Its the morning rush as I get ready for another flight to Bombay. There's a wordless lull as my mother seeks things to busy herself with - after having promptly finished all the work on the previous evening. Her daughter must seem like an alien creature who wears her tam-bram hair open, turns left and then right, adjusting her strap. This morning she decides that she wants to plait her hair - something she grew up always wanting to do, but never got round to. Single plaits were a mark of 'womanhood', while double plaits were girly and innocent.
My mother suddenly offers to do it and I gladly let her. For a ritual is being performed - perhaps a couple of decades too late, but even so. In the act of plaiting and having one's hair plaited both women are transported - the mother to memories of her grandmother plaiting her hair. " 'Tight and thick', she used to say..and then I would steal to the other room to try and loosen it up."
" Make it tight", say I. " I like how definite it feels."
Soon the plaiting is done and mother admires the result. " Wish you were here everyday, then I could plait your hair..." Uncomfortable now, both of them nod a smile and look away.
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"Doesn't your mother kiss you and tuck you into bed?", she asked her once. The girl shook her head a little too vigorously, trying to shake away a choke.
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Ritualised expressions make her uncomfortable. Loud pecks on cheeks always make her look away. Shouldn't it it always be present in the unsaid?
There is a very lonely nerve to confusion. It throbs silently, unsatisfied, defiantly. Defiant in its belief in itself - that this confusion must be valid. It must have, in its heart, something true that is worthy of pursuing. It is a very un-self conscious stubbornness... Something that itches at the edge of one's reasoning. For confusion must imply a certain validity to the discordance - between instinct and another's loud words.
This confusion makes me silent now. Earlier, while in younger blood, it would fuel me... Incite an uncontrollable passion to mouth words... To double into word the wordless cloud in my head.
Young blood can be self destructive. It will always lose to sudden expectations of tenderness from the other side. For those things creep upon you when you least expect them.
Somehow it feels like anger shouldn't accompany femininity. Like its a form of cruel that cannot be swallowed. One must engage in a performance of vulnerable defiance it seems. An interesting thought, but i don't have the first clue to getting around it.