Mom

“Here, beta,” my maasi said as she handed me over a warm glass of water, she was under the wrong impression that I was struggling to deal with the passing away of my mother, just like how she was finding it terrible to not have a sister from now-onwards to daily talk to, after finishing the household work. 

I drank a sip, it soothed my infected throat a bit. I walked over towards the window of  my room, which had been locked since ages. I entered the room and found it sleeping under a blanket of dust. I pulled my old, worn out wooden chair from the study table, and sat at the window. The moment I drank the last gulp, a tear rolled down my right eye. It was as my brain remembered my entire life, and that how I never had a single good memory of my mother. I must forget now how much I hated, since it is immoral to talk bad about the dead. Will this change the fact that she still tortured me, that she never showed me how warm motherhood is? 

I looked all around, the bulb had become dimmer, and the fan had become creakier. 

All the memories started flashing in, every incident of my childhood, or I can say every trauma. Living with her wasn’t easy, it required nodding all the time. 

I was five when she put me in drawing class. Two years passed away, I couldn’t learn anything. That was the first time she had slapped me, I still remember those four fingers on my cheeks. 

By the time I was eight, I was sent off to ballet, although I wanted to be a cricketer. 

“You have to look beautiful, that is what matters for a woman,” she would always say, and there would be silence all over. I would spend hours embodying grace and beauty in myself, and somehow I managed to do it, but it wasn’t of any use. 

My mom would grab my shoulders and cry out loud. “Why are you a slow learner, tell me why?”

“This isn’t what I like,” I would rebel. 

“You are a woman, you must have beauty, beauty and beauty,” she would yell out loud. 

She would every day bring in some or the other pastes which would smell horribly, and she would put them on my face all over.

“It is burning like hell, I am going to wash it,” I would say when she would grab me. 

“No, it will make your dark tone faire. No, I said”.

There would be oil every time in my hair, and she would shampoo them hard, making them soft and straight, and not like a curly nest like her.

It would pain, but I couldn’t do anything. She hated the fact that I was her Xerox copy. 

I couldn’t get any chocolates and cakes, as they would bring acne to my face. I wasn’t allowed to choose what I was going to wear, as she didn’t like my choice. I would always get magazines full of portraits of beautiful models and their tips for looking graceful and radiant when I asked for any comic. I was only allowed to watch cook shows which would teach making modern delicacies, and presenting food in a fancy way. She controlled my life, and all she ever thought was how to make me attractive. She also forced me into being a topper, with me also going to violin and dancing classes every day, not allowed to skip even during my onset of periods.

“I am skipping tomorrow’s exam,” I said one day, too tired from my dance rehearsals. 

“No,” she said. She sat there, making me study half of the whole night. 

I fell asleep on the day of the exam. When she heard it, she slapped me thrice, tightly.

“Why do you cause trouble to your mother? Why aren’t you turning out how I want you to/ You were born to torture me and bring me troubles it seems,” she yelled that day, the whole house in her terror.

“That’s because I resemble you, curse yourself for that,” I said back, too much frustrated, though I accept a daughter can never in her life tell that to her mother, no matter what happens. 

She was hurt, and she cried the whole week. I thought she would stop, but she became even more determined now to make me beautiful. She also did not speak to make, she would enter my room, not speak a word and would sit there, her cold hand pointing me to do whatever she wanted me to do. 

I became a distinguished ballet dancer, and could play the violin really well. Her pulling my long hair twice every week to make them silky and smooth turned out to be of some use, they helped me find my first boyfriend whom I married eventually. 

“No, I will find a guy for you, you can’t marry somebody else,” my mom objected, obviously. 

“Can you please stop interfering in my life,” I burst out wailing that day. “All my life, I lived as you wanted me to live, your will prevailed all the time. Now please, let me take one decision for myself, let me live one day, please,” I begged in front of her. 

As the preparations happened throughout the wedding, she was creating chaos, my mother. In the end, I wore what she wanted, and I looked how she wanted me to. During the last three days, she tried to talk to me, but I was already too mad at her for creating an argument at every function. When I was wedded off, I never called her from my in-law’s place. Also, I had then started working again, and I had no time to talk to her except giving harsh and dry replies if she had accidentally called me once in a blue moon. 

The day I received the phone call reporting her suicide, I had zero reactions, I wasn’t shocked at all. I knew she was mentally sick, and her life’s motto was to take all of us with her to the asylum. 

It wasn’t until I saw her dead corpse that I fell in an abyss, the space of nothingness. I forgot, everything for a second, it felt as if I was the corpse. There she lied hopeless, bald and charcoal on her dark skin, all over her body, after which she hung herself. 

“Where the hell were you lost that she did this to herself,” my expressionless and tear-less self told my father, who stood there as if, as if, what has happened, has happened. 

Suddenly, my flashbacks went away, and right now here I was in this room for what I came here, to read two diaries left for me by my mother, which was her last wish of this life she had written and put in an envelope saying “Only for Riya”, before she departed forever. 

I read through the ten pages she had written, each one slapping my existence to the very core of it. As I completed her diary, I opened the second diary of my father, which my mother had stolen from him and had convinced him by crying for a week that he had forgotten keeping it somewhere. I read all night this long diary of his, full of poems on women, women with silky hair, fair ladies shining bright and ladies smelling of strong perfumes all the time. I saw each mesmerizing beauty’s head-shot he had glued it with love, all the women he lived his life with, except my mother. At first, I thought that this woman’s last wish was also to invade someone’s privacy. Now, it was needed. She was the woman who held her hand out to catch her husband’s love, which was always of some other woman, and it only caught bitterness every time. 

“I tried to make him like me more, as I couldn’t leave him for my kids. Every time I ended to make myself more beautiful, he never saw it, as there was someone much better for him ready at each stage of life. Now, no more”. This was the last thing  she wrote in her diary. 

I sat there trapped in a dark chamber of hatred for her, for my father, and the most for myself. But how could I know this? Every thing made sense now, every dark memory of my childhood lost its hatred. All I could hear was the echoing silence when I never spoke to her for ages, and my dry replies and rough words. 

I took up a pencil, with tears dropping on that page, and wrote after the last sentence of my mother in her diary :

I love you. I wish we deserved you.