Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG December 2019 : Footprints

Time for the final Write...Edit...Publish...+IWSG Challenge, this month a little early to allow us all to disperse for the festival season. The prompt comes from Tyrean Martinson as the winning entry for a contest at IWSG last year. I have loved writing to both the IWSG prompts - it's always more interesting to write to, when someone else dreams them up! :)

My offering this final challenge of 2019 is also a memoir/photo essay. With this I have managed to write memoirs for all the prompts this year, so if that qualifies as a writing goal it's been ticked off, yesss! The original is much longer,  I am presenting an excerpt. 

The C-word

The years blur, it is so long ago now. Time spins to a different, wobbly-quick yet interminably slow beat during tumultuous events. The years blur, but the month stays, and it is an early morning in March. Memory is that March morning, as I come awake in Delhi to the sound of a taxi entering the block and coming to a stop just underneath the window. When I look out, both my parents are alighting from it. Memory is a stab of pure surprise – because they had written to cancel the trip my mother was to make.

Mother and I much before Nigeria

My maternal grandparents had died in quick succession, one death in December the previous year and another two months later. My mother was supposed to come in February but she had cancelled. But here she is now, not even a month later, come without any notice. Her jawline altered out of recognition, her hands in mine hotter than a Sahel sun. Lots of young folk don’t have mothers, you’ll have to be strong.

Her eyes are clouded with an unfathomable distress but her words are crystal clear. There is no false escape to be had, no refuge in imagining she is delirious. She has just made a journey of nearly 7000 miles with a body wracked by disease, but her mind is still her own. She does not believe in the comfort of white lies.

I’m nineteen and in university, but I’m still a child. And terrified at the thought of a world that does not include her - it turns my brain inside out and ties it up in a million tight Gordian knots.

I hear the adults murmuring in the sitting room while I sit at her bedside. What I hear in snatches makes no sense. Her fever remains at a searing temperature that I never thought was possible for humans. My father whisks her off to Calcutta. And calls me from Dover Lane a few days later. Will it hamper your studies if you come away now?

That’s it. The phone call seals it. My world comes crashing down. My veggie-growing mother has grown some awful unknown disease. My tiny-spunky, Tagore-obsessed, a-smile-per-minute, brimming-with-life mother, is dying.

***

The bungalows of the long, narrow footprints had passed out of my teenhood. End of school in Bauchi I sat for the certificate exams and thereafter came back to Delhi to finish my education. The West African grasslands felt many galaxies away - Delhi was very different. The capital city of much layered history, judiciously urbanised and landscaped green, a culturally and politically happening, never-a-dull-moment, hyper-stimulating metropolis. A far cry indeed from the laid-back, low-rise, sleepy, ‘broken-china-in-the-sun’  West African towns tucked into the Sahel or the Sudan Savannah.

Before my world came crashing down.

In Delhi after Nigeria.

I was kept busy transitioning to an entirely different, very urban Indian lifestyle, and didn’t have any time to consciously think of missing anything. Delhi had been my home before I’d gone off to Nigeria, and I was back, I was ‘home’ in India. Perfectly logical, perfectly normal then not to feel any lack, to slot right back in. I lived with relatives who had known me and my father from our respective early childhoods. There were no reasons for even a twinge of misgiving.

Just that sometimes, I would look up and the sky would be a little, faded blue patch caught between the edges of buildings, sliced up into portions by electric wires and TV antennae. I would look across but my eyes would be cut off by someone’s roof terrace or washing lines. The horizon was nowhere visible, unless I got on to a train to Calcutta,  and until it pulled out after Ghaziabad into open countryside.

But those vast expanses where I could turn my eyes any direction and not spot another soul, those skies of a million diamond-bright low-hanging stars, those wide open spaces where nothing obtruded upon the eye, the sheer beauty and majesty that could squeeze my chest and make my breath catch in my throat? - they were nowhere to be found again. However, I had no conscious knowledge of what exactly was missing, I was not self-aware enough to be able to articulate it. There was enough going on to stop me thinking on it.

But then one night a young man making ordinary dinner conversation asked me some casual questions. Do you miss the place? Really? What about it?  And I came up with a list so long and delivered it so forcefully that I made him nearly jump out of his skin. I startled myself as well with my own intensity. In a flash I had matched words to the feelings, I had learnt to articulate my losses. I do. I do. I do. Footprints, birdprints, leafprints, skyprints, starprints. Invisible. Indelible. All over me.

***

The path lab reports have not come in even when I get to Dover Lane. My mother is with her eldest sister at Jodhpur Park, another house the footprint of which is permanently etched into my life. I move between the two houses, the days spent with my terribly ill mother and the nights with my father. Both my parents have withdrawn into their respective familial comfort zones at this moment of crisis. I am straddling two houses, two parallel worlds, as I have always done since early childhood.

The reports finally come after endless checking, rechecking, these decisions are not handed out lightly. I had hoped against hope…but there’s none. The last remnants of childhood are yanked off in one night like a Band-aid from a raw wound. A piece of paper has finally pushed me over the edge and sent me reeling into adulthood.

I spend that night at Dover Lane in wild terror.  I alternately weep and rant. Neither father nor daughter gets any sleep. He too never offers the comfort of platitudes, the easy escapes of glib positivity and white lies. 

How are you so calm?! Are you not worried?! 

He is infinitely patient, exhausted but composed. Yes, I am. Worried sick. That’s why I’ve brought your mother home. 

What are we going to do?! 

We will do what she wants. And exactly as the doctors say. 

But she’s not even 45! 

That, child, is our misfortune.

Mother and I in Calcutta. Nov 2019.

WC-1043

FCA


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Here's a sneak peek of what's happening at WEP next year! Join us again then. Wishing you all a great holiday season and a very happy and creative 2020!