By Gaurika Taneja
They say, the more you age,
the more you grow into your parents.
I keep turning into my mother day by day,
with the colors of my youth flashing in front of my eyes,
soon to be dulled by the colors of sobriety.
An ecliptic change:
from a dirty shade of red to the holy shade of crimson.
That day I would no longer be born as a woman but as a sacrifice.
The sound of my mother’s green bangles echoes in my ears.
I don’t like the color green, I tell her, but she doesn’t remove them.
Instead, she says there will be days when you will pray
to God for wearing these bangles,
for the purpose of fertility.
The child in me refuses to believe her
even though I understand what she says.
There are days when you will feel like a drowning ship
waiting to find your lighthouse.
But don’t settle for the first light you see, she tells me.
Because sometimes, it is better to drown than to be saved by someone
who wouldn’t let you be.
Bonded by the shackles of marriage;
my mother looks at herself in the mirror and
places her bindi between her eyebrows.
As if waging a war between different choices:
What to cook for dinner?
My favorite mutton or my father’s beloved chicken.
She sighs in defeat,
realizing that the word choice is a hoax.
It doesn’t matter who likes what.
It is a matter of whose validation she seeks the most.
Bindi plays a significant role in her life.
Once, it was meant to give birth to a revolution
and wage a war between traditionalism and modernity.
Now, the bindi has been domesticated,
slowly changing its colour from black to red,
going back to the roots it originated from.
My mother gave up on her dreams a long time ago.
I don’t know if she even remembers what it is like to daydream.
She says that my dreams are her dreams,
but I don’t believe her because I have grown to be empty.
There is a certain sadness in her voice masked by contentment.
A silent call of desperation;
we communicate not through words but through silence.
Mom asks me to seek justice for myself,
to free myself from the chains of patriarchy.
I hear her voice seeping through the floor like her tears.
But, Mother, it’s too late,
I almost whisper.