The Thing that Swallows is Sorrow

The night I left Dhaka for the last time, I took this photograph through the taxi window. I was crying, which I mention not for sympathy but because it explains the blur, the way the city dissolved into smears of light and shadow. You leave a place and suddenly realise you never really saw it clearly. The streets where I had lived for seven months became almost like my father’s presence in my childhood — theoretical. That white car could have been my father’s. It could have been anyone’s. In the rearview mirror, the driver watched me with what I interpreted as concern but was probably just the humid air. I had three suitcases and a partition to overcome.

The wires cross like veins between buildings that lean into each other’s shadows. Once, I rode an elevator to the twenty-third floor, watching the skyline shrink beneath me while a woman held her child’s hand. There is a comfort in compression. Cities build upward because memory cannot do the same. The jumble of electrical lines reminds me of conversations at parties, everyone talking across one another, nobody quite listening. I lost myself in the eyes of a neon light for a while. The war continues. You have nothing to do with this mood.

Where’s my father? He is not one of those five hundred men, and I am not one of those women, waiting outside iron gates. All my life, I searched for my father in tiny balconies of big cities and unopened doors, I slept alone in innumerable beds, shrunk into extinction to find him. I wanted to know the man who made my mother wait — Who’s sleeping next to me, now? Is it loneliness — or is it you? Yes, I am babbling all this because, in spite of it all, I feel near you. I don’t like waiting. But you already know that. Once again the thought of you has rescued me from the mystery of my indifference.

She will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of I, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving her because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined; I don’t get one without the other.

My grandmother looked different in glasses. Serious. Aloof. I always hid her glasses, whenever I could. I watched her across the room, as she always searched, her body half-turned from me. I felt that familiar vertigo — I was both present and already remembering this moment from sometime away.

Three months ago, when I was packing my books into cardboard boxes, I found her glasses. I can’t return them, now. Can I?

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and keep oneself composed in the hardest hours of grief. But then comes a friendly gesture through a window, or one notices a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter falls from a drawer… and everything collapses. What’s real is this: I suffer shame in all these images

The plants grow wherever they choose, indifferent to our ways. This morning, I walked through the empty courtyard and felt my grandmother’s hand on my shoulder — the light hits the corners just so, and I remember every balcony I have ever leaned against, smoking cigarettes I didn’t want, listening to men explain things I already knew. White paint peels differently than any other colour – I once played in a courtyard like this as a girl. I was not happy there; it wasn’t the courtyard’s fault. I was not happy then; it wasn’t my fault. Being happy is beside the point; the point is not to surrender. I wish to be in that courtyard now — in this word-image, happiness and meaning come very close — in my girlhood courtyard, both might become a little easier.

I think about her now at 3 a.m., sleepless in my sweaty apartment, the sound of sirens interrupting any story I am trying to write. All photographs of solitary women suggest the same threshold. The difference between leaving and being left, as if geography might reveal what moral reasoning could not.

Some mornings she searches for evidence in her body. The hand against cheek, the eyes focussed on something beyond the visible frame. The women in our family had a way with eating — I never saw my mother eating anywhere other than in heat in the kitchen. She always struggled with hunger. She always struggled with weight — by her fifties she had put on a lot of weight, she ate voraciously, ate danadar while cooking. She slammed doors, banged chairs. She did everything noisily. Simply looking at her face upset her — I watched her watching what I cannot see. Marriage is not the story she had been told. Neither was motherhood. Neither was desire.

My mother is cooking dinner in the heat so I can write.

This is Kolkata, 2025, and we believe in nothing if not the mercy of closed eyes. I think of her as an immigrant twice over: first from the country whose language she still dreams in, then from the marriage that provided no sanctuary. Yet, she learned to love her life.

The lines around her mouth speak of waiting. For what, I never asked. Nowadays they speak of the cuckoo’s wings, and light of the thunder — I am connected to them in some way unknown to myself.

She braids her hair every evening, before lighting the lamp.

In the bathroom cabinet: Vaseline, Pond’s, Keo Karpin in a green jar. Religion failed her but ritual did not. She washes her face in exactly thirty-seven splashes of water. I am five, or twelve, or twenty-five, standing in a doorway wanting to cross a threshold that exists only in memory. My mother weeps in a language I cannot translate.

It was her 51st summer. 2015. I knew her to be many things, but not free. We have come away to the place she grew up in. She was walking by the mustard field — restless, exhausted. She moved herself through the grass, ran away to the stream, nothing could hold her back anymore — not even her age or weight. She ran away, like those small dragonflies by the stream, frightened, yet dancing in-between the mustard flowers. After a long time, she heard things other than demands and duties. She put her hands upon her body that day — she hadn’t had her period for three months now — she hated her body much less.

My mother never disturbed me when I spent all my days trying to count the leaves on a single tree. She never asked me to make tea, or serve rice to my brothers. I climbed branch by branch and wrote down the numbers in a little book. When they asked — she told them — I have my head in the clouds. But it’s not an easy thing to do; she had to give up her time and youth, for me to be bewildered by the wonder of it — the quietness of leisure and the sound of an otherwise life.

She sleeps as the May light cuts across her face. This was Bhebia in the year when nothing happened as expected. The table fan hums. A neighbour’s dog barks. I watch her breathe and think of how we arrived here, children of refugees who believed in work as salvation. The women in my family close their eyes not to dream but to rest before the next necessary task. We were raised on stories with clean endings.

There is a particular way I fold sarees — these are the things we arrange when we can arrange nothing else. My grandmother taught me to fold sarees; she liked arranging most things. There was a year in my early twenties when I lived alone in a one-room apartment in Delhi. I took on her habits, every dust has to belong in its own place and I have been a woman for a long time. There’s nothing left of that wild poppy dream now — my heart is burning, burning.

My mother’s hands. This is poor love. It is of salt, jasmine, and respite. I did everything I could as a pre-teen to get away from these hands. The bathroom mirror. I remember crying as the finger marks burnt on my face. The tiles were pink then, not any institutional white. There is something devastating about bathrooms — their promise of privacy and the rituals of cleansing that never quite succeed. I am not to be personal with my mother and my girlhood. She had no way to know how to be a mother to me. She loved me and pitied me. It was in this bathroom; she washed my hair and taught my growing body, and me when I got my first blood at nine. It was a bright blue spring morning, and I only remember her scent — it still goes straight into my bloodstream. I forgave my life since I have learned to dream.

We tell ourselves stories. The stories we construct when love fails us. At home, my mother potted tuberoses that never survived summer. In 2022, in a rented room by a dingy alley, I pressed petals between Didion’s pages and told myself they meant something. The thought of you rescues me from indifference.

All day long, I have been turning those girlhood afternoons round in my head; I couldn’t think of anything else. For a moment, I am going to ignore everything — tea and mangoes, noise of hunger and death, your messages, a long life with you. I remember only how my mother walked between doors, her figure, her bangles — these I can still see, and the warmth on her hands, and how she brushed my hair. All this is so far away, and yet the handle of my childhood door is close before my eyes — she has left signs of feeling everywhere — the cuckoo that sings in spring and the tuberoses by my window.

I remember the cluster of tuberoses in my mother’s pot stands — late in July — the flowers will never bloom, the clogged soil will kill the buds, and they might not come back again. Yet, she’d plant them in every season. Are you saying my mother too wanted better things? Or, she wished to live without any hope of flourishing?  I look up and a door opens — the tuberoses have bloomed. I don’t need anyone’s praise to believe in bloom. In this side of the world, there are no wrong seasons.