The Withered Cord

Oh Ma! I’m confused –
That tunnel of the Past
That I emerged from
I don’t want to explore.
Dark demons lurk in crannies –
Memories of being penned in – grounded,
Beaten for dropping bricks,
While my brother gloated over my predicament!
Do you know – forty-five years later – I still drop bricks?
Oh! I hate you when I think of the injustice.
I never ever understood what I did so wrong!
I never understood why I was a pawn
In your fights with Appa.
Is that why you had me?
In my teens I was obedient, silent.
But in my rebellious heart
You were no less than Lady Macbeth,
Until – in my twenties –
Life almost broke my heart
Dropping a little blue fighter,
Helpless as a tadpole, into my aanchal.
—-And you helped me pick up the pieces;
Fight my little one’s fight to breathe on her own.
Oh! that beautiful baby – but imperfect, not whole.
I’ve walked on, Ma, I’ve walked on,
Filling out the spaces in the jigsaw of my complicated life.
Now you want to draw me back
With your feeble hands – pluck out that one piece in my life’s jigsaw – ME!
To live life your way, follow your script,
With you as the tragedienne, the forsaken heroine.
Well, you can’t reshape ME to fit into your outdated world again!
I’ve no use for your faded colonial world, your “peons”, and your chauffeur-driven cars.
No more feudalism here –
The plate I eat from in the restaurant may have been used by an auto-man, a dhobi.
Who cares in this democratic world?
If I have ingested their molecules, I have also breathed in Shakespeare’s,
Kalidas’s, and Abraham Lincoln’s.
I have eaten Gandhiji’s salt recycled into the earth.
Where are your feudal servants now?
You are surprised – Thandavarayan’s son is an engineer.
Poongavanam’s daughter has a Master’s in Hindi Literature.
Their intellects work for them now, not their hands.
We all have to use our own hands – like “blue-collar” workers.
Your clinging, sticky hands refuse to help you now – although they can –
To stand on your own two strong feet again.
Your hands are not crippled, Ma, it’s your spirit.
Your nostalgia and self-pity are worthless coins now.
Where’s the spirit of never-say-die that you taught me and my little blue atom?
Let me go at least now!
I’m a woman, a mother too,
Leading her young daughter to the confident pathway
That can fulfill her dreams.
She’s my magnum opus – and yours too –
Perfect, with the right number of imperfections
In mind and body.
I’ll let her go like the little golden snitch
To fly where her heart takes her
Watch her proudly, benignly,
No clinging hands, no tentacles, no criticisms
Directed against that purloiner – no doubt, a most callow fellow –
Destined to grab her heart and ride away.
I’ll throw an old shoe after her for luck.
Then I’ll walk on, on, onward
Towards my Destiny (of which you and she are only parts, incidental parts)
And never ——EVER —– look back!
Because that’s all it is, Ma,
Our souls were never joined.
Never will be – even in a single life time – except by a tenuous cord that is severed
The very moment that we are born…