“My mother placed a curse on my head,’ you said.
The old man’s look took on a most venomous appearance. “What did you do to earn her curse?”
“I… er… I…,” you started to say but stopped.
He commented, “Mothers are the beginning of one, they beget one, they give one a beginning. You must have done something unpardonable. You must have. Otherwise, why on earth would she place a curse on your head? Why why why? I imagine she must have suffered gravely: first under your father and then you, her own son. Poor woman, your mother. To have carried you, as a blessing, for months, inside of herself, to have loved you as her child for years and then to have had to curse you. It must have been agonizing to her.”
You were clearly misunderstood by this old man, you said to yourself. Perhaps, you should tell him that the woman wasn’t actually your mother in the sense in which he took it, that the woman didn’t give birth to you in the way mothers as we know them give birth to their children. In other words, this woman wasn’t where you began in the clotted form of a tiny germ which grew, lived and developed on its own inside the body of another. But you loved her as you might have loved your mother — if she had survived your birth.
The old man was saying, “I knew of a young man who was cursed by his mother because he refused to carry her on his back when they were crossing a stream lest she drown and because she didn’t know how to swim and he did. The arrogance of youth had gone to the young man’s head, the desire of a woman had lodged itself in his loins and the beating of love’s wings compelled him to run to where the woman of his lust was. He left his mother, an old woman who was lame and aged and decrepit, he left her to her own devices, impervious to her plea, “Just help me cross this stream in which I might drown.” He flew off in a mad rush. No one ever heard of his mother ever again. The beasts made a meal of her. Or perhaps the angels of mercy saved her. But we heard of the youth, and saw him again and again.”
“What became of the youth?” you asked.
“He complained again and again of hearing the noise of a chain-saw inside his head. He heard that noise at night, he heard it by day he heard it in his sleep and heard it when awake. In the end, he went insane. And the woman he loved? you ask. Whatever became of the woman he loved? They were separated by the noise of the chain-saw: she couldn’t bear sharing a bed and her life with a man who always heard something she couldn’t. Besides, she took her distance because she believed that a young man who was so insensitive as to remain indifferent to his mother’s pleas couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered about her the fortnight following their own honeymoon. And she paid heed to society’s advice and rejected his advances. He was reduced to an ugly sight, this young man. And you could see him roaming the streets of our town, garbed in tatters, looking into the town’s refuse bins as hungry dogs and parentless urchins do. One day, right in the middle of the largest market, he set his tatters on fire. Ablaze, he died, unhelped, and his body lay unburied for days. A mother’s curse is to be taken far more seriously than a father’s. Give heed. A mother’s blessing is far more worthy of God than a father’s. What I do not know and what no one but God knows is whether it was the curse placed on his head by his mother that did it, or the woman’s rejection of his marriage proposal, the woman’s refusal to reciprocate his love. My feeling is it was the curse. Someone else might argue that it was society’s turning its back on him that persuaded the young woman and so on and so forth. Yes, young man. A mother’s curse is by far the heaviest burden a human has carried on his head. Don’t earn it. That is my advice.”
Silence. Then the wall became just another speck in the huge space surrounding yourself. And in the miraged distance, prominent as an oasis, there was a colt, riderless — but saddled. You sighed — relieved. You knew Misra was back, you knew she hadn’t, as yet, placed a curse on your head.
III
Your childhood, excepting activities involving either Misra or your dreams, you once said, is one great oblivion. You couldn’t remember much, you confessed; couldn’t remember what people looked like, although you could recall some names to which, at any rate, you couldn’t put faces; couldn’t remember whether your feet ached as you pushed them into shoes a size too small; whether the papulae on your measle-affected body broke on their own or whether you pressed them playfully yourself. In one sense, you considered yourself a solitary child and spent a great deal of your time alone. Unless you were with Misra, you found all other company “demanding, boring, in short, lifeless’”. You would stand by the tree, bom a day or two after you, and look up at its branches swinging in the wind, a tree much taller than you, and you would water it. Then you would take a handful of the earth surrounding it and you would take a mouthful of its nourishment, making sure Misra wasn’t watching you, believing, of course, that eating earth would do you a world of good, and that you would grow taller and heftier, just like the tree. Alone, again, once you knew how to write your name, you would secretly graft your name, born the same day as the tree, on its bark.
Dreams separated you. You shared everything else — but not your dreams. She knew every one of your secrets, touched every inch of your body and felt your heartbeat too. You slept on the same bed, under the same cover and partook of the same atmospheric pressures, air and oxygen. But not your dreams. Even at night, asleep, in the dark, it was your respective dreams which separated you; dreams which lay between the two of you; dreams which were (in your case) dressed up in “mantles of water, in jackets of fire, in suits of green wear, in fatigue-uniforms, one day as a woman, another as a man”. The rivers in your dreams flowed away from the streams in hers. Whereas you saw a companion very like yourself walk beside you in an empty street, Misra saw a man holding her right hand, she saw you hold her left and the three of you walked together towards sunset. Your dreams overflowed like buckets of water; at times, you saw rivers burning; at times, the water in your dreams was on fire; at other times, your volcanic eruptions made you speak in your sleep, and Misra could hear and understand the odd word that she had heard. She asked you to tell her what you saw in your nightmare the following morning. You didn’t. It was as if you were claiming your dreams as your own.
Nor would you share with her the dream in which you saw a woman drown in a muddy river, a woman who appealed for help, calling out your name. Do you remember what you did? You waded to where the woman was drowning. You extended out your hands as though you were offering help. Your fingers, immediately they came into contact with her body, rolled into a fist and you pushed the head of the woman down and down and down — until she died.
In its wake, the dream made you shout in your sleep. Uncle Hilaal rushed in and woke you up. You were wet with perspiration. In an effort to persuade him that it wasn’t anything serious, you told him a story you made up on the spot. He said he didn’t believe you had given him the true story. And only then did you speak the truth. He inquired if you recognized the woman’s face. You insisted you didn’t.
“What did the woman’s voice sound like?” he said.
You answered, “She spoke as though there was water in her mouth.”
“This doesn’t say much, does it? After all, the woman was drowning.” He explained himself, unnecessarily. “You said the river was choked with mud, didn’t you? Or was it simply stagnant?”