My Mother’s Feet

My mother’s feet are shaped like the letter C. ‘They look like Thamma’s feet,’ says my four-year-old niece when she eats a croissant for the first time. We grow quiet and wait nervously for the bushiness of silence to hide us. We feel grateful that my mother’s grown slightly hard of hearing – we are hoping that she hasn’t heard the little girl’s simile.

I’ve never seen anyone baking a croissant, but I have seen my mother’s feet grow into one. I once watched a French chef on YouTube – adding layer on layer on layer of dough, smuggling in butter between them so that they don’t stick, so that when one breaks  the croissant  with one’s fingers or inside one’s mouth, a phenomenological world can burst open. I don’t think my mother’s feet went through the same process. If butter was added between layers of muscle and nerve and skin, it is possible that they wouldn’t have hurt like they do. I have a theory about how my mother’s feet lost their shape, but I don’t have the ammunition to prove it. I think it started after my brother and I were born – I two years after her marriage, planned and welcomed; my brother about two years after me, an accident, like all births, but the sense of the accident somehow more emphasised by the unexpectedness of his arrival, as if he was a guest who, having come unannounced, had confused the young couple.

My parents didn’t want any more unannounced guests.. Emboldened – and possibly equally unnerved – by the forced sterilisation programme in the country and the growing noise of ‘Hum Doh Hamare Doh’, We Two, Our Two, of the government’s family planning slogan, they turned to the female contraceptive pill. I didn’t know it was called that then,  of course, but I have a vague memory of presuming that it, with names of days marked on it, looked like an adult calendar, a more private and sophisticated version of the wall and table calendar. I didn’t ask my mother – the adult world was confusing, there were too many things children were not allowed to ask.

In order to prevent unannounced guests from gaining tenancy in her womb and eventually her family, my mother sacrificed her bones. She wasn’t alone. They are everywhere – women of that generation, struggling to match their arthritic limbs with their desire to move. I might have read it in a research paper a few years ago, I’ll look for it again. I search for these histories online, as if knowing the reason for this quiet murder of her bones will help me to find a cure. My search history is my mother’s medical history, of when it became unbearable for me to see her in pain, not when pain became unbearable for her, for that is now as constant as her breathing.

My mother was a school teacher. It was from her that my brother and I learnt that the English sound for pain was ‘ouch’, that the full-throated wailing of the Bangla ‘aaa’ when injured wasn’t comprehensible to those who lived outside our language. My mother uses neither of these sounds anymore; no sound is perhaps an ally to her pain, she barely speaks. Or the sound of her pain has become subsonic – we can’t hear it anymore.

Not having asked anyone for anything when young, semi-abandoned by her parents as it were, she has forgotten to ask for help. ‘My hair’s grown very long,’ she says to me many months into the COVID lockdown. She’s unable to say anything more; everything is shorthand that I must interpret and understand. Because I cannot do anything to lessen her suffering, I become her interpreter. I have to look at her face and understand everything – infants cry, growl, squeak; my mother doesn’t even let out a sigh.

I carry a thin comb and a pair of scissors. My nephew and I help her walk – though it is incorrect to call her movements ‘walking’ – to the terrace. We make her sit on a stool. Her hair is wet, I begin combing it, untangling stubborn knots that her bent fingers haven’t been able to wade through. The little boy, then probably nine, holds her shoulder while I almost hold her by her hair – we have become conditioned to think of her as a person who might fall and break her bones again. It’s the first time I am cutting human hair. Her hair, which two fat braids couldn’t tame when she was in school, is now thin. She’s never changed her parting – it runs through the middle of her scalp, dividing two countries which look alike. At the place where it meets the forehead is a red mark – vermilion has been accumulating here every day for the last fifty years.

I know my mother even from the back of her head. I won’t be able to say how – it’s something one just knows, like the smell of one’s own mouth. I don’t ask her how much she would like me to cut – this too I must interpret from her silence or the length of her hair itself. I chop off quite a bit, my nephew looks alarmed. It is what follows that is harder, hardest. Trimming it to make it look like a straight line – I don’t dare to attempt the ‘U’ shape, the ends of the hair forced into a smile, as we are in photographs. The hair falls on the floor – it’s all calcium, I think to myself many times. My mother still has some calcium inside her – how else is her hair growing, why can’t we channelise this calcium into her bones? When I sweep the floor and collect the hair, I feel hesitant about letting it go into the trash bin. Only if it were possible to suck out the calcium from these strands and plump up her bones with them.

Nepal – for that is his name, not an uncommon one in northern Bengal, for the country is only a few kilometres away – comes to cut my mother’s nails. She can’t bend enough to touch her feet, we do not have the skill to cut gnarled nails. They do not look like nails – coiled and wound around themselves, they have the hardened look of fossils. My mother’s nails look older than her. Everyone in the family has tried cutting them with a nail cutter – it feels like cutting teeth. Why are the bones inside her body not as hard? Nepal soaks them in water, he uses surgical equipment, he saws my mother’s nails as if they were wood; or stone. I hear whispers escape from my mother: thank you Nepal, thank you Nepal, I’m sorry Nepal …

My mother always apologises on behalf of her bones, as if they were children she hasn’t raised well. Today she’s apologising to – and for – the sandals that can’t hold her feet. How’s it their fault, she says to me in their defence, how can they hold this? The ‘this’ is on the floor – the ‘this’ cannot even wear socks in the coldest winter. Her feet are so cold that she is shocked by their temperature when her hands touch them accidentally. She apologises for the footwear because I blame her condition on bad footwear worn by women in the 1980s and 1990s. My anger has made me purposely forgetful – how many kinds of footwear were available to Indian women at that time? She apologises to those who try to touch her feet for pranam. She apologises on behalf of all footwear manufacturers whose shoes, sandals and slippers no longer fit her – her toes fall outside the footwear, as if they were the stamen in a hibiscus flower.

I know of almost no Indian woman of that generation who does not complain of pain in their feet or knees, of difficulty with walking. As always, my mind gravitates towards the idiomatic – ‘paer bhari hona’, the Hindi phrase for the pregnant woman, almost a literal diagnosis, the swelling of feet. So many Indian afternoons, darkened by curtains, have held in them the moving images of thin little children, boys in their half pants, girls in their cotton frocks, walking on their mother’s legs and feet like junior trapeze artists. The mother’s request, insistence, threat and plea to her offspring for some help that would reduce the clots of pain, their small hands insufficient in wringing out the pain, the joint decision to turn to their little feet to push out the pain like washermen and women squeezing out dirt from clothes on riverbanks in India – an afternoon play in three acts. I still remember how white my mother’s legs looked even in that summer dark of closed wooden windows, light coming in only through a square jali ventilator – how girlish her legs were, their veins, as if they had just been drawn by an artist with a green pen, and my shock how something so beautiful, so hidden from the world by whorls of her saree, could have become a hive for such paralysing pain.

I try to make her walk. I hold her hand to support her body and ask another person to take care of the other side. She drags her feet for a few steps – I see the strain on her face, but my ambition takes over: I will try to remind her of what her feet could do once. My little niece, who lives her life on her feet, for whom sitting and sleeping are punishment, tries to help. ‘I’m here, I’ll hold you, you won’t fall,’ she keeps saying, meaning every word. My mother asks to return to her chair after a few steps. We place her there. I try not to look at her face – I know what will be on it. The skin that breaks when tears come … There is no human in the world who likes to see their mother cry.

My niece and I walk away. I know my mother’s eyes are pursuing me. ‘Have we come far away, far enough?’ my niece asks, always in a funny and unexpected Bangla syntax. ‘Thamma can still see us,’ I say, using her word for her grandmother. ‘How do you know?’ she asks. I know, I always know. I feel guilty that I can walk, that my feet can take me so far away from her.

A medical belt holds my mother’s middle together – bones and muscles and everything that I can’t see. We believe in it almost religiously – it will prevent other fractures, other dislocations. I know the sound of its Velcro like I know the sound of some Hindu religious rituals. Like the conch shell, like ululation, this sound inaugurates something.

One day, noticing that she seemed happier with the bubble wrap than with the bottle of body oil that it was wrapping, I start getting her bubble wraps whenever parcels arrive. Phut-phut-phut sounds fill the air, I see her thin and bent fingers struggle with the air inside these tiny pockets of plastic. When she manages to deflate a particularly stubborn air bubble, she pauses, perhaps to enjoy her victory, then she is at it again. Even though she will complain about painful fingers later, now she’s like an athlete – this is both practice and the finals, she cannot think of anything else. I pretend not to watch – it seems like she’s happy, that these bubbles of air have been able to do what her feet didn’t allow her. I think of the French footballer Michel Platini – I was in school when he retired from professional football: his mind wanted to continue playing, he said, but his legs were no longer willing.

Anthems and instructions about good health chase me. Sitting is the equivalent of smoking in our times. I hear that from people who exercise, who walk and run and touch ends of their bodies with their nose and head. I am not one of them though I want to be a person who can stand on their head and challenge nature and endorse human stupidity. What about those who cannot walk or run? When I see my mother, I am forced to imagine her as a chain smoker – she can only sit or lie down all day. What happens to our bodies when they cannot walk?

When my mother, compelled by my insistence and scolding, learns to text, she gradually begins to send messages to everyone. They have no punctuation mark, no comma, no period. I begin to think of them as run-on lines. She is walking in these sentences, walking without stop. My mother is walking freely, without pain…

I wrote this about two years ago. Since then, my mother’s body has changed. A ‘balloon’ was inserted between her vertebra; a ‘ball’ in her femur after she broke her hip. My niece is envious – to have two playthings, a ball and a balloon, inside one’s body would make her feel like a toy; I’ve overheard her asking such questions to my mother when there are no adults in the room. She also has an extra pair of legs – not a pair but actually four. They stand near where her footwear wait for her almost all night and day. I’ve caught myself touching or moving her sandals occasionally – a tic, perhaps coming from the fear of them rusting. She watches birds and butterflies fly inside her phone all day. When Soma, the domestic staff,  moves the four-legged thing to clean the floor, she tries to move her legs even though she’s lying on her bed. An old instinct. My niece, never one to lose an opportunity to be a gymnast, uses it as a balance beam.

‘Walker,’ she tells them, as if sharing the name of the four-legged stand and her memory of the life of her legs and her ambition at the same time.