There are two books I read last year that I loved, but that hit too
close to home. Eat, Pray, Love, about a divorcee who uses a year to go find herself
in Italy, Indonesia, and India, and Kabul Beauty School, about a beautician who
leaves her family to go to Afghanistan, and ends up helping set up beauty shops all
over the region- one of the only businesses a woman could own under the Taliban’s
interpretation of sharia law. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, but in spite of my
enjoyment I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.
There is something about affluent foreign ladies traipsing around far away countries
to find themselves that just makes me cringe. It’s so unspeakably colonial. Wanting
to see another country is one thing, but what were these women running from? Why did
they need to leave their families to go somewhere so far away? What’s wrong with
them? What about their daughters??
The only problem with that line of logic is that Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t have
children, and the woman who wrote Kabul Beauty School had sons…and that my mom
started leaving my sister and I to find herself in India when I was six.
I call the years from when I was six to eight years old my India years. My mother
would go for 4 to 6 weeks at a time, seeing big cities and then going to a rural
valley to practice meditation with other Westerners and their teacher. I mostly
remember her coming back, she would come home to our farm house with horses in the
back yard, and my little sister (who was four the first time she left) and I would
lose our minds. I remember holding onto my mom as hard as I could, trying to drink
in all the time we had missed. Her long blonde hair would be even longer than when
she left, and she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I remember being
extremely upset by how fast my image of her faded when she left. It made her even
further away. Where now we have skype and broadband, in the early 90’s we didn’t
have dial up in the country and the time difference made phoning next to impossible.
I don’t think we ever spoke on the phone, I think it would have made her time away
even worse.
When she came home her duffel bags were full of new fabrics and tiny presents for us
that smelled wild and full of spices. She brought us notebook with pages that were
extraordinarily thin, taught us to write in Hindi and brought us bindi’s that we
wore on our foreheads with delight. Our whole language changed when she was home. If
my mom was doing the laundry or making tea she was the laundrywalla or the chaiwalla
(walla is a Hindi word for someone who is hired to do something). I learned how to
pronounce complicated and strange sounds of another world, and read through the
Bhagavad Gita with her. I liked the stories about how Ganesh got his elephant head
the best.
If nothing else, my mom was alive with stories. There were ones about the buses that
careened up the sides of mountains at speeds that made the western women sick with
worry. There were the babies kept thin and sick at the airports by the beggars, and
the dangerous power lines that were often fixed by men prodding at them with long
poles and no safety equipment. There were the swami’s who were so powerful that when
they meditated they could generate heat that would melt their jewelery and burn them
if they didn’t take it off, and others who could create holy objects from thin air.
It was a place alive with magic where things that couldn’t happen anywhere else
happened every day.
I did yoga with her, meditated with her, and went to Hindu temple with her. I wrote
letters to her Buddhist monk friend in my childish printing and he called me his
dharma sister. And every time she left it was worse. I was convinced she would
always be going away, and would never stay with us. I would dive into everything
related to India so I could be closer to my mom. With everything I had, I tried to
feel like India was exceptionally important so I wasn’t so unimportant and small.
India was a huge part of our lives until I was about 12 years old. I was all mehndi
and plans to see the world, but as I got older my enthusiasm waned and I started to
really think about that time. About how we were so small, and she just left. No
matter how hard I try, I fundamentally cannot fathom how needing to find herself was
more important than staying with us, and I don’t know if I ever will. I love my mom,
and I know this couldn’t have been easy for her. I know she was trying to dream big
– to be a big picture person – but I can’t help but be furious when I think about
it, even if only for a moment. But I love her, and while the years that led up to
India and were followed by my parent’s divorce are still a mystery, I know she can’t
answer my questions. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but the person I want to
talk to is the 31 year old version of her, while she’s on her way to the airport.
She’s older now and has more regrets. She has as much trouble explaining it as I do
understanding it.
I’ve poured over it for years and while it’s taken a long time, I’ve started to
realize that the reason I can’t understand the mysterious and seductive country I’ve
puzzled over for so long is because it isn’t a place on a map. India is a place in
my mother’s heart that’s full of magic, chai, palaces and possibility that’s a
million miles away from a normal life.
Or that’s what India used to be, at least.
Kyla Roma
:: Daydreamy Canadian prairie newly wed lady, black tea aficionado + puppy mama. ::
is here,
and you can follow
her on Twitter here.
