Three ways of looking...
It is time to head back to Write...Edit...Publish... for
the October chapter and this is the much anticipated Halloween month. There's
a choice of two prompts, both utterly yum! I am going with the
Constellations prompt, there are enough scary stories in my life just now to
want to write more :) The scariest thing in the world in uncertainty, not
knowing what the outcome of any given event will be. That one thing can
reduce me to absolute jelly-legs. But that is also the one thing I, in fact we
all, live with on a daily basis, dealing with our given portions as best as we
can.
Recently, I have been reading some modern American poetry and specifically
fell in love with this poem here, which worked itself into the title. Not sure what these things are, they aren't poetry, and they aren't fiction.
And they probably aren't fact either, though they might feel like that
to me. Memory is a tricky thing, always selectively romanticised in retrospect. Whatever they are, I am happily dedicating them to my mother, who, I am pleased to report, is now recovering at home after her recent illness. She is named
after Arundhati, the Indian name for Alcor in the star pair Mizar-Alcor which
are part of the Big Dipper (called the Saptarshi, or the Seven Sages in the Indian system of astronomy). I don't know of anyone more deserving of being
named after a star.
...at Constellations of Meanings
I.
The
sun leaves smudged finger marks on the sky as he disappears. Smoke-lilac, bruise-purple, ash-pink,
burnt-rust. I feel like taking a pot
shot from the hospital window. The
glass pane is large, divided into three. So many things are divided into
three. Day and Night and the In-between
times. Heavens, Earth, Underworld.
Left, Right, Centre. Faith,
Belief, Rituals. Daughter, Mother, Dust.
She
is named for a companion to one of the Seven Sages, she taught me that
constellation in the sky herself. It’s the only one I can immediately identify
looking up more than forty years later wherever I am in the northern
hemisphere.
“It’s
a question mark in the sky. See?” And I
had traced it out with a childhood finger and seen. “And that one in the middle of the
downward stroke? That’s Great Sage Vashistha.
Look a little closer, do you see another? Not as shiny as the others,
but she’s there. That’s the one. Not as conspicuous as the Sages, but always constant, always
shining, sticking close to her partner. She’s a good star to have on
your side.”
I
look from the window to her face on the pillow.
It is tired, lines of pain etched into deep grooves, the claw marks of
time running parallel on the forehead. Her eyelids look a few sizes too big for
her eyes, ringed with the same smoke-lilac of the sunset sky. My hand on her forehead feels unwieldy, not
delicate enough to touch fragile things. Her skin is cool velvet, the fever has broken
sometime ago, the clamminess now a faint residual glow. Outside the threefold panes, the
constellations have quietly climbed into their places meanwhile. The Sage’s Companion is faint, but still
burning. Still a good star to have on my
side.
II.
A
snatch of song interrupts my titanic struggles with the Red Giants, White
Dwarfs and Black Bodies.
‘Oh
my mother’s smile lights up the face of the Moon; her tender gaze, how can it
be lost? it’s there in the eyes of the stars; the sun steals her vermilion to
deck the dawn…’
It
is a 1950’s number popular with her generation, ostensibly an elegy for
someone’s mother. Both the melody and the lyrics are maudlin and mildly
annoying, really, Bengalis!
‘Please
stop! I am trying to study here. And my
grandmother isn’t dead, why are you singing that?? It’s a silly song anyway.’
I
can hear her laugh, she is always laughing, the house rings with it all the
time, expansive, pervading, infectious.
But her comeback is devoid of laughter.
‘You get distracted too quickly, child! And it’s not about your
grandmother, it can be about any mother. Mother Nature, the Earth Mother. Mother is a vast word. One word, many interpretations, whole
constellations of meanings.’
‘It’s
just an awful sentimental song.’
‘Space
for your dislike too in this house. Just shut the door.’
Blue,
white, red, dead. All things born must
die. All the stars are dead. The constellations are dead, they are prehistory, primordially dead. Dead is dead black, matter
burnt to a crisp, to a nothingness. Blue
is hotter than red. Red is hotter than
dead. Cool ice blue, fiery red hot. No, hot blue, cool red. Constellations may actually be patterns
connecting star-corpses. Constellations of bluewhitereddeadcrispblacknothingness. Constellations of ancient, ancient light caught in a time warp. Constellations of meanings.
I
get up to shut the door. She has
meanwhile switched to a different tune, ‘Are you only an image? Are you not
true like the planets, constellations and the sun?…’
III.
A
single star pins up the sky in place. The
sunset is a ragged, multicoloured curtain on the horizon. We heave ourselves off in long strides, back
off the inselberg at the starting point of the highway. The twilight is just one sharp flare of light - and it goes quickly here. We haven’t left ourselves much leeway.
‘Pretty,
isn’t it? A bit more colourful than back home.’
I am silent. Because her ‘back home’ isn’t
mine. She is in a boarding school
somewhere abroad, here only for the long summer holiday. I live a little way up the road, my school a
fifteen-minute drive. The local girls’ school - a compound of low buildings
splashed with vivid bougainvillea and hibiscus. A residential school where
I, as an expatriate child, am exempt - let off every afternoon to go back home.
Back
home is a phrase fraught with many difficulties. Because half the time home doesn’t feel
anywhere at the back, it is right here in front of me, in this wide open, magnificent savannah I have known half my life. And the other half? If I listen carefully, I
can hear my still unformed identities split down the middle. When I go on holiday, my grandfather rebukes
my parents in absentia through me, ‘For how long? This nomad’s life? Settling down
is also something. Do you know what your ‘gotra’ is?’
I
don’t have the faintest clue. And I don’t much care. My father makes an
indifferent Brahmin, I don’t see him wearing the sacred thread around his
torso, don’t see him do the ritual sprinkling of water before meals, I have
never seen him pray at all. My mother
now - hers is a different world altogether, she prays on the full moon night of
Lakshmi-puja, marking the Gregorian calendar painstakingly in ink, picking out
the correct confluences of suns and moons and constellations from letters that take more than a month to bridge the distances between her home and homeland half a world away.
She
stands under the porch now in the fast fading twilight.
‘You’re
late, child. The rule is to get back
home before the streetlights come on, remember?’
‘Where’s
back home, Ma?’
'None of your cheek!' But something
in my face arrests her displeasure. ‘Home
is that land which puts food on your table.
Never forget the respect you owe her.’
