Your fingers

Remember how you told me once that there is a bubble around me. That nothing ever could touch me. Harm me. Affect me. Remember?

I was old enough, I thought, to understand what you meant by the bubble. I always thought I was old enough to understand you and you had never led me to believe otherwise. You never told me like everyone else does, that ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’ or ‘you’re too young to realize’. You had always encouraged my individuality even before I could spell it, encouraged my opinions and the fact that I was starting to have a stance in everything, you’ve quietly buoyed my self analysis, my self awareness, my feelings and my emotions. For as long as I can remember I have always had those grown up senses, I remember especially those of embarrassment, disappointment, anger, irritation and humiliation. You’d think I’d be done with my quota by now. You had always endorsed if not my opinion, but my having one in everything. I remember you dreamt of a year-old me lying on your bed with a bottle stuck to one side of my mouth and participating full throttle in some conversation you and Baba were having. Funny, you’d dream that. Funny I would remember it after something like 20 years. You will be amazed at all that I remember.

I was away from home for the first time, a little shy of 18. I was attacked on the street coming back from college right outside my dorm. I tried to scream, run, defend myself and by the time I could get any sound coming out of my windpipes, all I heard myself say was “Ma”. I still remember the rustle of his rain-jacket as he walked close behind me moments before. I don’t remember if I hit him, its hazy now that I have repeated the scene so many times in my mind at what I should have done and could have done and actually did. I think I ran and maybe I fell just as I reached the main gate. I don’t remember the name of the girls who helped me get in and to my room. I don’t remember what my roommates had to say about the incident. I remember though the same person had attacked a couple more girls from our hostel later that year before we all moved closer to campus.

Later that night I remember standing in front of the phone on the U-shaped portico looking out into the clothes spread out to dry when you told me to always remember that there’s a bubble around me. Nothing can ever touch me, harm me, affect me. I remembered wondering for a while then and intermittently thereon what that meant. Were you trying to give me solace, my trauma evident to the mother, with or without the details of the incident? Were you trying to make me braver? Or were you giving me a slice of the higher truth that you’d always been privy to? Or is it you who somehow created that bubble for me?

I remember, sitting on the red plastic chair and thinking about your fingers-- loosely entwined on your lap in the car next to me as we drove to school a really hot summer day in 2001, just a few months before this night's incident. That day I had let you down and Baba and some others. I don’t remember how you had looked at me then. I remember showing that I didn’t care and remember not crying even in solitude. I remember tasting failure, but choosing to ignore it, getting lost in my second world like I have so done so-so many times after that.

Sitting on that plastic chair I was thinking about your fingers as if they were weaving a bubble around me…

That other day in the car, were you praying? Were you just catching onto composure? Or was in another grain of imagination stuck in the convolutions of my brain?

I always saw you as a person who was always right, never scared, who knew everything, who had all the answers, someone I could pray to but not someone who would bow to another power. Because you were power. The sun doesn’t bask in sunshine. And this hierarchy of authority confused me. I tried to take momentary pleasure and strength from the fact that it’s well-wishing. But seeing you pray then and anytime after that or the knowledge that you did report to another power, wrecked me. Destroyed my morale. Shattered my belief (in you). I started treating you as a mortal, I began to think and judge you as an individual; choices you make, decisions you have taken. I started reprimanding you internally and externally for whatever I thought was wrong. Yes, you opened the floodgates to the fact that you could be wrong. It wasn’t teenage rebellion, just sort of a religious conversion. And yet once again that reprimanding decreased; I sometimes understood, sometimes accepted and meanwhile quietly mapped out my choices and decisions of my life, fully aware of your judgment about them. This was not revenge and it was not to ignore you like I had felt ignored once, I was not cooling off against you, just another conversion, better known in society as growing up.

Does it all make better sense to you now?

Well eight small years have gone by with that knowledge of the bubble and even without knowing any rhyme of reason, all I saw was that the bubble was always there; nothing really ever happened to me. I have cried myself silly for more men than anyone should ever hope to get involved with, I have been stuck in an upside down car in a ditch with no hope to be rescued and I have found myself fainted on the bathroom floor unclothed. I have felt humiliated and abandoned, elated and thankful, felt like an ace and in the dumps within hours, felt enamored and cheated, celebrated and stampeded, coddled and stifled, worshipped and ignored, young and old, scared and brave. I have lost, found and lost again. I have been in moments where I hoped I was dead and in those where all I wanted was to live. And I think in some of the harshest times I almost hear myself telling me, loudly enough for anyone to hear … ‘you’ll be okay’, ‘you’ll make it’, ‘stop crying’, ‘don’t panic’, ‘we’ll figure something’. Is that the bubble talking to me? The bubble that you wove for me that autumn evening? Or is that a part of you, that you put in me when I was a part of you? Is this bubble just an extension of your womb? Or the sheer well-known, well-tested, well-understood philosophy that 'life goes on' in a more personal, more decodable, strong-and-easy-at-the-same-time, ubiquitously familiar motherly language? --something we seldom use now. But do you still remember how that sounds? Remember, Ma?