By Khalid Mohamed

Rs 295

An extract from the short story, Two Mothers

Tilting her head like a viewer in a museum, she fades in photographed by his memory, cooing, billing, making all the correct motherly sounds, scooping him up in her slender arms. He can feel the light sensual fuzz, kissing him, caressing him.

One year old, two years old…too much is made of age. It doesn’t matter if you die at 72 or 73, 80 or 81. It doesn’t matter if he was one, two or three, when she perished. She left him like one would leave an airless room. To this day he isn’t sure about when, the moment. Or more to the point, how deep her love was for her son, if it was deep at all. He thinks of her in extremis: either she loved him insanely or not at all. He goes on about love-love-maternal-love. He has been told by a psychoanalyst of his acquaintance that when a child is denied love in infancy, it grows up warped, loony tunes, locomotive breath, a jazz rock riff which goes all over the place and can’t return to the groove. Can’t. Doesn’t want to.
With the advance of age, this one-two-three year old is surprised. He inched up to medium height but not to become sullen or morose. He wasn’t prone to depression; he could laugh till he had to be stopped. Often he knew not why he was laughing: a bird dropping on a pedestrian’s shirt was enough for him to caw-caw. So funny.
He excelled in studies, secured a Master’s in Political Philosophy. No stress there, topper at University... He parachuted into a journalist’s job, selected from a shortlist of hundreds... Occasionally, the journalist wrote wonderfully—no hyperbole here—his words like embroidery on paper. More often than not, it was another wretched day, words bouncing off his mind like bogus cheques.
He’s a writer but he’s not a son. It’s late. Yet he yearns to be a mother’s son. An obedient son. A rebellious son. A mixed-up son, a son, a son. He longs to remove this anxiety surgically. Suture it. Boning up on Sigmund Freud is not mandatory...
Childhood-adolescence-adulthood. That mother of his, always tilting her head at him as if he were an art exhibit. Or so he wants to believe. He has been described as mild-mannered, effete in some ways, his slow-mo drawl so cultivated, so affected. He has tried to speed up his manner of speaking. Only then he’s too fast and the idiots ear cock, “What did you say? What? What?” He ignores the boorish what-sayers. The conversations continue.
Now, he’s salt-and-pepper, silver streaked. Disappointing that, since he had nursed this delicious fantasy that he is Peter Pan—ageless. Deep worry lines can be handled; he still looks at least ten years younger than he is. Always has. Except that one time when a bank clerk had recommended a senior citizen investment plan. No desperate desire for that extra one—or is it half?—per cent of interest per annum. He did not return to that bank. He’s vain. He longs to tell his mother—maddeningly conspicuous by her absence—about the bank android, a clerk blinder than a bat. Mother, mum, mom, mamma, ma, so many variations on you...mum.
Oedipus Rex—been there, read that. “You have an Oedipus complex boy! Grow out of it. If you know you’re stalked by that complex, simplify it,” he hears himself on silent mode. “You’re not alone. So many are in the same boat. Shut up! Just live with it if you can.” Damn, not much to learn either from random case studies archived by those doddering institutes of social studies. Human behavioural patterns…can’t figure them out. Random patterns. Snag ahead. No one, not even kindergarten kids marvel at hand-made kaleidoscopes anymore. Internet zigzags are more ziggy.
Reading doesn’t calm the storm within. Irreparably he is devoured by guilt, the cancerous guilt that he wasn’t grateful enough to his mother and to his grandmother, the nani whom he called ma.
His grandmother had brought him up making him feel like Moses, a child who could have died but was placed in a basket midstream, rescued and leased a life. Nani, no no ma, even saw The Ten Commandments with him at the Regal Cinema. So what if she didn’t know the ish of English? She graded Charlton Heston “Behad hi khubsurat!” She wept when the baby in the basket floated down the studio stream. Her grandson wept to keep her company. He would do that—if ma wept, he wept, the two howling as if they were competing to be louder. Laughter Clubs have clicked. Crying Clubs could be as calming. Cathartic. Grandmother and grandson felt noble after crying in orchestrated harmony.
Nani repeatedly reminded him that he wasn’t weaned on his biological mother’s milk. By some miracle, nani had lactated when he was an infant; she had breastfed the sobbing, starving child, while showing him the gaslights of Marine Drive. They clip-clopped on a Victoria, the child, and his surrogate mother who was neither young nor old. She was of indeterminate age.
The ‘real’ mother—who gave birth to him—was lored to be 18 when she abandoned her son. She had remarried, a Rajasthan maharaja after a day’s courtship at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse. Ever since this was revealed to him, the boy had avoided going close to horses. No childhood thrills of pony rides on Chowpatty beach. He didn’t hate horses. In fact, he was dumbstruck by the illustrated story book on the travails of Black Beauty. Instead, he had an aversion to mosquitoes. The maharaja had nicknamed him Khatmal—bed bug—because he was small. Bloody hell, that damn maharaja. If his mother, yes yes yesssss ‘real’ mother hadn’t left with him, if that raja-maharaja hadn’t existed at all, Khatmal could have led a normal life. Whether he was small, big or medium, didn’t matter now.
Often he congratulates himself for not making heavy weather of the absence of his mother. She could have been a witch, enwrapped in sun yellow chiffon, stinking of duty-free fragrances, smoking an ultra-lite cigarillo. He could have grown up a wastrel deep into booze and drugs. He could have gone over the edge if she were swanning, preening, slapping him hard and barking constant firmans to quit home. Home? Whose home? He could have become twisted (a friend calls him eccentric but then so is the friend). Perhaps he would have married, sired a couple of children, led a sedentary life like all the men have in his extended family, living off the rent of ancestral property. So can he but he doesn’t know money. He wouldn’t know when to admit and eject tenants from the two empty homes willed to him by dearest nani. He would have been in a gutter, castrated, mutilated, were it not for her.
Thank you thank you thank you—can’t stop the thank you’s for the home, homes. He will glide through the rooms as if in a dream. No sub-letting, no sale. Shukriya, shukriya, shukriya in every language.