Pictures of You: Shabnam Nadiya

 “None for the Birds,” by Shabnam Nadiya

 

Mothering didn’t come easy to us—not to my mother, not to me. Surely there are women who slip into that role with the ease of sword into sheath. Surely there are women for whom discarding their earlier selves was a battle early won. Not us though. Perhaps it is wrong of me to say that. Perhaps it is more accurate to say we discovered, in our own ways, that lullabies were just one kind of song.

To become a mother was expected; less so for me than for her. The leniency afforded by a later time was not much, but it did grant me a few more moments to breathe. Her vision of what her life should be was halted again and again by marriage, war, childbirth, migration. Obstruction (?b?str?kSH(?)n,äb?str?kSH(?)n/, noun) : a thing that impedes or prevents passage or progress. Sometimes you have to choose to let an obstruction merely ‘impede’ and not ‘prevent.’ Tenacity became my mother’s religion; she fed it to me straight and raw through the umbilical cord.

I broke my world apart, once, and put it back together. It’s not your world anymore, friends and family told me, You’re a mother now; it’s your daughter’s. I disagreed. If I didn’t learn how to hold on to my own world, how could I tell my daughter that the real question isn’t whether gravity can push you down or pull you up, it’s whether gravity can pull you apart?

This is not to say that my mother or I lacked in love. This is not to say that the first touch of baby skin didn’t rip our hearts and fill it brimming all at one go. A nurse had swooshed my newborn over me, letting her velvet cheek rest on mine for a moment, and that touch had cut through the epidural fog like tempered steel.

My daughter was born with a full head of hair; her tight curls clung to her head like silken limpets. The curls eventually disappeared as she grew older, but back then my gently teasing fingers never found access to her scalp. Older family members, as well as the nursing staff at the clinic, tut-tutted at my decision not to shave her head. It was unthinkable to retain the hair made napak, impure, by its months-long soak in amniotic fluids. My mother laughed; her teachings, messaged through her words as well as her lived life, of not mindlessly following custom were rooted in my heart’s soil. I trust my daughter’s judgment, she told relatives when they came to her with their concerns.

I had never known this.

One afternoon, when he was about three or four, my youngest brother disappeared. The three apartments in our wing were connected at the back by a spiral staircase. Our parents and our upstairs neighbors kept the backdoors open, so the coming and going between the two households was near constant. The deep affection my brother felt for our upstairs chachi, our neighboring aunt, was very much reciprocated, and when we noticed he wasn’t anywhere in our apartment it was natural to assume he had toddled his way upstairs. When he couldn’t be found in either apartment, both families went mad with panic. Did my mother cry? I don’t know. I do remember that if there were tears, they were probably not hers alone. My older brother searched the roof, and even climbed atop the silver water tank lodged in a corner there. We all looked and looked, and when the grownups were on the verge of calling in more authoritative grownups, the cry went up: he’s been found, he’s been found!

He had hid himself behind the living room drapes of our upstairs neighbor, probably intending to play peekaboo or maybe even jump out and scare chachi, but then he had promptly fallen asleep. Perhaps being loved too much becomes tiring after a while.

Our chachi died many years ago. We lived in the same city still, though a different one, but our houses were no longer connected by a spiral staircase or a conjoined balcony. Once she had draped me in her fancy ivory jamdaani sari readying me to sing onstage. I was petrified with stage-fright. You look beautiful, she told me despite my awkwardly fitting blouse, despite my teenage-gangly limbs, Your mother will be so proud. My blouse didn’t fit properly because it was really chachi’s; she had tacked the sides to make it fit me. I was already taller than her, but I never grew as tall as my mother.

My daughter is almost as tall as I am. Another year and she will be taller.

Once a woman I met at a wedding told me she packed sumptuous lunches for her two college-age sons because they demanded it and she was a good mother. But every other week she would make an extra lunch, and sit on her balcony feeding it to crows. Why not give it to some poor person? I asked. Because I don’t want to, she said. Because I don’t have to.

Sometimes when I, my siblings, the world, claimed more from my mother than she had to spare, there were others to catch hold of us. Sometimes she had no more to spare because she was making sure that others weren’t being fed to the crows.

It was a hot, muggy afternoon when I first felt my daughter move inside me. I was alone in the house. I was so hot and so uncomfortable I drawn all the curtains and turned all the ceiling fans on at full speed. Did we have air conditioning by then? I think not. Otherwise I would have been in my bed instead of shifting to the living room where even at the height of noon no sunlight entered, barred by the building being erected next door. It was cooler than the rest of the apartment and I had first lain down on the little rug on the floor, the red black yellow and green seeming duller than they actually were. No colors ever popped in that room.

Even that had grown too hot for me after a while. The heat outside was somehow replicated inside me as well; my body was both a furnace and a wellspring for discomfort.  I shifted to the two feet of bare floor between the rug and the coffee table. I could see the ceiling through the glass-top table; the beveled edges made the ceiling look coffered. I pulled my kaftan up to above my knees. Even the soft flimsy material felt harsh against my skin which was exceptionally tender. In the end I pulled it off and felt soothed by the cold cement under my naked flesh.

I was lying on my side when she fluttered. I’d read about women mistaking gas for fetal movement, which to me had seemed simultaneously sad and hilarious: To misread your own body in such a fundamental way; to mishear the first communication from your child. As if the Morse code of your body and theirs were tapping out messages, but you stood stranded without a decoder.

The little fish inside me swam some more. Silver quickening: fish and fluid. This is what water feels, I tell myself. This is what water feels.

 

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Shabnam Nadiya is a writer and translator from Bangladesh. She completed her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012, and is currently working on her collection of stories titled Pye Dogs and Magic Men: Stories. She has been published in Five Chapters, Amazon’s Day One, Words Without Borders, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. Her work can be found at  www.shabnamnadiya.com.