19 March 2018

It’s Good To Be Quiet

Sitting beside me on the rickshaw, my mother

Wipes her eyes, “Why are you crying?” I ask.

She forces a smile,

I am five years but I have learned to see

The subtle differences in her real and forced smile.

“I am not crying,” she says. I have reached my school.

She kisses me and I get down from the rickshaw.

It irritates me when she kisses me in front of my school friends,

But I do not say anything today, and that makes her smile a real smile. And I feel good about it.

I go to my class. I wonder, while Shiv Shankar sir does the sums on the board,

If my mother’s tears have anything to do with

The loud exchange of words she had had with my father earlier this morning,

Words that are not yet in my vocabulary.

I do not ask anyone the meaning of those words.

Nor can I concentrate on the numbers on the board.

I learn nothing.

Except that it is good to be quiet.

And that I shouldn’t become like my father.

“Don’t become like your father,” my mother often says

Late at night when my father has thrown us out of

“Our” one-room flat

And we spend the rest of the night on the terrace,

My mother and I.

And I whisper, “I will not become like him,” while she

Covers me under her saari to save me from the mosquito bites.

I have always focussed on what not to become.

So, when my girlfriend said how her ex,

Who used to spend hours on the phone talking to her,

Stopped picking up her calls after a three year long relationship,

I said to myself, “I will not become like him.”

So, when we are fighting and she calls me up to yell at me,

I pick up her phone though I know she is about to yell at me.

“Why are you not saying anything?” She asks,

And I say that I have a very weak vocabulary.

Which is true, you see.

But that melts the ice. She laughs.

And I feel good about it.

“You manipulative son-of-a-bitch,” she says after we have made up.

And I do not try to convince her that I really have a weak vocabulary.

It’s good to be quiet, you see.