“Love was dashed in Mother’s demands to eat, sometimes scolding.
Other times, threatening with a rolling pin or spice jar.
It could’ve easily been mistaken for anger.
But I was learning her language.”
Sometimes love is silent, sometimes it screams. Sometimes it emerges even despite pain, crude but pure.
– From my memoir, Where the Tiger Dwells, on the ways love speaks despite obstacles of class, caste & racism.
Rules do not always mean safety. In fact, they can cause the very harm we’re trying to prevent. To be told to be dutiful provides boundaries, but do they exist to keep us safe or to lock us in and be more vulnerable to danger? Duty is a heavy word, sometimes a powerful thing that fills our hearts with honor and reinforces a sense of community. It is a parent’s duty to care for their child. Yet, this same word can then be used to imprison a woman to fulfill her wifely duties.
When raised in duty, it is difficult to know if it is the elixir or the poison. People just automatically follow what they’re taught. But somewhere along the way, there’s a separation between what we’re told and what we want. When these two are misaligned but we’re forced to comply, duty is becoming something unhealthy. It’s important to know the difference. Otherwise, we can be pushed into doing things we may not feel are the best for us. We can integrate this forced way of seeing the world and then require that others comply with these same controlling views.
You might sometimes wonder how whole groups of people agree with some scary notion of how things should be. A classic example is Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale. A society of people thought that controlling girls and women should become the norm. This society believed that it is a higher power’s will for females to be stripped of power and be used for whatever their delusions thought necessary.
This is why we must stay vigilant in understanding the difference between duty and trauma. The definition of a word, a concept, a law, how a human being is labeled, should not be taken lightly. Protection of self means protection of others.
What did they carry with them, my parents, over thousands of miles? What pieces of jewelry did they carefully choose? Which did they keep and which did they have to tear away from? Did they want to wear them all on each of their fingers, filling them as high as they’d fit? As many chains that could go around their necks? What did they stuff into their pockets? What are the most valuable things, maybe viable things, to an immigrant?
Did they wonder which clothes would be most acceptable? Or did they even worry about this? Did they want to take all their clothes, even the ones that were a little snug from high school that reminded them of good times with their childhood friends? Did they want to take some of their shoes, maybe all of them? But would their shoes work there? They had heard it was bitter cold, almost uninhabitable. How do you then dress for that? How, I mean, what, do you put on?
Did they speak to each item that meant something, the ones they couldn’t take with? The doors, the walls with the little lizzards sitting still like decor, the little random steel cups and clay pots in the kitchen? Did they say goodbye, or maybe one day I’ll see you again? What did they think would happen? That they’d never return to the ground and sky and trees they knew so well? The childhood toys, dolls, the table they ate their meals on, where they sat with their mothers and fathers, their siblings, where they prayed over their dal, rice, chutney, chicken. They couldn’t take those.
What about the well in the backyard, the one they leant over as children, yelling into it, echoes responding with giggles. What stories had they told their friends about the well, as they all encircled it, bent over slightly, seeking the bottom? What lay in the darkness? What fears had they buried there and what new ones would well up?
Did they wave goodbye to the animals that freely roamed the dirt roads in front of their houses, the pigs, the dogs, as animals should? Isn’t it in fact their home too? Isn’t freedom for all? Did they whisper into the creatures’ ears one last time, did they give some of them names, letting them know they were going to a far away place where the animals wouldn’t love them the same? Did they know that then? Did they know foreign meant foreigner, a bad word, outsider, feared, to be ridiculed, cursed at, in a place that would never quite feel like home? Did they leave space for this as they were gathering all the things they would carry?
