai. She could not hide her relief not to have to explain the grim realities. But I could tell that she knew that I was aware of everything.

My earliest memory is of the time when Sir locked me up in the bathroom because I had accepted a rupee note from one of his friends who had come to visit. He was there when his friend handed me the bill to ýbuy chocolates,ý but he waited for his friends to leave before handing me the punishment for bad manners. The time I spent locked inside may have been an eternity. The loneliness and guilt welled up my eyes and as I looked in the mirror, hot teardrops fell down my cheeks. Like Mother I had learned from early age to cry quietly, silently so that only I could hear the bawling noisy sorrows that erupted inside me.

Mother used to say that he was a saint when not drunk. The only time she was happy was when he was away. He traveled frequently for his job. There were two times when he went away for extended periods- two years in England and two in Delhi. He wrote all these letters about how he had quit drinking. But when he returned he was not a saint.

Mother and I we called him ýSir.ý Right after she was married to him, they lived in a government quarters of his work where the peons called him ýSirý so in jest she had picked it up. And I learned from her. When he was in England he wrote to her. He addressed her: My Nuisance. I have her diary where she copied her letters to him. She began her letters- Dear Sir. And ended them ý Your Nuisance.

Mother had this fascination with arts, music and literature and knowledge. She never threw away old books. I had my books from kindergarten for a long time. She was a teacher of English for a long time and later worked as a librarian. She would come behind me while I was reading my lessons and would be amazed to find out that a certain flower was called ýChrysanthemumý in English. She helped me pronounce it and said, ýEven I did not know that.ý She taught me never to disrespect books- ýnever soil or tear the books,ý she said. She would put a cassette on the tape recorded and just record whatever I said in my child-speak. Most of those tapes were lost and I never got to listen to them when I grew older. There was one surviving tape: I hear myself describing how I would grow up to be a night-bus driver. Mother breaks into her innocent laughter and then Sir scolds me in his drunken garble that I should be an engineer like himself not the lowly driver. And he shouts at her ýYouýve ruined him.ý I burned the tape in rage. I do miss the sound of her laughter.

I have never been able to sleep. When young I pretended to fall asleep as soon as I heard the door slam and he returned home at night. I closed my eyes as hard as I could but I really did not was to fall asleep. My childish sense of responsibility would not let me leave Mother alone lest he harm her. I fantasized about growing big, tall and strong like Tipu Sultan and fight Sir if he laid his hands on her. I heard the shouting, his drunken demand for sex in the filthiest words, her sobbing and sometimes him hitting her. I did not have to be asleep for nightmares. She tried to hide it from family and friends but he was a shameless one-man road show. One morning some of Motherýs friends came to ask her to join them to a visit to a temple. She lied that she had much things to do. But the blue spot above her eyes was screaming the truth. When I was older, about 8 or 10 years, she would send me to the neighbors to call for help when he was uncontrollable. They came and their children, my friends tagged along with them, to watch the spectacle.

Sir once went to Motherýs office and fought with the security guard who did not let him in as he was too drunk. The whole office must have found out about it. I wonder how she faced her co-workers, how humiliating and degrading it must have been.

During monsoon he would come home late at night, his clothes filthy with mud and slime. One afternoon from the window of my class in school I saw him slumber inside the school gate, with his soiled, muddy pants and jackets, on drunken, unsure foot going into the business office. I was on my seventh grade. If it had been the lunch or break times the whole school would have seen him that way. I just wished he were dead right then as I had done many times before.

Mother tried every remedy. In her hopelessness she was went to a dhami/jhakri who gave her a bottle of alcohol that he said was ýprayed uponý which should really help Sir. Sir did drink that and got merry-drunk. My family held pujas and saptahas on his name to cure him with divine intervention.

Mother sometimes sang to me and my sister before bed. In the dark her low voice rang peacefully. She did not sing lullabies but songs from old Hindi movies. Her favorite one was: aage bhi jane na tu, pichhe bhi jane na tu, job hi haiý, bas yehi paal haiý

Sir had gone to Russia for his engineering right after his ISc. That was where he found Vodka. He never went back to Russia in the eighteen years since he returned. We had stacks of engineering books in Russian and numerous slides of his projects and travels. One night as he fell to an inebriated stupor, he blubbered something about a Russian woman named Oxana. That was the one and only time he mentioned that. Mother was in the kitchen so I donýt think that she heard. But the next day I ransacked through all his papers and books. I squinted at all the slides for a hint. No mention of any woman. There was one slide of a group of students. He was standing in the side with a shy smile, his head then full of hair. There were some girls on the picture but he looked too young, too shy, too out of place to have had a relationship with any of them. But I never trusted him so I never found out.

(.....contd)

oh damn.....if all that was true....i so feel for u deeply mG....u written in such a way that i felt some pain of wat u had to go through...it touched me to the core, n well, we appreciate for bein so brave n tellin us all here of ur terrible experiences..helps some people realise how lucky they are n appreciate their stable backgrounds..n helps others to realise that they are not alone in this world goin through bad experiences..

..what we share of ourselves helps us to move on from the past n helps release our inner demons..

Thank u either way mG, true or not.. :ox

Domi

Appreciate the fact that you posted your memory...

Forget and forgive.....

i feel so sorry that you went through a lot of pain and abuse. my heart cried as i was reading your story. i felt very fortunate to a have very loving and caring parents.

i am sure you will meet someone one day and heal your pain and sorrow. time will slowly cure and erase your dreadful memories , but you have learn to forgive . best of luck buddy.

preeti

sorry for the typo
i meant who will heal and ......

and but you will have to .......

MG is it a true story??????????????? Reply garnus hai!!!

MG
Very good way of writing. I couldn't stop my tears rolling down reading it. I just say you r very brave and bold if it's a nonfiction. I know one thing for sure YOU WILL SUCCEED IN LIFE NO MATTER WHAT. I'm a great fan of your writing in which you are blessed indeed. Keep writing

MG?.your narration forced me to go back to a very unpleasant memory lane of my own; a place buried within me. Each experience is different therefore I dare not say that I grew up in the same situation. It was similar though, the only difference would be support of my older siblings. The part where you expressed crying quietly and softly as something you learnt from your mother touched me the most. My mother has passed on some such traits I live with each day. I hope you are just a good fiction writer and you did not have to go through it. But hey, that which does not kill you, make you strong, right???

Damn man that was really touchy. Is that really happened to you?

Man, brought back my own meomories about my struggle.

Take Care Bro. Its a cycle. Time will bring happiness and sadness. Instead of looking back, try to make and future better.

Peace Out

I cant believe I have so many typos. Anyway take care.

Very touchy. wow. wow.
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"Motherhood is priced Of God, at price no man may dare To lessen or misunderstand"

Simply great! touched my soul...

How strange is it to note that it has already been more than a year since I poured my demons on this piece of writing! Incredible still to realize that it had been locked inside me, always in forms of one nightmare or another, for ten years before that fateful day last July. I say fateful not providential; I do not believe in providence. But I remember on that day I woke up with an instinctual, almost animalistic, urgency and furiously wrote "Mother & Memory." In one sitting... When I had finished three hours later I was trembling for in those three short hours I was forced to relive the tragedy of my life, and so many lives around me, in one concentrated dose. The three hours was one grim dash through the extended misery of a lifetime.

I was trembling too because I had finally cut a corner and on seeing it on paper and posted on Sajha for everyone to see I knew the ordeal was finally behind me. In the last year since then I have grown more than the first twenty-three years of my life. It is inaccurate to say that the memory is entirely behind me; life may be lived in chapters but our consciousness is an amalgam of all that we have been through. But I am less bitter now; my past, though equally troublesome at times, is less demanding. The wound of arbitrary violence, uncertainty and doubt on my psyche is finally healing. It is a curious paradox of psychological wound that unlike physical ones, exposure heals it swifter. The comments on Sajha from the compassionate readers were my bandages then. Many asked if it was actually fiction. But as they say, fact is stranger than fiction. The poking and punching of the memory became therapeutic. May be that was the unconscious motive of my writing and posting it on Sajha. I did not want easy sympathy but an acknowledgment of a tragedy that was beyond my control. And for a society where little is shared such personal communication generated affirmations, recognitions and some very painful identifications of similar violence.

I remember that when I shared Mother & Memory a friend wrote back quoting someone, "It is not what is done to us, but what we do that defines us." Although I will always carry a reminder of what was done to me, I refuse to be defined by that. My life's worth will be judged only by what I do.

---
mG.

MG;
It was during my trip to KTM that I read your piece. I had just visited my father and was visiting my mother in KTM. I recall "feeling" your pain, not through my experiences but through your raw emotions. There have been similiar instances when I have penned down episodes in my life which have left me, shaking, bereft, empty. The void was what I longed for because it meant I had emptied my agonies on to a blank sheet of paper to be quietly filed away. Yet, within emotional reach.

Thanks again.

My positive energies with you always!

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"It is not what is done to us, but what we do that defines us." Although I will always carry a reminder of what was done to me, I refuse to be defined by that. My life's worth will be judged only by what I do.

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*applause*

A very beautiful way of expressing yourself. I could feel the magic of your words and travelled with you through time and witnessed everything. My heart cried out for the boy, and it was as if your pain was my pain. Applauds to you!!
I was so touched that I could feel the tears stinging my eyes (but as I am work could not really cry!). Words have a beautiful way of expressing what we feel and yor words were so perfect that I have no words that could do justice to your writing. Keep writing, do not let a talent go to waste. :)

mg, thank you for sharing this story with so many people. it takes a lot of courage to open up and allow yourself to be vulnerable. i wasn't terribly familiar with sajha when you originally posted this last summer, so i am grateful to saajan for bringing it back. and it is quite clear to see how much you have grown and matured, both as an individual and as a writer, simply by reading your posting from yesterday. i don't write on sajha as often as i used to, but i still visit quite regularly and i am always wondering where your poems are....?! many of your poems that i have been fortunate enough to read have really moved me and i thank you for that! ajhai pani lekhnus hai!

Wonderful peice MG.
Deeply touched.

Welcome back!

B.

A very close friend of mine went thru similar circumstances, never-mind his was different in essence. It's been many years since we lost touch, your courageous act have yet again forced me to sit and just reminisces the moments; yet again.

When someone dares to bare his heart out, slit it open and face it straight up albeit the colossal suppressed emotions, from pain to desires to suffering; I simply choose to keep nod and let it sink.

It gives me a bitter sweet pleasure to see you rise above the chaos and be the man that you are MG. Bravo.

Hope you would be as good a survivor as you have proved to be until now. My good wishes mate.

Indisguise.

Dear mindGames:

I just can't help myself to comment-

one word for your penmanship "AWESOME."
And few words for your life experience- "IT IS SO SIMPLE TO BE HAPPY-BUT IT IS SO DIFFICULT TO BE SIMPLE....!!!"

RSVP

very touchy!!