Written by Hrishita Ghosh
Edited by Aahana Banerjee
I’m lonely here, ma. I almost said it to her over the phone. Instead, I cut the call with a smiling goodbye, talk to you later. I didn’t say it. If I had, maybe she would’ve talked to me an hour longer. Maybe I would be breaking down in tears fifteen minutes into that conversation. Maybe she would feel helpless because she is not here to hug me and console me and I would feel helpless for making her feel the repercussions of the 1500 kilometres between us.
There are so many things I want to tell my mother. I want to tell her how I resented her for burying some of her rage in me. I want to tell her that I’m grateful for all the softness she showed me despite burning inside for so long. I want to tell her that I’m afraid I will not be able to do that for the people I love. I want to tell her that I am so, so scared of losing my softness. I want to tell her that I am more and less of her daughter every passing day. I want to tell her that I have learnt every lesson she taught me a dozen times over now. I want to tell her that I still dream of faceless monsters pushing me off a cliff sometimes, just like I used to when I was a child. I want to tell her that I still wish she would be there to comfort me when I wake up from these nightmares. I want to tell her that I have started singing again. Sometimes, when I’m alone in my room. I want to tell her that I have known love, pain, loss, and heartbreak. I want to tell her all of it. But I don’t.
My mother is a shield and a spear all in one. Maybe that is why I am so scared to let her see that I have not yet even forged my own armour. She has spent nearly nineteen years of her life building me up. How do I tell her that all she has built is a body with skin too soft to withstand a few harsh words, a mind that rebels against itself constantly and a heart that does not know how to beat for itself and can only beat for others?
I asked her a few days ago why women must bear so much pain. I could hear her smile through the phone. She tells me I asked her this question once before when I was younger. She doesn’t give me a straight answer to my question. I don’t think I wanted one either. Instead, she tells me how my father was worried sick when she told him I was going to a doctor alone with a fever because none of my few friends had been available. And I ask her if she was worried too, and she says of course I was. Then she pauses for a second and tells me, “Your father was worried you were too sick to travel alone but I trust you enough to know your strength and if you thought you were capable of going to the doctor alone then you could.” You have the strength that all women are born with. I remember crying silently as she said that. My mother thinks I am strong. But I am yet to be nearly as strong as her, and I am afraid that this is the limit of my strength. I might dip one foot into unfamiliar waters sometimes but I am so scared that I will drown if I dive right in. I was never taught to swim, ma. And neither were you, but I am not as brave.
Every night she gives me a piece of advice before hanging up. Tonight, she told me to never give anyone access to all of me and I almost told her about how I had already let someone see most of me and didn’t regret it at all. But I didn’t. My mother has better things to worry about than her daughter who does not know who she is or the things immature teenage boys do with their hands and their honey-sweet words or why people get tattoos over their scars. She would disagree but I can tell you it’s true because there is nothing in this world that could have prepared my mother for her life but she lived through it anyway. And she deserves much better now than the trivial worries of a conflicted teenager who listens to The 1975 sing “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen” and cries thinking about how she is not seventeen anymore.