Pritam's Blog
My Mother Transformed Herself Many A Time In Her Life
My mother transformed herself many a time in her life.
I do not like changes.
Changes, I find, are difficult to cope with.
So, eventually, I developed a certain kind of aversion towards her.
This, she didn’t like, I guess.
Of course, she never told me
But then again mothers barely say anything.
They just shrink with all the words within them
And cease to exist one fine day.
I wonder what happens to the unsaid words.
Do they fly with the ashes?
Or mix with the ground?
My mother transformed herself many a time in her life.
But I never bothered to find out
What brought about all these transformations.
And I wasn’t aware of how it started.
Years later, I saw another woman change.
This time I asked and she said it was needed.
“I was comfortable running around in shorts,” she said,
“But my mother asked me to cover my body.
Because it was indecent to run
And to show my body.
I had to change myself.
“Then when I was married off to a man
And had to move with him to a new city,
Thousands of miles away from my family,
To live with his,
I had to leave behind
A part of my shame and decency — I had to learn to fight,
For once married, every woman is on her own.
“And just when I was getting comfortable with my fierce avatar,
I had to “calm myself down”
For a fierce mother is not good for the child.”
All these times,
The man remained the same, she said.
“They can afford not to change themselves.”
And I wondered what were my mother’s reasons for all these changes.
My mother transformed herself many a time in her life,
But I never cared to know the reasons.
’Guess I will never know.