janma (जन्म)

A bone

Ribbed-

from your tree of life

robbed

from the fathers.

Thrown into dirt,

I reach for you,

But I only find raindrops in my hands-

The scars unmuddied

I lack the realization that I was born into this world. As I sit here to write, I ask the insides of my body that I cannot see, touch, but only feel. Tell me a story of the first time coming into life? I sense a certain opening, like flora or fauna. I have lost count of memories as I braid grief into knots. The first one unfurls, and everything else follows.

The voice comes from the force under her belly as she screams. “You are aggressive just like your father”, my mom tells me in a voice muddled by fractures of her grief, joy, shame, and love. All of those fractures are held beneath one single breath that seems to repeat itself through her life. This is a statement which often marks our fights. I have lost their count as I braid grief into knots. Her voice is travelling towards me and I do not want to absorb her pain. So, i close my eyes and make a fist of my body. My voice executes up the head like a lava exploding and I echo it back to her. I amplify her pain hoping to shatter the mirror she looks at so I can rescue her from the pits. Instead, I fall back down and flow under like the oozing lava.

Her life is a question that lines up like assembly lines and patriarchy’s rigid authority conforms her answers. In between the fight she defines me with words such as whore, slut and often times a monkey or pigs. In most occasion with a slap of classic line that I need to be given away to a man very soon when my playful giggles become a little too much for her.

In her attempts to untie herself her hand reaches for my hair bringing me to the ground. I do the same to rescue myself. For a split second I am back where I used to be. Inside a dark womb, intertwined and wrapped by the umbilical cord. In her vastness I find the manifestation of kali. Standing amidst the dark of the night, her hair is wild, tongue extended with her ferocity and her many arms that carry the weapons of a sword, severed head, her eyes the fearless ocean and blessings. She brings me down to earth.

I am a vacuum baby. Born under the Falgun Purnima (a full moon in the month of Falgun). It is a marker of the onset of spring and the end of harsh winters. My birthday fell on a Saturday which is ruled by the planet Saturn, the planet of discipline. In Vedic society, it means that that laziness and anger are two things I need to work on in this lifetime. My grandfather wanted the blessing of having a son born into the family.  So, my mother was aborted two times before she had me. My birthday is on the international woman’s day. Ever since my childhood it was always marked to me as a source of empowerment and justice in itself.

Another famous tale about my birthday is that my family made the biggest amount of profit they had ever made in their business. When the lists of things to describe me ends in an emptiness. My grandmother shares the story of the night I was born over and over again.

The suction of the vacuum has left my head swollen. My mother is fast asleep with the pain of labor. Hajurmami is trying to pacify me as I am crying with a red face

I am hooked on her shoulder. She is moving me back and forth, tapping lightly on my shoulder, making sounds to pacify me. I am hungry and my mom is unable to breastfeed me. In need for desperate help hajurmami takes me next door to a Newari lady who has just gotten out of labor. With a pleading voice, my grandmom explains my critical situation and pleads her to breastfeed me. In her story she makes sure to emphasize the word “Newari” who are indigenous to Kathmandu and a lower cast to we the brahmins. She retells this story in attempts to remind me of the love she has given me form the day I was born and of her maternal instinct. She often wonders where that lady is now.

But somehow, her words always carry a double meaning. The weight of my family presses on her heart rather than holding her down like gravity. She tries to lift it up with disdain for my blood does not run into her heart. Her words usually make the same impression, sounding loving on the surface but shrewd underneath. I wish her heart had more freedom to deny us.

Weight

Since I was 3 years old, I went out alongside her for her many excursions in town. Our means of transportation was a red cello car (a Korean automobile company that are no longer manufactures). We had those in red, white and black, and they had names like pets. Rato(red) gadi, seto(white) gadi and kalo (black)gadi. The red car was the first car on which I learned to drive.

When I was a child, I would never let my mom touch me. She had a darker complex and was from a poor family unlike my other family members. The other adults would tell me that if she touched me my skin would get dirty too. She would pull millions of tricks like putting something over her hands to get me ready. There were days when I would lock myself or sit fixated in a corner draped over a curtain, crying for her to go away from me. So, the last resort became handing me over to my hajurmami. When I began going to the local elementary school, my grandmom had to drop me off every day. Each morning felt like my eyes feeling the cool breeze after a heavy shower.  Sometimes, we would stroll in silence along the little gallies, my tiny index fingers wrapped around her fist like blossom on a tree. Other times, she would leave me in the red car. I would only depart from after being assured she would be at the school gate waiting for my classes to end. In cases when she was not there to get me, I would have to be distracted or taken somewhere by my many sisters and cousins.

One afternoon when the sun was casting its crystal light onto after long days of constant rain and cloudiness. One of my cousins came to pick me up. I am wearing a red sweater, red pants, plaid shirts, and a tie. This makes me feel like a scholar in the body of a child.

When I get home, I drop my bags in the entrance door, run upstairs and through till the end of the long-marbled hallway. This is where her room. I arrived with the wind before my body did. I am calling out her name more like screaming. I find her room empty. I call out for her as I check everywhere. Sometimes she hides inside the washroom quietly where my last breath hooks onto. I open the door of the washroom which is a little firm. Not being able to sight her the ground lets go of my feet and my heart that holds life shatters into millions of pieces on to floor.

I fire upstairs to ask the question of life and death, where is hajurmami?

I demand my mother to being her back in an instant. I collapse on the floor crying. I do not move for a long time. My mother tries to pacify me promising that she would take me there. With half my heart I manage to get till the entrance door of my house but midway I broke into an ugly fight with my mom because i was a really anxious child who was not able to accept the given situation. So, I just lay down crashing on the floor, minute by minute. The distance of my grandmother felt uncertain. I had no clue how far she was and when she would come home.

I stayed in the door until she appeared. When she came back, I asked that she never leave me.

Along the years she also stopped locking the doors of the washroom and days when I would just sit inside with her.

Into my blooming years, I nestled onto her. My father prohibited me from going anywhere alone without his permission for I was vulnerable to see the light of the day. She became my constant companion to all school programs. While I accompanied her to her lengthy shopping for groceries, festivals, to pay dues to neighbors and her hospital visits. My favorite was shopping for saris and kurtha for festival and marriages. We bought saris in a store lit by fluorescent light located in the heart of a two-lane street in new road called Asan. The house there probably dates back till the malla dynasties of the Kathmandu valley. the inside has a small creaky wooden stair and ceilings so low you have to bend your head. The store has large cupboards filled with saris and kurtha, in all types of fabrics and colors that exists in the world. They shimmer out like festival lights. During lunch time, the pasal bhaiya always brings us warm samosas and a cool Fanta as we try on different clothes.

Mostly I accompanied her to the tarkari bazar (farmers market). The bazar is located a mile from where I used to live in a town called kalimati (meaning black soil). It was a 15-minute walk from my home till the bazar. There are multiple gallies to get to the main road. The roads in these gallies are undivided and narrow. We walk on the edge of the road making way for the oncoming traffic. Since there are no traffic rules in Nepal, we have to be extra cautious in these gallies. The architecture of the houses determines our route. The road is filled with cracks and holes that gets puddled with the onset of monsoon. I walk with my grandmother hip to hip with my left hand hooked to her right. Our weights collide and slide against each other moving like a Pendulum. Sometimes our legs would get in between our next step. At times one of us would tumble onto either side or end up tripping. Sometimes my grandmom would get furious for I would cling too giving her all my weight. I laugh at the silly sight of her irritation and the scene. We were one.