What would it mean for one such as I to pick up a mirror and try to see her face in it?
Night after night, I asked myself that question. What might it mean to look at myself straight, see myself? How many different gazes would that need? And what to do with the crookedness of flesh, thrown back at the eyes? The more I thought about it, the less sense any of it seemed to make. My voice splintered in my ears into a cacophony: whispering cadences, shouts, moans, the quick delight of bodily pleasure, all rising up as if the condition of being fractured had freed the selves jammed into my skin, multiple beings locked into the journeys of one body.
And what of all the cities and small towns and villages I have lived in since birth: Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, all within the boundaries of India; Khartoum in the Sudan; Nottingham in Britain; and now this island of Manhattan? How should I spell out these fragments of a broken geography?
And what of all the languages compacted in my brain: Malayalam, my mother tongue, the language of first speech; Hindi, which I learnt as a child; Arabic from my years in the Sudan—odd shards survive; French; English? How would I map all this in a book of days? After all, my life did not fall into the narratives I had been taught to honor, tales that closed back on themselves, as a snake might, swallowing its own ending: birth, an appropriate education—not too much, not too little—an arranged marriage to a man of suitable birth and background, somewhere within the boundaries of India.
Sometimes in my fantasies, the kind that hit you in broad daylight, riding the subway, I have imagined being a dutiful wife, my life perfect as a bud opening in the cool monsoon winds, then blossoming on its stalk on the gulmohar tree, petals dark red, falling onto rich soil outside my mother’s house in Tiruvella. In the inner life coiled within me, I have sometimes longed to be a bud on a tree, blooming in due season, the tree trunk well rooted in a sweet, perpetual place. But everything I think of is filled with ghosts, even this longing. This imagined past—what never was—is a choke hold.
I sit here writing, for I know that time does not come fluid and whole into my trembling hands. All that is here comes piecemeal, though sometimes the joints have fallen into place miraculously, as if the heavens had opened and mango trees fruited in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway.
But questions persist: Where did I come from? How did I become what I am? How shall I start to write myself, configure my “I” as Other, image this life I lead, here, now, in America? What could I ever be but a mass of faults, a fault mass?
I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It went like this:
Fault: Deficiency, lack, want of something . . . Default, failing, neglect. A defect, imperfection, blameable quality or feature: a. in moral character, b. in physical or intellectual constitution, appearance, structure or workmanship. From geology or mining: a dislocation or break in the strata or vein. Examples: “Every coal field is . . . split asunder, and broken into tiny fragments by faults.” (Anstead, Ancient World, 1847) “There are several kinds of fault e.g., faults of Dislocation; of Denudation; of Upheaval; etc.” (Greasley, Glossary of Terms in Coal Mining, 1883) “Fragments of the adjoining rocks mashed and jumbled together, in some cases bound into a solid mass called fault-stuff or fault-rock.” (Green, Physical Geography, 1877)
That’s it, I thought. That’s all I am, a woman cracked by multiple migrations. Uprooted so many times she can connect nothing with nothing. Her words are all askew. And so I tormented myself on summer nights, and in the chill wind of autumn, tossing back and forth, worrying myself sick. Till my mind slipped back to my mother—amma—she who gave birth to me, and to amma’s amma, my veliammechi, grandmother Kunju, drawing me back into the darkness of the Tiruvella house with its cool bedrooms and coiled verandas: the shelter of memory.
But the house of memory is fragile; made up in the mind’s space. Even what I remember best, I am forced to admit, is what has flashed up for me in the face of present danger, at the tail end of the century, where everything is to be elaborated, spelt out, precariously reconstructed. And there is little sanctity, even in remembrance.
What I have forgotten is what I have written: a rag of words wrapped around a shard of recollection. A book with torn ends visible. Writing in search of a homeland.
“What are you writing about?” Roshni asked me just the other day. We were speaking on the phone as we so often do, sharing bits of our lives.
“About being born into a female body; about the difficulty of living in space.”
“Space?” she asked quizzically.
“Really: living without fixed ground rules, moving about so much; giving birth, all that stuff,” I replied shamelessly and laughed into the telephone. I could hear her breathing on the other end, all the way from Sonoma County, California; dear Roshni who has lived in Bombay, Karachi, Beirut, Oaxaca, and Boston. And then her gentle laughter.