REPULSION

By BASRAH HASAN RIZVI

I love contradicting phrases with arguments so logical one may not even be ready to rebuttal leave alone discard.

That when one fine morning, we were being taught a lesson, ‘my mother at sixty six’, by Kamala Das.

I found myself repeatedly cross evaluating the answers of each question our sir ever asked.

‘Have you ever thought of losing your mother/parent?’, he questioned.

‘Ever? Ever is a phrase that wouldn’t do justice to the paragraphs I’ve experienced’. I mumbled in my thoughts.

We dived into the lesson and for good few minutes were rampaging through words when suddenly another attack.

‘What do you call your mother’, he questioned.

‘Ama, ammi, maa,….. Sir… Mummy’, the voices struggled to shine in amidst the bustle.

With one unspoken voice lingering round my medulla, ‘Amma! I used to call her, but I don’t anymore. People may assume a person insane if they keep calling dead people. There was no room for people’s judgmental remarks in the already taken enough’ Taunts’ of the society house. ‘

The poem went on and on with tags of explanation when suddenly a voice interrupted the flow,

‘Have you ever seen your parents grow old’.

No.

‘I didn’t want to get into the details of how I certainly wished for those moments especially every time my hands were ever up making a moon asking the Almighty of everything but after their eternity and how I imagined her dusky skin complementing the heavenly palette colored clothing with glass bangles enough to represent her marital life though however it wouldn’t compete to me imagining him smiling proudly wearing the suit he would’ve bought after ages or to rectify the sentence, money he would’ve had spent on himself after accomplishing buying things for others every time and how I wished for them to see their birth faces in familiar faces…

I nodded as he explained the stanza not knowing the nodding is nothing but a disguise

‘… not to mention how I explicitly wanted to keep them with me no matter what others would say or think…. No I didn’t want to get into the details of it’

Not long after the lesson was finished came through the last question that shushed the mind for a brief second.

‘What smell reminds you of your mother/parents?’.

‘Perfume’, one said, ‘Food’, said the other,

Then his eyes locked with my eyes with the company of a nodding that I certainly wished wouldn’t happen!

‘Hospital rooms for I don’t have any latest memory that’d beat it, medicines for I’ve consumed them enough in my memory than in real life, injections for it gives me nostalgia when it should lurk out fear from the deep bottom, car rides because I wished almost everyday for it to be an accident they could’ve escaped,….

‘Incense stick’, I said.

‘Incense sticks! You know how some mothers are religious, they pray a lot!’.

‘… no… I certainly didn’t say it that way! Incense sticks for all I’ve known of her after her was through the prayers I said, dreams I had, food I offered and sticks I ignited…’

And all questions would be answered if I let the imagination take lead believing they left a part of them when their whole couldn’t do enough.

By BASRAH HASAN RIZVI