Through the Woods of Belonging
[An Olive Tree in Neapoli, Crete / Photo by me]
Rajamma and Ma would exchange, over the sizzle of ginger garlic paste and sesame oil, the latest gossip of Rajapalayam. One pair of hands sliced thin the chicken, while the other pair was submerged by a flood of rice. I’d find myself watching Sun TV in a curious corner, listening to the ripe notes of an 80’s Tamil super hits playlist. Like the falsetto of the pressure cooker and it’s chesty squeal, I’d eventually fade into the background. I would observe the dribbling spatula become a wand, become a rod, become the vehicle of animation for the juice of a scandal too excitable for the mouth alone to dictate. I would watch as a tiny warehouse of secrets transformed into a daily communion.
At 4 a.m., while the sun was still laborless, Rajamma would rise. She would bathe for ten minutes, dress for two, cook for an hour 一 the hum of the crickets peppering the silence of a fading night. Once the perfume of Madras curry powder cascaded the house, Ma would rise from her bed, bathe for fifteen, and accompany Rajamma. Every now and then, conversations of reincarnation would emerge:
In the next life, I want to come out as thin as a white woman, wear skirts and go to college.
I don’t want this next life nonsense. This life is tormenting enough. Why sign up for another round of troubles?
They spoke with both their hands still married to their duties. The two of them were careful, in cooking and in longing 一 tending to life, against the quieting of their own.
The knitting of two people is formed in covenant or in endurance. Sometimes endurance becomes the covenant. When the architecture of belonging is misbuilt, or diluted, it is default to then belong to the role, the act, the part 一 and create a melody with those who, with or without choice, have done the same.
I once had a lover; we began at the dawn of my becoming and weathered little erosions through intervals of time. We were thrifted leaves on a mountain, destined to be moved apart by the winds or trampled upon by the avalanche of generations. Still, despite the evidence, I held on for as long as I could. He landed his ears at my table when I began to learn how to see and I attached him to the genesis of my eyes. But who could bear this lofty task? I could not clasp love, so I stitched myself to his development, as an anchor for my own.
Out of my need to be held, I forged myself into whoever he needed 一 a hiccuping voice, a reclining tree, the nemesis of myself or a drowning sun 一 if that offered him some sort of relief that he was not alone in his sinking. I emptied my belly, filling his. I became small for him, he became small to me, I became small to myself. We were alike, in a way, two teenagers interrogating truth, burdening our homes with our disdain for normalcy, if that normalcy represented a life of silence; the impossible nature of rebellion making him a monument to himself.
The second time he broke my heart, I took myself out to eat 一 a celebratory prize for graduating to martyrdom. I didn’t tell my girls, for fear they wouldn’t understand. I prayed over my coffee and daydreamed of a home with him. He would become the god I always thought he was and I would expand, again.
Eventually, I left. I found a taste of Love, while he continued his search. Which, in the absence of answers, birthed a restlessness that transformed into rigor, and like anything that uninvites gentleness, wore out love. He fought the rules of others with his own rules, the religion of others with his own religion 一 any movement that becomes an itch is bound to end in laceration.
I’ve been wondering about the form of belonging, burdened by my need to understand a life outside of survival, habit and the lone vine of loss. I am mesmerized by memory and its unwillingness to disclose all of itself, at once. Instead, it arrives in archives, at the ballot of reflection. And so, I fasten my eyes into the earth; I enlist myself as a witness to the infinite book of analogies.
I am learning how the ocean creates waves, the air energizing water till it dances 一 the basin of blue, cherished by a brush; how the woody roots of an evergreen tree seem to, at first glance, belong to its spine, but are in fact, ingrained several inches into the underbelly of the soil; how the oil remains inside of the cocoon of an olive fruit; how the stars mount into the arms of a sky that has held it, infinitely, against time; how the air also needs touch — the grass loosening like a beach wave to caress the sky. I wonder then, if mountains cannot live without oceans or if oceans cannot live without mountains. I realize, neither of this is true. They are both beautiful, and whole, and together they complement one another.
I feel the wind wash down my spine, memorizing me, the braille of my back 一 this touch, a soft kiss from my Beholder. I wear this gushing water, as an organ inside of me, prompting me towards wonder. When I step outside the door, the heavens are there, offering me a landscape of dwelling, attending to my essential needs. When I pace through the woods, in my element of wandering, the grass and I are continuously exchanging; I give her her breath, she gives me mine. Before I lift my head, the birds arrest me with a song, humming ancient lullabies. When I fashion my eyes to become a witness to being held, I know that Love has been reaching for me all along.
