I get a text from my sister on Tuesday afternoon, when I am lolling around in bed reading. ‘Did you want to come over this week and get your things we have in storage? We’re cleaning the rooms out in prep for the wedding. Mum said to tell you to come get your stuff’.
This is the first oblique message I have received from my mother in almost five months. It isn’t even from her phone. It still sets my heart thudding.
I stare at the message for a good three minutes, my body awash with that sinking, slow-motion feeling you sometimes get from an unexpected rush of adrenalin.
The wedding is my sister’s arranged marriage to a guy in India she met a week before their engagement. I met up with her for a coffee right after she got back from the trip, and she was glowing the way that most brides-to-be are.
“What’s he like?” I asked her.
“He’s really nice, he really respects Dad. They just love him,” she said.
The coffee, our first meeting in months, was painfully awkward in general (I shared a room with this woman until I was 16, and yet now we can barely hold a conversation). But the biggest revelation is that my sister somehow got three engagement rings – one, she chose for herself and took with her to India; one her fiancé chose and purchased; and a third that she’s currently looking for, because she’s not entirely sure she likes either of the other two. Collectively, they probably cost close to $10,000. This wedding is going to stink of money.
My sister shrugged. “Dad said that if I get engaged, I can have whatever I want.”
I tried to be enthusiastic, but all I could focus on was how the coffee we were drinking would set back my weekly budget, because my job at an art gallery doesn’t pay enough, and the apartment I share with my boyfriend, Chris, is probably a bit out of our price range. Before everything happened with my family, I had two credit cards from Dad that I used for petrol and groceries occasionally. Now I stubbornly refuse to use them at all, choosing pride over necessity. I know that if I use the credit cards, no one will say anything to me – but it’s what they say to each other that hurts most.
In my bedroom, I finally churn out a reply to her text. ‘Is there a time when Mum and Dad won’t be there? I don’t want to see them.’
This is an understatement – I can’t see them, I don’t have the capacity for that confrontation.
The reply comes moments later. ‘That’s hard, because Dad is here most of the time. Mum said she’d stay in her room while you’re here though.’
Another heart thud, another sick moment. I feel queasy with anxiety and a familiar sadness that seems to hover around the periphery of my thoughts at any given moment.
The thought of Mum in her bedroom, lying down with her eyes closed, willing my presence to leave is too much to contemplate. She used to stand in the doorway, watching my car pull up, I think. She used to wait for my arrival with anticipation, she would complain that I never stayed long enough. Now, this.
I put the phone aside, and force myself to stand up. My afternoon of reading in bed has taken on a sour taste, and I walk zombie-like to the kitchen, dressed only in one of Chris’ t-shirts.
I start picking up plates and putting them in the dishwasher, managing to get five or so in before I burst into tears. The sobs only last for a few seconds, but they are big, heaving, heavy ones, the kind that wrack your entire body and leave you gasping. I will myself to think of something, anything else, just to stop the dread from becoming too consuming.
I hold onto the bench top and bend my head, remembering to breathe slowly and deeply. A year ago, when all of this started, I used to get panic attacks that would often last for five or ten minutes of on-and-off hyperventilating. I have asthma, so this isn’t ideal. I try to calm myself down before I get there now, but I remember almost relishing the tightness in my chest back then, the erratic and ceaseless breathing. It was a physical sign that this isn’t normal, that I wasn’t coping. I used to wish my parents could see me like that, just so they would know that it hurts me too.
As my breathing normalises, I make my way to the living room and sit woodenly on the couch. Five months seems like both a very long and a very short time to be estranged from my family. Too short to feel as if it’s final, but long enough to know that it’s serious.
The fact that my sister is having an arranged marriage to a ‘respectful’ man is just the icing on the shit-cake that has been my relationship with my parents – the underlying implication is that if I, too, got married to an Indian stranger, none of this would be happening.
My choice of a guitar-wielding, liberal-minded white man was made at the expense of my family, and now I have to move mountains of my stuff out of their house because, wedding or no wedding, I’m not wanted there.
Two years of my life have been spent in limbo, trying to construct a compromise. Muslim Indian girls don’t drink, don’t have sex before marriage, don’t choose. Choices are for parents, for husbands, for men. Never for us.
In a text message my mother sent me a year ago, at the height of her anger, she snarled at me to ‘look in the mirror. You are Indian, not a WHITE GIRL’ (emphasis hers). I was struck then by the realisation that perhaps my life would be about choosing after all, a series of impossible choices. To have Chris means not having my family. But to have my family means to give up not just Chris, but my freedom, my agency, even my writing.
In the end, it wasn’t really a choice at all – it was a narrow twisting path with no road to either side, an inevitability that I gave in to because fighting had become so hard.
Although there is sadness, there is also anger – ‘they think you’re a slut,’ I remind myself when I’m wavering. ‘They hate Chris for no reason, they are ashamed of your writing, they think you’re tainted.’
The counter-argument is waiting in the shadows though, and it’s a simple one. ‘They are your parents. You love them. You miss them.’
As I sit on the couch, I try desperately to block these thoughts out, to regain the peace of the afternoon. The door clicks open, and Chris is there, covered in sweat from his run and smiling the smile he reserves for me and no one else.
I want to be calm about this. I want to treat it rationally like an obstacle that needs to be worked out instead of the emotional danger zone it has already become. Instead, I burst into tears again, and shove my phone at him, letting him read the messages and make the conclusions for himself.
He wraps his arms around me, and whispers in my ear. ‘I’ll come with you to get the stuff, it’s going to be ok, we’ll do this together’ and ‘I love you so much, I’m going to be with you forever, it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok’.
His voice is like a tether, pulling me slowly back to calmness. My sobs hiccup to an end, and I curl against his chest, letting my tears soak through his shirt. I am a snotty mess, my body suddenly achy and exhausted.
When I reply to my sister, it is simple and honest.
‘I am not coping with this very well. I haven’t slept properly in weeks, and my doctor has me on a mental health plan and sleeping tablets. I don’t want to see Mum or Dad. I’m sorry, but can it wait until they’re not there?’
She replies with the first bit of kindness I have had from them in a long time.
‘What if I drop it off to you instead?’
*
When the boxes arrive, they are numerous and mountainous in proportion. I stare at the towers that Chris has assembled in our apartment, momentarily lost for words. What lies inside them is beyond me – clearly, years of my accumulated crap has been taking up significant space at my parents’ house, more than I had considered.
I start the arduous process of unpacking and culling my possessions almost immediately. Chris hovers nearby, suggesting more than once that maybe I should take it easy, just do a little at a time.
Each box is a potential emotional land mine. I uncover childhood photographs, old notebooks and diaries, toys I can’t even remember, and also piles of unnecessary trash I’ve kept for who knows what reason (boxes of unopened tissues, several feathers, a tiny bud of cotton I smuggled back from a trip to India).
There is a box in the kitchen, neatly wrapped in tape and marked in handwriting I don’t recognise. ‘Zoya’s things’ it says. ‘Fragile. For storage.’
‘I wonder what this is!’ I exclaim excitedly, the hours of unpacking having given me a slightly frenetic energy.
‘Maybe we should open it later,’ Chris says, his gaze worried. ‘You’ve done a lot, it’s probably time for a break.’
But I am already reaching for the scissors, slicing the tape. I pull out a bubble-wrapped object, still confused as to what it could possibly be. Tearing the wrapping off, I slowly withdraw a large, ceramic canister. It is in the shape of an Italian terrace building, painted with detailed windows, doors, even little people sketched into its walls. Two more shapes lie in the box, and I pull them out in a frenzy, sitting them next to each other – three little buildings, with roofs that come off to reveal the hollow interiors for storing pasta or rice or coffee.
‘My canisters!’ I say, and for a moment, my eyes light up in utter delight.
These sat in my mum’s kitchen for years. I loved them as a child, imagining little lives existing within the painted facades of the houses. I have a hazy recollection of her saying she would save them for me, when the décor of our house outgrew them.
In an instant, I am again in tears. This time, the grief is so strong I feel that I might fall down, but Chris is there, leading me to the couch. My sobs are loud and unedited, my thoughts a jumbled mess. I want my mum.
‘We’ll get rid of them’ Chris murmurs, trying to comfort me.
I shake my head violently.
‘No, I want to keep them. They’re mine,’ I say insistently, my voice coming out mangled and thick.
Chris eventually helps me into bed, and brings me two sleeping tablets. I take them and lie leadenly under the covers, my thoughts weaving circles and chasing tails.
Five months, I think. It’s too long. It’s too short.
I miss her so much, I think. This is an endless thought.
When I wake up, morning light is creeping its fingers towards my pillow, and my tongue is thick and heavy with the bitter aftertaste of the tablets.
Chris is sleeping curled against me, his arms wrapping my body against his, his leg thrown protectively over mine. I untangle myself, and trudge into the lounge room, dreading the onslaught of emotions that I expect at the sight of the boxes.
It doesn’t come. I feel strangely light. I look for the canisters, and can’t see them at first. Then – there they are. Perched on top of my bookshelves, lined up in the same order that mum used to have them in.
They’re mine. They were meant for me, packed carefully away by my mother for a home I won’t have, and a life I don’t want.
The rest of the boxes sit obstinately against the wall, a challenge unmet.
I will wade into them, as I know I must.
Image: Ryan Hyde
