My earliest memories of my mother are from two photographs. One where she is probably of college-going age and is posing mid-step while dancing. Her movements are graceful or at least were, judging from the graceful pose in the photo. The other is where she is wearing a blue saree and we are in a studio before my first day at school. I am in uniform, carrying a small aluminum briefcase that had my books. In the school van, on my first day, a boy who was not too happy with the idea that I had a ‘bag’ like no other kid, repeatedly stomped on it and dented it. I remember thinking what my mother would think of my abilities to protect my things. I don’t remember what she said. My grief at the denting of the briefcase was instantly soothed by my grandfather. Till date, that photo is an instant reminder of that incident. It is also ironic that my mother’s two daughters cannot dance to save their lives.

For decades, she has dominated our thoughts, our words, our actions. Once someone told me, “Your mother has brought you up very well.” I was happy and I also realized that possibly that was what my mother was aiming for. To be spoken well of through her children. After having both her knees replaced, she was made to walk on the third day of her surgery. She did. Through pain levels unimaginable, she did. My friend told me, “Never have your knees replaced. You are not half the person she is.” I have to agree. Her hardships, her struggles, her work made us what we are. We grew to fear her, we wanted to love her and I think I do. In my own way. That is a dented suitcase I have not unpacked yet.

I see my mother, fastidious, wanting to do things on time, driving us up the wall with her demands and her process of getting her work done, which is to delegate them to me and then to embark on a process of haranguing and wonder how she created a daughter like me. My idea of time is elastic and a day can stretch for months, something that can take a month barely takes a day and vice-versa. Are we what our parents create? Or do we make our parents in our image?

I often think of the opening line from Albert Camus’ The Stranger “Maman died today.” I think of the connotations of the line and feel distinctly uncomfortable. While psychoanalysts have constantly told us how we work relentlessly to erase our mothers from our bodies and I meet women who worry if they will become like their mother, I sense that erasure is not entirely possible. At a certain age, a sort of fragility sets in women. The dynamics of caregiving changes everything about mother-child relationships. The child can see the parent it is going to become or already is in the way they treat their parent. Sometimes, mother wonders how the years have flown and how it is that she got so old. The memories that they live amongst are often repeated, reiterated till your ears bleed. But you will sit and listen. Because that is what you need to do. To get up and walk away is somehow blasphemous, wrong and uncaring. You don’t want to do that.

In Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan’s verses, I see a beautiful connect. The schematics of caregiving and the heartbreak of seeing a figure of authority becoming a dependent is poignant. The parent is everywhere. A corporeal and non-corporeal presence. Only poetry can express such love. Shobha holds the verses like one would hold a baby bird. She inspires the same emotions in the readers too.

At the end of the day, no matter how hard you have scrubbed yourself, no matter how much you have fought against it, there will be a part of your life, a seemingly inconsequential action or a quirk of behaviour that you have brought back from your parent. These poems are a testimony to the longevity of human feeling, of memory and of a sense of time passing and the powerlessness we feel. Understanding is all.

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

We Need Bodies

I read some lines by a writer
who had a stroke,
and she declared
that we need our bodies
to express ourselves.

She said that a song
required a throat
to pass through
before its music
touched the air.

Her words took me to my mother
as words sometimes do
these days.

I thought of her, my mother,
body now frail, and slow,
still holding words and thoughts
for us to receive
each day.

Her body weaves together
pieces of life,
hers, and ours.

It carries in its cells, the travels
to distant places,
the homes built
to strengthen
our existence.

When she holds my arm
to steady her walk,
her hand is part of the body
that once held me close
and stroked my fears away
at night.

As her fingers
tremble in mine,
I feel the weight
of what we’ve shared,
the years that lived
in her skin,
now slipping away.

In the quiet, I understand.

Yes, we need bodies.
We need bodies to carry our love.
We need bodies to tell our story.
It is where we are remembered.

Only After It Is Named

Isn’t that why we embark on journeys?
Not only to see new things,
but to see things in new ways?

Many of us need to go far away
to allow what we have left behind
to become clearer.

How many times I’ve done this,
the packing and unpacking of my life. 
Each place feeling familiar
for a while.

And then the unsettling feeling
of a less than firm foundation.
Nomina si nescis, perit cognitio rerum. 
If you don’t know the name,
the knowledge of a thing perishes.

But how well do we really know it?
And how much of it ever becomes ours?

Perhaps enjoyment comes slowly-
through uncertainty,
even disappointment. . .
before appreciating a destination,
with any depth.

I Made Her Bed

I slept in my mother’s room
and on her bed
the few hours
that I spent in Kochi.

I felt her presence
in all her belongings;
the half-drunk water-bottle,
on her bedside table,
her hairpin,
with a strand of gray hair
still caught in its tine,
the muscle rub,
with its cap loose,
where she could reach it easily,
the balled up mismatched airline socks
that she needed each day
in scorching summer
or winter.

The bed had been made
with a pillow
placed in its middle-
its lump visible
under the bed cover.

Beds must always be made
and covered when you leave the house-
was her mantra.

As I moved the pillow
to the head of the bed,
I imagined her sleeping
on her left side,
at the edge
of the large mattress
with the pillow under
her knees. 

This is where she used to be
all those years;
alone at night,
only her thoughts
for company.
The cooing of the pigeons
in the early dawn
woke me,
as it must have
my mother.

Bracelet

Every morning,
and often
many times
in a day,
I struggle
with a thin gold clip
that keeps
my bracelet closed.

It requires
holding together
with pressed fingers
the two sides
of the circle
that wraps around
my wrist.

These days
it reminds me
of my life.

Of the force
of responsibility,
of completion. 
Of the strength it takes
to make a whole.

Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is an author of a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction published in India and United States and an award-winning voice-over artist who won the 68th National Film Awards, India, for Best Narration Voice Over in 2022. She also worked for almost two decades as a non-profit development professional and as an advocate and fundraiser for persons with disabilities.