It had been 22 years of what D.H. Lawrence narrated in the ‘Rocking Horse Winner.’ I sometimes felt as if I had gained the third eye during that time. The exact words, movements, expressions, timings, moods, etc. of the members of the household were un-explainably predictable. Life was a consistent déjà vu.
When the weather is too calm, a bit too calm, you can hear its quietness maliciously gnawing and snaring at you. It tells you a storm is on its way. Relationships are quite the same. Too much constancy can lead to the arrival of eccentricities that all of us face regarding the beloved. After all, we know them too much. Pushing the truth away does not change anything. A bit of loathing in love does not harm it; it’s merely a fulfilling completion. Shreds of hatred lament the time when love would be gone altogether, and loneliness will bury its claws deep inside of you.
On a day like that, when things were unreasonably stagnant, I killed my mother.
There was nothing very special happening that day, just my father’s 60th birthday, my sister’s dinner with her colleagues and my exam preparation. Echoes crying for money reached my ears several times a minute. I didn’t care to see which of them came from the walls of the room and which from the flesh filling its corners. Somebody slid the cupboard. The television blared with the loudest sound possible, possibly a desperate attempt to tune out other sounds raging through the atmosphere. It was a war.
New clothes became the cause of dispute. My mother was bent on delaying sewing clothes for my sister. She needed some rest and said she’ll do them later. That pissed K off. K was the feeding hand of the family. Nobody held her off like that. A few minutes earlier she had added to my information that I had done a very mean piece in telling mother that the dinner had been delayed, which I had done most innocently, otherwise her clothes would have been sewn by then.
My mother walked around the house. Deaf. She was immune to the angry grumbling; opening, closing, smashing of the fridge; banging doors; tsk tsk-ing at the walls, doing nothing, something, everything, things. She did ‘doing’ until her veins gave way and sweat dripped off of her forehead. It was because of her children, us, and she lay down. It was time to knit another elegy in memory of the dead.
It was hard to study in those circumstances but I tuned out the quietness. It could tear me up otherwise. I safely collected all of it within me, had been doing that for years. “I need a glass of water.” There was a puff of smoke and stumbling smatters of ‘concentration.’ There are two people outside with you. Can I study in peace so I can bring sacks of green somethings for you as required?
“Water?”
I got up. It wasn’t abnormal. I had to. Religion implored me to do the same. I filled a glass of water from the tap and took it to the TV lounge where TV blared. K was lying on the sofa. Her eyes were not visible behind the sheen of her spectacles, but the lines on her forehead were obvious. Her mouth was tightly pursed, giving her ovoid face a funny look. She had the TV remote placed on her chin, other end of it resting on her chest. One leg sluggishly rested on the back of the sofa while the other was curled dreamily beneath a cushion. Y was enjoying social networking on the laptop.
“Did I have to come from the room, leave what I was doing, because you were busy doing what exactly?” None heard…Anger. Breathe, breathe, breathe. It’s a happy birthday; he’ll be home soon. Breathe.
I was her daughter. Not using the tongue was hard for me. “You could have told her to bring it. She’s not lazy when she needs clothes.”
The glass came flying towards me and landed near my feet. It shattered into a thousand pieces.
What was the matter if one of us used their tongue for a change? We could ask questions as well, say no, mock, moan. We had the brains to get mean too. She was a mother. We will be mothers someday. All of us are daughters, including her.
It was me who chose the largest shard of glass. A face came near. Panicked eyes screamed. Hands pushed me away as I stabbed her mouth, her teeth, and her tongue. I wanted her to bleed everything out, if there was anything left to say, once and for all. I wanted nothing to be left behind.
The world had gone quiet. Peacefully quiet. For the first time quietness didn’t plummet down into its own depths, it hung there, surrealistically serene and beautiful.
A moment had passed while I stood there with the glass in my hand. She took it herself.
It came out of nowhere, “You could have told her to bring it.” I stopped myself quickly and turned around to leave, as quickly as possible.
There was a loud crash. I turned around in a fierce attempt to retaliate only to find her staring at her feet. Expressionless. Shattered glass lay in my feet. Surprisingly a sigh of relief left my lips.
Predictability is good. Prescience can save life because accidents are first-time occurrences. Self-control comes from experience, whether in real or in intuition, it doesn’t matter.
