Mother Mary Comes to Me

Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.

She was my shelter and my storm.

The world was too ridiculous for me to remain too sad for too long.

When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became

Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them.

It made me realize how literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can.

That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.

I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body.

I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.

I began to refer to myself as the Hooker who won the Booker.

Friendship is the raft I sail on. Friendship is the pennant I fly.

Mrs. Roy made it her mission to disabuse boys of their seemingly God-given sense of entitlement. She turned them into considerate, respectful men, the kind the town had rarely seen. In a way she liberated them, too. She freed them of the burden of being what society thought men ought to be. She raised generations of sweet men and sent them out into the world. What she did for her girl students, the spirit she instilled in them, was nothing short of revolutionary. She gave them spines, she gave them wings, she set them free. She bequeathed her unwavering attention and her stern love on them, and they shone back at her. That revolution, like all revolutions, came at a cost.

Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream.

The priests in church said it would be as difficult for the rich to go to heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I imagined the rich were busy making a gigantic needle with a huge, camel-sized eye. If you think about it, that needle has been forged. It exists. And a ceaseless cavalcade of camels passes through it.

I have never felt the weight or the sorrow of this memory. I really believed it was fiction. I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel.

Over the years I would learn that sharing money with love and in solidarity is a delicate process, far more difficult than hoarding it. But until we live in a more equal world, sharing (responsibly) is the best you can do.

As my personal life turned to rubble and I risked coming undone, the outside world smashed in. In a strange way, over the next several years, it was politics - and anger - that held me together.

The sleeping hound of addiction was alive and well in me. It leaped up at a moment’s notice. One cigarette a day went to two and then to forty in a week. And, yes, I knew about the Orange Stuff and the Yellow Stuff, too. (It’s what I drank with Bahadur the watchman in the graveyard.) But I had kept the hound on a tight leash. I had seen enough wreckage among the drugged-out hippies in Goa to know that my life depended on hanging on to that leash and never forgetting about the hound for one single second, even when it was pretending to be asleep.

I was soon being called a writer-activist, a term I found absurd because it suggested that writing about things that vitally affected people’s lives was not the remit of a writer.

As I grew older, my very existence seemed to be enough to enrage her.

Tonight I will wander on open roads Tonight I have some time off, even from my dreams

My brother and I grew up in the cleft between that syrupy dream and our capricious nightmare, not always knowing which was worse. On balance, if we had to choose between the two, I think I’d choose our nightmare, and he, the dream.

In my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her per-spective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist.  Because that ’s what novelists are  –  labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.

I had learned that the best way to minimize the chances of conflict between Mrs. Roy and me was to visit her often, but only for a few days at a time. I learned to enter her orbit like a clever insect negotiating a spider’s web—to fold my wings and minimize my surface area as I stepped in, and when I left, to retreat along the path I had cleared when I entered, taking every possible precaution not to entangle myself in the filaments of her web. I made a hobby of twisting old adages to suit my situation.

The more I wrote, the more it puzzled me. It behaved as though it had a volition of its own. There was a rhythm to it, a sort of backbeat, a formal architecture, that I could sense, but for a long time couldn’t put my finger on. I had to trust it. Sometimes it felt as though it were writing itself, and that I just happened to be around.

They hanged a man to win an election.

The only thing that I should perhaps have been able to predict but didn’t is that just when everything became dependable and secure, when the children were grown-up and love was a way of life, the stars in our sky, all our constellations big and small, public and private, would move and realign, and I would—yet again—run.

Beware of the person that sacrifices’. (Because they soon become insufferable and extract a price far greater than what they sacrificed.)