by Disha Bisht
Disha’s story is about the secrets one is forced to keep because societal expectations neither value nor tolerate their truth. One such truth drives a family apart before bringing them back together.
Fifteen years of asking the same burning question and here I am, facing an answer I cannot fit easily into the familiar, comforting mould of rage-driven preconceptions.
The room is tiny but cosy, touched by personal effects that turn the space into a living, breathing entity: a mismatched set of sofas hemming a weathered carpet; papier-mâché lanterns with unequal edges that speak of untrained but enthusiastic hands behind their creation; and a massive picture frame hanging on a nearby wall, looking over the details like a wizened guardian that’s been around long enough to see these pieces come together to make a home.
Before me is an ornamental tea set not unlike the one back at baba’s place—an unsuspecting object tenuously connecting this home to the one I know. It’s a foolish thought and I’m aware of it, but I cannot help making such connections even as they untether me from my reality—a reality I built upon the foundations of resentment. In this place that shouldn’t feel like home, I look for superficial similarities because they make me feel like a part of something, even if that something ceased to exist years ago. In these few seconds of cowardice, I seek false comfort when I should be hardening my resolve to pry open the box of secrets that tore my life in half.
‘The tea is excellent,’ I say to you as you sit nervously on the edge of a single-seater opposite me. The intensity of your gaze is unsettling but I don’t have the heart to complain.
‘Thank you, dear,’ is your quick response, and for the first time in the thirty minutes we have spent sitting together, assessing each other from behind poorly placed facades, you crack a small smile that I remember like a breeze whispering through the shifting tides of long-lost memories.
My fingers tighten around the teacup.
‘I want you to know—’ you continue, perhaps gathering courage now that you’ve taken a half step forward, ‘—that I am forever grateful you decided to come. You may not want to believe me and that’s completely justified, but I have missed you. I miss you still.’
The sudden dryness in my throat is so severe, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to swallow again. I want to ask the obvious question: why didn’t you contact me then? I look into your eyes—my mother’s eyes—and I see the truth in them, clear as day. The brown eyes that are a reflection of my own and that are wet with unshed tears. I know they won’t come out, not now when there’s audience around. I don’t know you much—haven’t had the chance to grow up with you around—but I know we are much more similar than I would have liked to accept given the circumstances and the weight of years’ worth of unspoken words between us.
In those shining tears that refuse to find their destination, I see the pain of longing induced by circumstances beyond your control.
Words evade me, and I let them run amok in the back of my mind. I don’t need them right now; my presence in this house should be enough, I suppose.
‘How have you been?’ you ask, and I know from your tone that you don’t expect an answer. You simply look on with hope and adoration, twinkling eyes drinking me up with a pained enthusiasm that wrings my heart out.
I clear my throat without meaning to. ‘Good.’
You nod and then look over your shoulders at the second figure leaning against the doorjamb of the small kitchenette. The other woman is tall and willowy where you are curves and soft lines, the differences between the pair of you so stark yet so pleasant to behold. From what little I know about this stranger—for she is the woman I happen to work with, and the one who led me to you after I accidentally came upon a picture of you two—there is not a speck of similarity between your diametrically opposite personalities that would hint at a long-lasting relationship. That’s what baba’s family would have told me, driven as they had been by notions of conformity. According to them, dissimilarities engendered imbalance and undermined the harmony of relationships. I would have agreed with them once. Now, I only have to look back at your relationship with baba—a perfect balance of personalities meeting an imperfect end.
It’s been fifteen years since baba and you split up, but the sting still feels like it’s from a freshly inflicted wound.
Remembering the tragedy of my broken family is understandably not a pleasant activity; it brings with itself a baggage of memories that is hefty enough to crush my soul. I am forced to remember those days when school was an unbearable stretch of a friendless existence because home was a fire of accusations and frustrations beneath the surface, waiting to burst out in blazing glory. I remember the fights between you and baba that didn’t involve so much as a word but were just as impactful and destructive. I remember begging for screams at some point in hopes they would drive the smothering silence away.
The pillars of my life simply drifted apart, leaving the foundation of our home in shambles. Dadima had been pivotal in prying them apart and then sheltering my baba from the aftermath—the inevitable cave-in that brought the ceiling down when you and baba finally split.
‘She didn’t deserve this family,’ dadima told me squarely, never one for mincing her words. Sometimes, I wish I could have known the truth right then. Should have been able to see the prejudice in the bitterness behind dadima’s choice of words, and sift through the venom in them to understand the nuances. Yet I can’t blame myself, can I? I had been young and unaware—too young to understand what prejudice meant, and unaware of what had warranted that prejudice in the first place.
‘She’s not coming back. She never will. She never should.’ Dadima had said grimly, and you ended up living up to those words with a vengeance, mother, precluding any questioning from my side. It was easier for me to swallow dadima’s side of the story when you didn’t make any efforts to contact me, let alone come clean about your reasons.
Fifteen years of no contact whatsoever. You disappeared from our lives like you’d never been there in the first place, and that suited baba and dadima just fine. Too fine. I often felt like I was alone in my grieving, too hung up on that night you packed your bags and left without a word.
Whenever I questioned baba and dadima about your intentions, I got the same response. You wanted your freedom, they would insist, my dadima more viciously than baba, like it was a crime to ask for freedom. Of course, I couldn’t understand why you would want freedom when I thought you weren’t shackled in any way. It confused me to no end, this secret of yours that had driven you away. But even then, I thought there was something beyond dadima’s vehemence and baba’s reticence—something I wasn’t prepared to handle because I was still swathed in the teachings of a society that does not provide for any digressions.
The little box of secrets and lies lay shut for years within the confines of my own ignorance.
I know better now, and this is why I have come to you. I can see the picture hanging on the wall next to us: you and the stranger—my colleague—smiling brightly into the camera as you tie mangalsutras around each other. My desire to still connect you to baba—to the memories of my lost home—through such meaningless details as tea sets seems very childish now.
I smile despite myself and despite the memory of my dadima’s acid-like glare on me when I told her why I wasn’t interested in her rishtas. ‘You were like her all along…’, she spat at me, ‘a freak like your mother! A blotch on the family name!’ She cut me out of her life in a chilling recreation of what I now know were past events.
All because I don’t see gender when I love.
I can’t say I understand everything now. There are still questions I want answered, accusations I want to throw at you, just because. There’s a part of me that wishes my assumptions were true—that you didn’t want me anymore, or something equally ridiculous. There’s still a mum-sized hole in my life despite your compulsions and reasons. I am never going to get those years back.
But what I understand is this: the box of secrets has been wrenched open and within it lies not an ugly truth my family would have liked to manipulate me with, but a mirror that reflects only the light within me. It’s a light that’s been called a hundred variations of degenerate by now, but in your presence, it is what is: a rainbow-hued part of me that’s unabashedly and unapologetically me, and that’s never going to change.
You are a part of me as well, in more ways than one. No one is going to change that either.
In your presence, I find some of my answers, but I find a part of myself too.
I allow myself another smile as I take a sip of your excellent tea.
Image from https://flickr.com/photos/silentinfinite/
Disha is a law graduate who likes to immerse herself in the expansive realm of speculative fiction. Her political science background inspires her to create fantastical secondary-worlds and explore themes of identity in works of fiction. Based in Delhi, she’s currently working on her first book that hopes to capture this ever-shifting essence of the SFF genre.
