I.
The best way to tell a story is to write about it, but more importantly, to write about it without stopping. I have tamed the itch to tell you about mine for over four years now, never too sure about what I was attempting to convey because I did not know where it was headed. At first, I was looking back at it trying to decide on what it meant for my past, then for some time I was in it, unsure what it meant for the future, and now I am ahead of it again, looking at what it really means in my present. I could start narrating it from any point, dear reader, and you might find some angle of interest by projecting an aspect of your life onto it.
II.
The tears from my eyes collected on the cracked screen of my phone. They rolled past the curve of my nose and poured directly from the other, forming a puddle that could dial a number back into the keypad and disrupt our conversation. “I am tired. I cannot shake the feeling anymore. I am unsure if it is of inadequacy, of pain, of uncertainty, or of suffering. I cannot put a pin on it, but it consumes me on a daily basis. I have given it enough chances to understand, to undo, and to really move past what it makes me say”
“I know. I can feel your pain for you. I sense the weight of it in your words. I am sorry you are experiencing this.”
“It is in my morals to remain honest and to tell you the truth. I know that I feel a great deal of fear and discomfort. I cannot seem to separate you from me in my head. Not in a romantic way of oneness, but in a context of uncertainty. Like you exist through me, and I am forced to carry the identities of us both, and somehow also reconcile mine as one that is growing and finding itself. You see, this is all I have ever had. I think, for you, you have had so much more, and yet you hold onto me and mine like it is another thing you are unwilling to exist without. I am all for the intersection of our love, our being, and our futures. But not like this.”
“For as long as I can remember, I have only felt like myself with you. This is a part of me that is so personal, so unadulterated from everything else that was prescribed to me. I am willing to do what it takes to make you feel whole and better. Less uncomfortable, more happy. It is important to me that you are your best version of self, and I have always tried to understand and do just what it takes to get you there.”
“This should not be about me. It is about us in my heart. You should not do it for me but for you too. It remains a large sign of disservice to lift me up like it is only my journey to move forward. We must both be in motion. Could you put your feelings first? Tell me what you need. I will figure mine out too.”
III.
It is the big, golden question to understand what instilled the fear and hatred in me to begin with. I think back to my childhood with a sincere level of focus and attention. I was around five years old when she ran her thumbs across my lips and asked me to let her kiss me. She told me it was important to do so when nobody was looking. Our friend sat by us in the bus, and the minute she looked away, I felt her sloppy tongue and lips meet mine. This was supposed to feel good. I wonder where she learned this from at a tender age of six. I know for certain that I learned a sense of forbidness from this. This does not explain everything, but might just be the founding brick to a wall of discomfort I battled through as a teenager, and later, as a young adult.
A few years in, I lay on the animated rug in our cooped up TV room. This was also where we dragged out and laid the mattress when it was too warm to be in the bedroom. We never bought an air conditioner even though our city located itself too close to the tropical line, hitting numbers close to forty on the regular. Young Cece, perhaps only a couple months more naive than I was, was rummaging through the puzzle box for the final few pieces. I asked that she lay with me. Unsure, she complied. I hugged her into a cuddle, her plump body barely feeling comfortable against the bones of my skinny one. I was subconsciously doing what was done to me.
At sixteen, it happened again. Nina was slightly obsessed with me. I was at her place for a week-long sleepover, and her cosy air conditioned room had us cuddled up under a blanket. At first, half-asleep, I pulled her closer. Gaining more consciousness, I inched her face closer to mine, and in a matter of seconds, pecked her lips. She hesitated at first, gave in almost immediately. Nothing else happened. We fell back asleep. I woke up feeling foreign to those actions, like they were not mine to begin with. She said nothing. Her mother did, she said we cuddled too close. Another evening she asked Nina if she was a lesbian. It was not with distaste or hate, she wanted honesty from her child. It took Nina eight more years before she could admit to herself and to me that she did indeed feel that way. I would not have reciprocated in a serious manner, it was likely an untamed secret for the best.
IV.
We were dropped back home from the field trip, my dark blue shirt untucked and shoes barely resembling the colour they arrived in. Yasha, from the other class, leaned against the bus window and rolled her eyes as the little kids disembarked, one by one, at every stop in the hour-long journey. Soon enough, we pulled up to mine. She tilted her head back and scanned past the glass, taking in the rusty paint and water stained walls.
“Ugly”, she muttered. “You live in an ugly house. My home is much better.”
I would not know because her stop was 9-10 past mine, but a tear rolled down my cheek, and my older brother scowled at her, saying it was not very nice to make judgements like those to anyone our age.
It was one of the nicer houses from the many we lived in. One where I seemed to hold the most vivid memories as a child. Particularly from when my father walked out on my mother one last time. He did so this time with no mercy, slamming her fingers in between the doors after smashing her first fax machine on the floor. I looked back in fear and confusion as he revved the getaway bike, my brother sat firmly against his back, wincing his eyes and better placed by age to understand what was really going on. I briefly caught a glimpse of my mother from the front window in the beige rusty house with water stained walls. She was wailing and almost pleading for her little children. He cupped my face and turned it to face the front. He drove the bike away with little guilt, negligible remorse, and no fear.
The fax, facsimile machine, had a bigger role than beeping every few hours to print out a new set of inked paper. It represented my ma’s freedom, it was the remote connection between her and the many well-meaning, successful businessmen in the far land of China. Her first customer bought it for her, to enable the small consultancy that powered her first step towards financial independence, away from bruises and broken bones. My father saw it as a symbol of unintended defiance towards the heavy armed punches he threw. Smashing it on the floor was more than breaking a possession, it was a message of threat, a signal demanding compliance.
V.
The strong sense of justice and interference that I experienced as a rebellious teen, and later as a norm-defying adult, came from my ma. Her survival relied on speaking up, and being loud. Her silence stole from her years of what could have been an escape from the patriarchal violence she was subjected to.
As a result, I followed suit. It was rather instinctive than a choice to me growing up. There is much power in the crumbling of stereotypes that my ma enabled when she cut my hair short and dressed me with my brothers’ old pair of shorts and polo shirts. The patriarchy of Southern India could not stomach this neutrality with which I was raised. Void of golden chains and heavy earrings, I represented ma’s non compliance to how a lady ought to look, behave, and show face. A traditionalist teacher told me I ought to do better to fit in and get my ears pierced at the minimum. Her tone did not showcase any degree of concern or willingness to help. It was laced with what I could perceive as disgust and embarrassment even as a ten year old child. When ma heard of this, she stormed the gates of the school and asked for our Dutch founder, a lady in her mid-fifties with short hair and unpierced ears. She was stunned when my mother recited the comments I received, but equally helpless, I imagine, as it would have taken more than just overhauling a dress code to change the way the people thought of women in that society.
VI.
To love and to date has been a simple concept in my life. I have found myself bonded with multiple men, all of different backgrounds and cultures, and experienced a range of emotions - mostly ending in sorrow - for trivial reasons between the ages of 16 and 21. For my ma, it was not the same. She mentioned very briefly how she was never that interested in most men except one before my father, and unfortunately due to a misalignment of social cues, missed the opportunity to ever formally date him when they were in college together. She did, very intensely so, fall in love with my pa on a training excursion in China when learning about leather and how it was made. He was smitten by the duality of her strong ambition and lighthearted nature, and after they head back to their home states in India, professed to her in poetic and philosophical letters, his yearning and love for the woman that she is. My ma, a woman without a real date up until this point, yet equally enchanted by Bollywood norms of romance and heroism, fell hard and deep in love. Just like that, over a hundred letters exchanged in a short period, it felt enough to know he was indeed, the one.
VII.
I flip around in my bed having entertained half a dozen men over different points in the last six years of my life. Three in a short period of a couple months when I was nineteen, another three in a short period of a couple months when I turned twenty five. I feel within me a sense of superficiality when I think of them. I yearned for each modestly in the hours of having them, but classified them as mere bodies in a sea of people in the moments after. I was far too removed to want to know more about the cookies their grandmother baked when they were five. I am rather uncomfortable with many realizations I have about myself at this mid-point in my life. I go on a date with this woman who makes me realise the sanctity of self lies within both the mind and the body, not just the mind. I feel so distanced from my physical self, like it is not my own, like it does not deserve the care and tenderness that I devote towards my mind. I blink into the sunset and think to myself that I might just be no better than a man. This realization comes to me in waves, on days, and I feel equal amounts of disgust and bitterness because I crave femininity as much as I am owed to have it as a woman. However if I were to extend acceptance to this way of feeling, I can appreciate briefly a sense of great privilege to enjoy physical sensations without any worry to digress my wants. I recognise the greatness in the ability to choose, and then to exercise that very choice, one that my ma lacked so severely it trapped her happiness to a point she still chases past her fifties.