Mother
Noun: a female parent.
Verb: to be the mother of; to assume as one’s own; to care for like a mother.
Related forms: motherless, unmothered.
The day my mother is arrested I have a roaring spat with her.
Friday the eleventh of February. Cold and grey, my breath escaping in smoky wisps like spilling secrets, the brush of icy air like the caress of a ghost, the white taste of winter in my mouth. School has finished for the day and there is the delicious anticipation of no school next week to look forward to. It is half term – yippee. Five whole days of freedom from the taunts, the jeers, the constant dodging of bullies.
Shadows dance to twinkling lights reflected from other flats onto the windowsill when Mum comes in from work, smelling of curry and smoke and other people’s sweat, bearing that flighty look she gets when she is worried, her lips pulled down into a grimace, her eyes flitting this way and that as if they long to escape the boundaries of her face. They remind me of Lily’s hamster, they do, with their constant scrabbling. She wrings her hands and picks the tissue she is holding to shreds.
‘What is it, Mum?’ I ask when I am unable to take her restlessness any longer, even though I know what’s coming. I can read the signs; I am not stupid. She is already in the bedroom we share, pulling clothes into the suitcase which hasn’t been up long enough to gather dust. I’ve been at Fernhill Secondary only a term and a half, the same amount of time we’ve been here in Kenton. This is the fastest we have moved anywhere, the smallest time we have stayed in one place.
Usually I don’t mind this constant moving. I really don’t. I like that it’s just Mum and me against the world. I like moving just when the bullies are starting to get particularly vicious; it is thwarting them, isn’t it? I like the thought that they will turn up at school having dreamt up new names to call me, a new form of torture, only to find that I am no longer there.
I can’t say I like starting at a new school, identifying immediately the same old bullies in new guises just a tad before they identify me. It is wearying having to endure new bullies calling me by the same few names, having to suffer the same regurgitated pranks.
And now, finally, I have reached my limit. I do not want to move again. Because, for the first time in my life, I have a friend. I have Lily.
I know. It’s sad, isn’t it? It’s taken me thirteen years to find a friend. It hasn’t been that bad though. I didn’t know what I was missing. Anyway, if I had had friends all this while, I would not properly appreciate what Lily means to me, would I? And I have always had Mum, the two of us against a world that is cruel to me, a world that judges me on how I look, not bothering to see inside. And so far, Mum’s been enough.
‘I’m afraid we have to leave, sweetheart,’ she says, trying to shut the overflowing suitcase, contents spilling out like M&M’s from a burst bag.
Normally, I enjoy the excitement of moving to a new flat – the new smells, the fresh layout of the same few rooms. I do a quick reconnaissance of the shops close by, the cafes and the chip shops where I can while away some of the hours waiting for Mum to come home from whichever job she is currently doing. Funnily enough, I like winter evenings best. I have books and food to keep me company while I wait.
I like sitting in the chip shop and doing my homework, the mouth-watering smell of battered fish, the sizzle of potato hitting hot oil, the vinegary crunch of steaming, freshly cooked chips making my brain cells spark and fizz into producing some of my best work. No matter how many times we move, wherever I find myself, the owner of the local chippy becomes my friend.
‘Ah, there she is,’ they’ll say, be it portly Dave, Turkish Ali or cheerful Jen, looking out for me once I’ve been round two weeks in a row after school; the scratch of my pencil on paper harmonising with the cooking sounds, the reassuring banter of the chef with the customers reverberating in my ears like music.
I’ll watch their tired faces crease into grins as I walk in, beads of moisture glistening on their upper lips like droplets sticking to leaves after a shower, wait for them to say, ‘And what homework have you got today?’
I will shrug off my bag and sigh, ‘History and maths.’
They will bring me crispy golden fish and fat chips oozing oil into the foil packet they are wrapped in, steam escaping the corners, along with a smile as warm as the fryer in which they cooked their offering. ‘You work hard for your mum, now, so when you are older, you won’t have to slog long hours in front of the cooker like her, like us.’
On busy days, I help behind the counter and earn a few quid which I then spend on chocolate and crisps. Mum doesn’t know, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, I tell myself. I love the feel of food filling the gaping hole that yawns in my stomach, always wanting more. The explosion in my mouth from a burst of chocolate or the salty kick of crunchy peanuts from a Snickers bar instantly wipes out the horrors I’ve had to endure that day – the name-calling, the jeers. When I am eating, I can forget. The warm feeling in my stomach afterwards is comfort, like my mother’s hug. It envelops me, makes me feel safe, loved. And the thought of the food awaiting me at the end of the day gets me through long afternoons at school, when the desks on either side of me are conspicuously empty, when people move to sit two benches away, sniffing loudly, complaining that I stink. The thought of the lunch I carry in my bag, a tuna salad baguette that my mum has packed, plus the KitKat I bought on my way to school and the cheese and onion Walkers I will buy in the cafeteria along with a can of Coke, tides me through the morning when my classmates call me lard-arse.
The other activity I love, which provides solace from the realities of daily life, is reading. When I read, I can escape to diverse, happier worlds, I can be a different person, a person other than the fat girl my schoolmates, no matter where I move to, seem to despise and be repulsed by. I revel in the joy of discovering a new word, trying it out, the feel of it in my mouth, the way it rolls off my tongue, a gift to the listener.
Mum loves my pronunciation. ‘You speak English like the British who invented the language,’ she says proudly, her eyes shining.
‘I am British, Mum,’ I laugh.
‘You are,’ she says, her voice awed as if she cannot quite believe it.
Mum makes me say new words that I have learnt again and again, watching my tongue shape the word, her eyes screwed up in concentration. She tries to repeat after me but she pulls the word every which way, stressing the wrong syllables. The more she tries, the more she gets it wrong, until finally she gives up, with a ‘Pah!’ in that way she has, rolling her eyes and shrugging and thrusting her arms out at the same time, and I give in to the laughter that has been bubbling in my throat and we fall about laughing.
When I was little, just as I was beginning to make sense of the world, Mum realised how much I loved words by the way my face lit up when I learnt a new one. I would clap with delight and repeat the word again and again, fascinated by the way it sounded, the way it tumbled out of my mouth. She fetched a notebook and asked me to write down any words I did not know the meaning to; any new words I found in the books that I was reading. The first word I jotted in that new book – we called it ‘Diya’s Vocabulary Book’, written painstakingly in my just-learned-to-join-up-letters writing – was ‘mother’. I knew the meaning to that one of course, but I wanted to write it anyway. Mum had me write out the full meaning, the verb, noun and related forms. ‘Mother’: such a simple word, encompassing so much.
‘You,’ I had said, cupping her face in my palm, and she had looked at me, her eyes filling up in that familiar expression of love and joy and wonder, that expression I can never get enough of, her eyes shimmering like chocolate buttons melting in the sun.
‘Yes, me,’ she said, smiling and swiping at her eyes.
‘Why are you crying, Mum?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘They are tears of joy, darling,’ she smiled. ‘I am so happy to have you for my daughter. Do you want to write “daughter” in there? Shall we look it up?’
Since then, I have amassed quite a few of those notebooks. I think I am onto my seventh or eighth one now. Nerdy I know, but who’s to care? I haven’t had any friends up until now to make fun of the books that I lug with me everywhere. Not all of them at once, of course, only the one I am currently using. I read such a lot and I’d much rather be prepared when I come across a word I don’t know.
My vocabulary is brilliant thanks to these books. I hardly ever need to refer to the earliest ones now – I know all of those words by heart, have used them many times. I make a point of using a new word that I have learnt as many times as possible. My record is twenty in a day; it was the word ‘schadenfreude’ – even the teacher did not know what it meant. She had to look it up. It is not a very nice word; it means ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’.
Food and words are my best friends, or have been thus far, after my mum and, more recently, Lily.
I like coming home from the chip shop, dragging my school bag behind me by its strap, my clothes smelling faintly of oil and the outdoors. I let myself into the dark flat wherever we are staying, the noise of countless televisions blaring, arguments erupting, dinners cooking and children yelling filtering in. The soft buttery glow of reflected light from the lamps outside oozes into the flat like caramel from a Creme Egg and envelopes me in comfort. The stale, slightly desperate smell of the empty flat is masked by the overpowering odour of spiced grilled meat wafting from the Kebab shop, which inveigles in on a burst of nippy air through the open front door as I enter, and the thick cloud of trapped air sighs as it is displaced, huffing like a spurned lover.
I am not scared to be on my own. In fact, I feel safe, cocooned in the collective warmth of the hundreds of people living in these flats, above, below and around me. I like to imagine what an alien zooming past on his spaceship sees when he looks down on us mortals. Will he rocket into each flat and wish he was part of the lives being led there rather than trapped in a machine ogling a culture he longs to own? And what will he think of me, sitting in the dark on the sofa with a bag of crisps, a can of Coke and a pack of Skittles, reading my book by the mellow gold light of the lamp beside the sofa as I wait for Mum to come home with leftovers from the restaurant where she’s been working? The smell of chocolate and adventure, the gooey brown taste of sweet escape, the crunch of teeth working overtime, the rustle of the foil pack gaping wider to dislodge the last of its contents, the wistful sigh of pages turning, my mind transported, no longer in the room but in a world created by the author of the book I am reading, beige crumbs swilling like confetti, blending into beige carpet.
When I hear Mum’s tread on the stairs, I quickly dispose of the wrappers – she doesn’t approve of my choice of snacks, what mother does? – and sweep the crumbs under the sofa. (I always know it’s her. I know by the rhythm of her footfall, the way she favours her right foot more than the left, the sigh of exertion she releases after each step. The last flight of stairs is always the hardest for her. ‘They get me every time,’ she laments. ‘It doesn’t matter if we live on the second floor or the fifth, I cannot handle the last flight of stairs after a long day at work.’)
When I hear her key in the door, I am propped up again on the sofa with my book, no evidence of offending snacks. She will smile, the lines on her face crinkling, her eyes glowing, the tiredness leaving them briefly as she looks at me.
‘Hungry, miss?’ she will ask and we will sit together in front of the television, still in the dark, the reflected light from other flats and the flicker of the telly basking us in a warm glow. She will save all the pieces of meat from the vindaloo, and the paneer from the saag for me and she will throw her head back on the cushion, swivel her gaze towards me and ask, ‘How was your day, sweetheart?’
‘About the same,’ I will reply.
And she will say, ‘That bad, huh?’
‘That bad.’
She will smile softly at me then, her eyes shining with care. ‘We both need a bit of a lift, don’t we? Look what I got for dessert.’
I love moving into a new place and getting used to the smells. Every flat in every town smells different. Some smell of escapades, others of pain, yet others of anger, danger, fear. I like to wander through the rooms, usually two plus a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and imagine the lives of the people who lived there before us and wonder where they are now.
This flat, the one we currently inhabit, though not for long if Mum has her way, smelled of new paint and old despair when we first arrived. Now, to me it smells of hope and new beginnings. Not so, it seems, to my mum.
She tries to pull the suitcase closed but it won’t shut. Both sides are full to bursting, blouse sleeves waving out of the edges like drowning arms in the sea after a shipwreck. She manages to pull the top to and tries to sit on it to squash the clothes together. ‘Here, help me,’ she says, looking up at me for the first time.
‘No.’ I fold my arms together, my legs planted apart: my warrior stance.
‘Diya, don’t be difficult now, please.’ Her voice is desperate, laced with panic. Her eyes plead with me, eyeballs moving frantically again, as if she can pierce the wall, see past it to some peril only she can imagine.
‘Mum, I’m tired of moving. I want to stay here.’
Her shoulders slump and she doubles into herself. Unlike me, my mother is tiny. At thirteen, I am almost as tall as her and twice as big. I bet she could fit into that suitcase she is trying to close. ‘I thought you liked moving,’ she says in a small voice.
‘Not anymore. I have a friend now, Mum. You know that. I have Lily.’ My voice is accusing. I don’t care. She knows what a big deal finding a friend is for me. She was so happy when I told her. She baked a cake to celebrate. ‘You said I could have her round for a sleepover this half-term, remember?’ With each word, my voice has been getting louder. I try to mask the hurt I feel but it is hard.
My mum has never been one to go back on her promises. And I was so excited that, for the first time, the very first time, I would be doing stuff other girls did routinely, that for them was a matter of course. Sleepovers, staying up late sharing secrets, midnight feasts, giggling after lights out. ‘You said we could have the bedroom and you would camp on the sofa. What happened to your promises, eh? I don’t know why you keep insisting on moving all the time. I’ve had enough. I’m not going!’ I shout.
When she looks up, her bottom lip is trembling. That makes me mad. She’s going to use tears against me – talk about cheating!
‘I’m sorry,’ she says softly. ‘So sorry, Diya. We have to move, sweetie. We have no choice.’
‘Why?’ I yell. ‘Why do we have no choice?’
‘I’ve lost my job.’
A lie. She is a rubbish liar, her face flooding crimson every time she swerves from the truth. First tears and now a lie.
‘Nonsense,’ I say. ‘And anyway, the kind of jobs you do are a dime a dozen.’ I say this deliberately, aiming to wound as much as I can and, just as I thought, she flinches. ‘You could ask the chip shop owner, Ali. He’d give you a job in an instant. He fancies you anyway,’ I scream.
She doesn’t say anything, just allows the tears to keep on coming, making no move to wipe them. She fiddles with her pallu, twisting it into knots, the way she does when she is nervous and upset.
‘Why do we have to keep moving when we’ve barely settled? I’m not coming. You go.’
The neck of her sari blouse is soaked now. Her nose is running. I cannot bear to stay in this room, tainted by her anguish, any longer. I walk to the door, opening it so fiercely that I almost pull it off its hinges.
‘Wait,’ she yells. ‘Where are you going? We have to leave tonight.’
‘Have you not heard a word I’ve been saying?’
‘Please.’ Her voice is urgent, begging. ‘Please don’t, Diya.’
I slam the door shut with a satisfying thud on her teary face and clatter down the stairs, the smell of burgers and overcooked rice, the faint yellow tang of urine, the reek of feet and angst trailing me. I hear our door open and close as she attempts to follow me, but she has no hope in hell of catching up. I hear her breath coming in laboured gasps and after a flight of stairs, I do not hear her at all.
A police car idles half on the curb, half on the pavement, just outside the front door, blocking the entrance to the flats. I have a good mind to slap it, ask what they are doing obstructing people when they are supposed to set a good example, but I rush past instead, wanting to get away, not get in trouble with the police, and to put as much distance between my mum and me as possible. The anger is a hard ball in my chest, fiery and red, propelling me forward. I want to douse it with a chocolate bar or two, I think. I dig in the pockets of my sweatshirt. Damn, I ran out without my coat – it has some change in the pockets. And it’s freezing – even though, as the bullies said last week, snatching my coat and stuffing it in the toilet bowl, I have plenty of padding to keep me warm. Lily had found it for me, and together we cleaned it the best we could. I ran a load of laundry before Mum came home and she had been inordinately grateful; she’d kissed me and said, ‘What would I do without you, my best girl,’ her eyes shining, soft as chocolate-coated marshmallows. I’d pretended to blanch, pulling away.
Goosebumps, teeth chattering, the breeze smelling of battered fish, tasting of ice, nippy on my cheeks. I rush back to the door. The police car is still idling, though now another car plus a police van have joined it. I am not surprised or unduly bothered; there are often police cars idling by our block of flats. I’m annoyed though. If the front door was blocked before, when there was only the one car, now access to it is even more constricted. I know they have to make their arrests or whatever, but shouldn’t they be more considerate of the residents? I have a good mind to write a letter of complaint. I make a mental note to discuss the pros and cons of this with Lily at the sleepover – I’ve been a tad nervous as to what we’ll talk about, seeing as we’ll be spending almost twelve hours together. I worry that she might get bored with me, even though I have two movies lined up that we could watch and a choice of three more. I have been collecting topics we might talk about all week, just in case conversation lags. Then I remember that if Mum gets her way, there will be no sleepover, that we might be moving this very evening, and the orange ball of fury, temporarily doused by the icy breath of winter, sparks and blazes again.
The police vehicles are empty except for one of the cars. The driver’s face freezes, going as white as the breath escaping my mouth in heaving puffs, when he sees me running back, our gaze meeting for a brief second, his eyes the dark blue of regret. He opens his mouth and I wonder if he’s going to say something, but he only looks stricken. Oh well, no time to worry about that now. I clatter up the stairs without pausing to take a breath, run up to our door and screech to an abrupt halt.
It is wide open, a cluster of policemen forming an impenetrable wall around it in a semi-circle, enclosing my mother as if they are a rugby scrum. Mum’s face is devoid of colour, pale as the pristine pages of a new notebook, her orange sari garish in contrast.
All those police cars – they came for Mum? Do they think she’s a terrorist? I feel a giggle building inside and threatening to burst out of me at any minute. What a laugh we will have about this later, Mum and I!
Her eyes close when she sees me and she sways on her feet. A phone beeps, the radio one of the policemen is wearing crackles loudly.
‘Vani Bhat, I am arresting you on suspicion of the abduction of Rupa Shetty from Bangalore, India, thirteen years ago…’
Abduction? Ha!
‘…and on suspicion of obtaining leave to stay in the United Kingdom by deception, on suspicion of remaining in the United Kingdom beyond time limited by leave and on suspicion of being in possession of false identity documents. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do or say may be given in evidence…’
I am reeling from the assault of the words the policeman is uttering, the tableau being played out at the door to my flat, when I hear a clattering on the stairs behind me. I turn to see the driver of the police car who had caught my eye running up towards us. The door to Flat 3A opens and a small face peers out, two curious eyes the green of pond water. A sound from within and the door is slammed shut.
‘What’s going on here?’ I ask and my voice is reedy, wobbly as tentative notes being played by amateur fingers on a piano.
The group of police gathered outside our door turn as one to look at me and I squirm under the scrutiny of so many eyes. They look shocked, wearing the same expression as the man running up the stairs, the driver of the police car, who is breathing loudly and noisily behind me.
‘Sorry, we didn’t mean for you to be privy to this. We waited until you’d left. We didn’t think you’d be back so soon,’ one of the women says gently.
‘I forgot my coat,’ I say and immediately I think, why am I telling them this? The laughter is still bubbling in my chest in anticipation. I’m disbelieving. There is a mistake. There must be. ‘Why are you here? What’s going on?’ I ask once more.
There must be some quiet unspoken agreement among them as it is the policewoman who speaks again. ‘We couldn’t risk waiting any longer as she would have fled, given us the slip again, like she’s been doing for the last thirteen years.’ Her voice is soft, apologetic.
I feel the laughter morphing into tears, the taste of salt in my throat, at the sight of their serious faces, grave as headstones lining the cemetery, my mum’s closed eyes, her face blanched as if someone has taken an eraser to it and wiped it of colour and expression.
‘I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.’ Why am I being so formal? Why is my mum standing there rocking on her feet, her eyes shut, her face blank? ‘There must be some mistake. You tell them, Mum.’
She opens her eyes when I say ‘Mum’. ‘Diya is my daughter,’ she says, her voice high and scared but unwavering. ‘I am her mother.’ She is speaking to them but looking at me. There is apology in her gaze, and love, all the love she feels for me, the melting chocolate-button gaze. She is telling them she loves me with her eyes.
I realise with a start that she might be saying goodbye, that this was why she wanted to move, this was why she thought she had no choice. The first tendrils of fear bloom, creeping up from the pit of my stomach, taking a hold of me. ‘What did you do, Mum?’
The policewoman who spoke earlier looks at me and her gaze is tender, remorseful. I hate it. I hate her.
‘No!’ I shout, ‘please, no,’ babbling, desperate as the policewoman restrains me, her arms gentle yet surprisingly strong, as my mother is led away by the posse of officers, as flat doors open and heads peek out, as my whole world turns upside down on a February evening while shadows steal up the walls and night sneaks in via the back door and takes up residence.
‘I love you, Diya. I love you so much,’ my mother says, softly blowing kisses into the air around my face and, even though she leans close, she can’t quite touch me, and even though I lean in towards her, I am being held back by the policewoman. I struggle, I kick. I want my mother. ‘You are my daughter. Believe me. You are.’ Mum looks right at me as she says this, as if conveying a part of herself. ‘Nothing can change that. Nothing. I am sorry it had to happen this way. At the time…’ Her sigh is immense, catching on a sob. ‘Perhaps there was some other way, but at the time… I will explain everything in my letters. I will write. I love you, Diya.’
My mother’s words float up the stairs, echoing up the stairwell like dispatches from a ghost, propelled by the deflating air from the popped bubble of the truths I took for granted and believed up until now, the purple smell of horror, the scarlet taste of pain, the icy white grip of shock raising goosebumps.
‘I am your mother, Diya. You are mine. I love you, Diya, my darling girl, light of my life,’ are her last words to me, as she is led away.
Breakfast: 1 slice of toast (wholemeal from a 400g loaf). No butter.
Mid-morning snack: Banana.
Lunch: Tomato Soup. No croutons.
Afternoon snack: Apple.
Supper: Mixed salad. No dressing. No croutons.
Aarti twines the salad on her fork, around and around, the leafy green reminding her of fields gleaming in the sun. She aches to be home, where there are people hired to look after her, to cater to her every whim. She brings the fork to her mouth but her stomach recoils, nausea threatening to get the better of her. She welcomes the familiar feeling; it comforts her, even as she rushes to the bathroom, is sick over the bowl, heaving until there is nothing left inside to purge. How many toilet bowls in how many bathrooms has she heaved over? How many years of her life spent like this, bent double over a cistern? The dirty yellow smell of vomit and hurt. The feeling of being cleansed, of floating on air. She has missed it, she thinks as she rinses her mouth, the mouthwash tart, stinging. It’s been a few years.
The reflection staring back at her from the mirror confirms this assessment. Lips sagging like the drooping belly of a portly woman who’s lost weight too quickly. Tired skin the colour and texture of crinkled orange rind. Lines radiating from sunken eyes – no money left for Botox injections anymore. None of the so-called ‘age-defying’ creams do what they promise. Not one. Age has crept up on her when she has not been looking, not been watching. It has crept up and taken residence while she has been busy hunting for her daughter.
Her daughter.
Nausea threatens again. She grips the sink hard, closes her eyes. A silhouette swims in front of closed lids, the shadow gradually taking definition and shape, growing from baby into young girl in a matter of minutes. The face she has imagined so many times, each feature chosen carefully, created lovingly from her fantasies. This is the curse of never having seen her child in the intervening years since she held her as a baby. Her profile changes with each conjuring. Will her daughter be like this for real? She doesn’t know. All she has is this: an illusion fabricated by her yearning, painted by her imagination. Aarti pictures young honeyed skin radiant with the first flush of youth. Soft, liquid eyes the colour and texture of warm sunflower oil, curving upwards tantalisingly at the ends. Her whole life ahead of her, her best years to come.
What was she, Aarti, doing when she was her daughter’s age? Photoshoots, ads, television appearances. Well on her way to becoming the top mo. . .
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