by Shoba Narayan

Silence

Once a week, mother went mute.  Mounam, she called it, the vow, imbuing it with sanctity, different from the stentorian call for Silence from our middle-school class-teacher who ordered us to Stand Up On The Bench before rapping our knuckles with a ruler as we crowed like partridges. Mother’s silence though deafened our home. For us chipmunks, it was torture, used as we were to a waterfall of sound—sirens, horns, doorbells, cranes, TV, taps, brakes—through the day.  Ma’s silence loomed and scowled, a dark abyss amidst sharp corners, its contours diffuse like squiggly scribbles, shackled sunlight, spangled shadows, stardust released from yanked rug. Speak Mother, we pleaded. Her silence hurt more than the slaps she pulled from electric sockets and spiked sunset with a loon’s call.  It varicosed into red serpentine veins that throbbed heartbeats from her parched lifeless skin. We heard the snarl in her engorged tongue, the succor it gave her, the dagger it stuck into my father’s back as he banged stained vessels in the kitchen—making coffee, mouthing insults, while the monsoon drummed on asbestos, seeping through streaked green walls, into streams that braided dog urine on the mosaic floor, turning wooden toy soldiers that were supposed to protect our dreams into bobbing servants floating on screams. Oh, yes, we absorbed the discordant music of our home, the incongruent geometry of parental avoidance even if we couldn’t hold it in our hands or investigate its opaque prism to see if the future included us. Like the tree which drinks water from its feet, mother’s muteness was both utterly incomprehensible and utterly normal. Many sunsets later, I finally comprehend its cause. Yesterday, I made my daughter cry, my unctuous words  slipping like a needle into her banana skin. As I watched the child I made dissolve, I inhaled back the words that contained the horror of my thoughts, but they wouldn’t go back into the womb. In that cloudy moment, I went mute. In that un-take-it-back-able instant, I understood my mother’s mouna ragam, the song of silence.