confessions of a body

Deconstructing the skin, the muscle and the bone, to reveal the soul beneath it.

   It all began with a phone call I had with my mother. 

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” I had said.
“Why do you always do this? What’s the need to cry? Now I can’t say anything to you because I’m worried that you’ll get upset.”

   I wiped away my tears and steadied my voice. I didn’t want to play the victim.

“I just want you to be proud of me. If I had your approval, I feel I could do anything in the world. But you seem to hate the person that I am.”

“And this is the person that you are, is it?”

   She enunciated the words with malice. I have grown used to her comparisons of me to the version of me she loved the most. 

“You used to be such a sweet child. You used to be so likable.”

  When I was a child, I was still harmless to my mother’s perception of the world. Now my revealed form had begun to threaten her. I am become the night-time terrors her mother would warn her about:

“Keep your windows closed and stay under the covers, or the dangerous university student will sneak in and brainwash you into having political opinions different from those of your family!”

   After a pause, she said, “You just don’t want to work hard. When we were young, we had to study so much, we didn’t have time to think about politics! I didn’t even know who the president of America was when I was in university.” These words were spoken as if they were something to be proud of - as if her ignorance had been proof of her diligence. 

    I had no words for my mother. All I had to offer on this account was my body, which, by nature of its existence, couldn’t lead the kind of life that she had in mind. 

    What is the body but an expression of the life it has lived? A story set in sturdy flesh. Let me tell you a story, reader. This is the story of my body, how the people in my life have shaped it, and the burden and honour it carries in coming from a culture of intersectionality; constantly trying to shake off the restraints of colonial thought imbued in it. Deconstructing the skin, the muscle and the bone, to reveal the soul beneath it; I show myself to you, naked in the whole of my being. Do not look away. Do not flinch. It is okay for you to read this. 

Mother

   I often ask myself when I stopped being the daughter she adored, and morphed into the “political activist” she feared? Could it have been when I sat and watched the news with her as a child and grimaced as her and my grandmother lamented about “Muslims ruining the country”? Could it have been when I first told her I was attracted to women? 

   Each of the moments that has been a building block to my identity seem to have been another brick in the wall alienating her from me. And as she watched the little soft being of her creation engulfed by a growing fortress, can I blame her for fearing for me? For not knowing that these bricks are an extension of my body?

  Memories of my mother come to me in vignettes, flashing before my eyes simultaneously; I see her smirk with a plan to help me outsmart the kids bullying me. The cheap flea-market DVDs she would buy me after work. The wet blankets we would sleep under in the summer because we couldn’t afford the AC. Her tears when she told me that if something ever happened to me, she would kill herself. My peals of laughter when she would tickle me awake, and I’d smile at the light of the warm sun as it kissed my face through the blanket.

    The Doctrine of caste uses human nature as the basis of its justification. My mother is a ‘Brahmin’. This means she allegedly comes from a lineage of priests and teachers. To my grandmother this meant her daughter was by nature a hardworking, diligent young woman who had a passion for studying. Coming from a family that did not start out as well-off, it was by virtue of these traits that she justified their growing socioeconomic status. 

   There is a divide between the language used by women of different castes in India. The ‘reservation’ in public institutions to a woman from a lower caste holds a connotation of hope. Hope for a fighting chance at equal competition. To a woman from a higher caste, it is a threat. It means that she has to work twice as hard, lest another man seize her position through- what she perceives to be -an unfair advantage. It is thus that the scorn my mother endured by virtue of being a woman in a male-dominated field, blinded her to the complete dismissal of identity that came with casteism. When she claimed that she did not see caste; that she had married a tribal man, she failed to consider that her declaration of not seeing caste held in it her rejection of my father’s strife in society, and thus a rejection of a part of him. And so, she did not flinch as she hurled the words “stupid” and “lazy” at my father, at religious minorities, at student protestors. 

“Let’s not talk about politics” I offered, 

“That’s so condescending! Do you think you’re better than us? You can start having political opinions when you start paying taxes!” she retorted.

    After our call, I cried. Then I put my phone down and looked into my mirror. I looked on in wonder at my blotchy reflection and how it had taken the shape of my soul. I thought about my mother. Her body had been shaped by the anger of her father, the bruises on it a mark of his parentage. He had instilled in her a fear of the unfamiliar.

    This fear had protected her throughout her life. Fear was what kept you safe in the house, when rapists and thieves roamed the streets. Fear kept you in university and gave you a good job so you wouldn’t be married off to and subject to the will of a man; the belt of a man. And with no language to express that fear but anger, she had come to me with reproach. She chose to shape my body with words rather than bruises, and the brunt of them did not strike her as hurtful, as much as they pained me. 

Grandmother

  My grandmother performs her prayers every morning, it is a ritual that solidifies her identity as a Hindu, Brahmin woman. In my mind everything - from her long black hair and the flowers she places ever so carefully into it, to the bindi on her forehead - has been linked inextricably to the tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These religious epics of kings and gods would lull me to sleep. To me bedtime tales; to her they were years upon years of culture and heritage that she was hoping would shape my body into one she could recognize. 

  I was eleven when my grandmother first said to me, “It’s okay Sasha, you’re still a Brahmin”- like a consolation, a bandage on a wound I never knew I had. By the age of fifteen, the unspoken words that lingered after my grandmother’s reassurance: “even though a part of you comes from your father” haunted me. Assured that my grandmother’s disdain of him came from personal grievances, I soured more each day with hatred for his character. And soon I had begun to believe that if I didn’t stay vigilant, if I didn’t try to be more like my mother, I would fall prey to the blood of my father. 

  The vignettes flash away. I think of how my grandmother would remove her dupatta - the cloth that lay across her chest as a symbol of her chastity - and lay it on me to keep me warm when I fell asleep in the car. I think of her hands that worked tirelessly in the kitchen so my tummy would always be full. I think of her lips, the thin sharp lines that formed the cruel words “black dog” and “Shudra.” I would chastise her for it. It would upset me that her opinion of people was based on their birth. To me her condemnation of the driver, a lower caste man, was the same as her condemnation of a part of myself. 

   How insidious is the language of caste and class . “The driver” at first seems innocuous enough, until you hear the way some people pronounce it, reducing the people they’re addressing to occupations. 

   I am often taken back to the words of the last woman I loved: “When Brahmins no longer have Islam to take up the mantle of their foe, the very first victim of their hatred will be the lower caste.” These words came from her experience as a dalit woman, at a time when tensions between Hindus and Muslims were running high because of the election to power of a party that ran on fuelling Hindu hatred against Muslims. As we watched, millions in the country - my grandmother, aunt and mother included - celebrated the destruction of a mosque, masquerading as the construction of a Temple. “Reparations” they called it. 

   A hatred festered within them all. A hatred that called for vengeance, that estranged her from me and a kind I could not replicate. I know it is born of the sort of manic fear that takes over in a stampede, but how loathsome it is to let your fear turn you into someone unrecognizably cruel.

Father

   My father is a tribal man. His people hail from the hills that make up the northeast of India. Stories of how his Tibetan ancestors were displaced and had to move to India for refuge, and how his Gorkha relatives had fought for the British with their curved knives made up his identity. He came from a lineage of sanctity and valiance. 

   When the sixteenth summer of my life broke out, I made my father cry for the first time. Years of blame and resentment had made me a bitter child, and one day his calm composure, his constant affections wore down and he cried. He heaved, and tears and snot ran down his face uncontrollably. I felt a gut-wrenching sorrow for how helpless I had made him feel, and I felt sorry for his weakness. I cried with him, showing the same weakness that my mother’s side condemned, a weakness that spoke to him softly: “I’m still like you, a part of you still lives in me”. 

   As much as my body has been shaped by my mother, it is also a product of the love my father has poured into me. I finally understood this last year. It had been a cold morning, I called him crying on the bus, broken-hearted over a girl whose last name I never learnt, frustrated with my grandmother and mother who had been calling me frantically, asking me to deny being a lesbian. 

   “I think I like girls too. I can’t help it. I’m not doing this on purpose”, I had managed between sobs. He had replied in his constant, quiet voice, “You will always be my daughter no matter what, and I’ll always be there for you, whether you fall in love with a man or a woman.”

   All the distance I had felt between my father and I through the years was bridged in an instant. I had finally learnt to speak the language of his affection. His unwillingness to act unless asked to was not a mark of sloth or indifference as my mother believed it to be, but a sign of his respect for my will. I finally understood that while to my mother loving someone meant shaping them into what she thought their ideal form should be; to my father it meant supporting them regardless of the shape their body, their soul, took. 

   And in those words, I saw my father reading The Hobbit to me each night to sleep. I saw his forgiveness time and again for every harsh word. I noticed his silence around my mother’s affairs. His concern that a child should not be burdened by the weight of a parent’s emotion. I saw the times he nursed me to health when I was sick. The breeze on my cheek as he drove me to school early in the morning just so he could spend time with me on the weekends. The hum of his voice to fill in the silence as we drove back. The bow and arrow he carved for me out of bamboo after we fought. The taste of homemade noodle soup, fried dumplings and all the other meals that he cooked for me every weekend. Meals that he never bothered to cook for himself.

The story ends here

   “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours; and I'll tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on….”, the voice of Mary Oliver droned on in my ears as I walked across the cobblestones to my university building. The sun had begun to set on the cold winter evening, and the pigeons cooed their tunes of solace around me. I watched the last of the sun fade away and unlocked my bike to make my way home. It was far but I knew I’d enjoy the way back, and I knew how to end this story. 

    Look at my body and you will see a queer Indian girl, nails bitten down to the quick. Take the time to look into my soul and you will find that in the laughter that spills over the corners of my lips lies admiration for my friends. The room of my heart is a shrine of little gifts and lessons from past lovers. My mother’s ambition, her desire rages within me unquenching. It compels me to action. My father’s cool solemn patience laps at my feet and tells me to wait. 

     Take the time to see my soul, and you will find the war I have waged against my body for years. She and I are friends now that I understand her better. I do not expect the same of my mother. I believe I am doomed to love her for the rest of my life, as she is to misunderstand me. But I will listen to the sound of the ocean rush against the sand, assuring me of the new year to come and telling me, “It is not yet time”.

Sasha Lama