Finding eternal sunshine through some unlettered years--a memoir

an excerpt of my life, my convictions--the way I've seen them...

“When the world is gray and bleak/Baby don't you cry
I will give you every bit of love that is in my heart
I will bake it up into a simple little pie
Baby don’t be blue/Gonna make for you
Gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle
Gonna be a pie from the heaven above/Gonna be filled with strawberry love...”

 

Couple of days back I was watching Kery Russel singing this song in 'Waitress', a bitter-sweet hilarious comedy. Watching her sing, my facial muscles tightened. I felt a cloud train of quick flashback shots staggering across the horizon of my mind. I sculpted some forgotten years of my life; when loneliness and anomalies made me sing an unnamed song to myself with almost the same words as this.

 

“When that I was a little tiny girl/With hey ho, the wind and the rain”, I found myself growing up in a crumbled house with steep stairs, with a father always away at work and more away from doting his child, a silent mother cocooned in her daily worries, an aunt making up with her supernatural stories, a school full of classmates stealing lunch from my box and discarding me as ‘vague, imaginative and weird’. Months and years flew past, swallowing me up with devouring loneliness. The sky seemed to loom, gray and dead, above me. Yet, in my mind, a sulfur glow of a different sun gave way to streaks of opaque dark.  I’ve been threatened and insulted by the mediocrity around, but in rare moments of clarity, I saw the world as it should be. I broke the chains of mediocrity, and felt free. I felt free with redeeming, everlasting imagination, with the mystery of colors and brush strokes, with the inspiration and creation of artists I seemed to know from my previous births.

 

I had to live with a father giving up on me for not pursuing medicine and taking delight in John Keats and his metaphors of pain and death, in Renoir and Raphael. I had to live with a mother who thought I was pathetic as I kept on falling for the wrong men in my quest for love and acceptance, with a mom-in-law who didn’t understand what was special in me in the eyes of her son, through my dusky skin and frizzy hair. My sisters didn’t understand why I couldn’t fit myself into the mould of an archetypal Bengali bride, why I didn’t watch daily soaps on TV and preferred scribbling poetry in the dull, looming darkness of my room instead. Today, when I speak to them from miles apart, I know I’ve won. I’ve never downplayed my identity to accommodate someone else's intolerance. Being content with myself through all my silent tears, I grew up to articulate the dignity of being different, of being “me”. 

 

And so today, I believe in the inherent sunshine of my mind. In the soft, inner raindrops inside me, making me alive every passing day. In weeks from now, I will be born again, as a mother, with my little one cuddled in my arms. I used to think that I will consciously refrain myself from giving her the life I’d got for myself. Today, I don’t care if she begins her life isolated, bruised by the mediocrity around. She will find her own sunshine and moonbeam, her own raindrops in some horizon, some sparkling sunny day.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

Your words as always strong and with purpose. I like the story and the ending. Each of us must find our peace in a life. A outstanding story. You can always teach me with your powerful words.
Coyote

[My Fair Lady]

Love me some Ru- convictions placed on the table face up. Really beautiful.

[Brad]

damn, ru, i love your stuff because it's real, and no matter how painful things are in some of your writings...there is always sunshine