Rites of Passage

Source : The Indian Express

She stands looming over me, and I feel the tic tac graze my scalp. The grasp is firm, the callused hand balances my head from teetering back. She adorns a saree, it is tamarind tinged. Two black beads; and a maroon dot stare at me, with intent. She appraises me, having secured the jet-blackness of my untamed hair, which she nurses religiously with home ground shikakai. My eyes sting at the seams, and I feel my cheeks wrinkled and puffy. I shuffle about in the satin of my white gown, and take in Amma. I belch the half chewed daal rice, which she fed me spoonfuls of, between acerbic remarks. 

I had come home that afternoon, red inked math paper in my hand, heart in my mouth. I had managed a “good”, not an excellent. It was a letdown, a steep one. 

She adjusts my hair one more time and twitches her lips in what is but a shoddy attempt at a smile. I look pretty, she tells me, but my marks, she says, do not attest to that. No one respects this, she says, gesturing to the frame of my seven year old self, without the latter. 

I feel this gaping hole somewhere, and all I recall of the rest of that evening was being suctioned out by that nothingness inside me. 

It only seemed to fill itself by swallowing me, and the terseness of my mother. I think of that day often, and the many ways in which it has come to shape my lens on recognition and standing, the social types of course. 

Hegel talks about the Geist, that unifying conscious experience that realizes itself only as it is battered by time, battered by its unrelenting passage. 

My mother’s words weren't born in that moment- they trickled from an older history pressing itself through her. The spirit carries its past tightly, Hegel says, and we unknowingly reenact it. My mother’s strife for a space in her marital home, her inherited ideas of dignity- are things I’ve eventually come to make peace with. 

“She was my shelter, and my storm,” writes Arundhati Roy in Mother Mary Comes To Me, a memoir of sorts that traces the oft-knotted intimacies of her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. Mrs. Roy, Arundhati’s preferred moniker, was a force to be reckoned with in the orthodox Syrian Christian circles of Kerala in the late ’90s. She walked out on an alcoholic husband, fought a landmark legal battle for women’s inheritance rights, and spearheaded Pallikoodam, a prototype for holistic education long before the phrase became fashionable. In doing so, she scripted herself as a woman who challenged the system with nothing but conviction and an almost defiant tenderness. 

Yet the book’s subversion lies precisely in refusing to pander to this script. It unsettles the familiar expectations of motherhood and reveals the intricate, sometimes contradictory textures of a woman in a world that demands relentlessness.

Mrs. Roy, like most veterans in history, had her shadows. In one memory, she has Arundhati’s beloved Alsatian, Dido, put down while her daughter is away at boarding school — Dido had mated with a stray. And later, writing of her brother Lalith, Roy admits, “Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother’s fault. Because he was the only man she could punish for the sins of the world.” 

Mary Roy’s ferocity was never singular. Rather, it took root in the disillusionment of a woman who had come up against a system built to make her, and so many women fail. A system where one gender held the bastion and the other was compelled to fight, simply to stand her ground. 

So why does maternal love, which is assumed to be unconditional, calcify into discipline? 

Freud might have said that what we encounter in such mothers, Mary Roy, and perhaps my own, is a subtle kind of displacement: the quiet redirection of a frustration too vast, too deeply ingrained in the bygone, toward the only spaces that feel safe enough to bear it. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he describes how the psyche builds composite images, layering desire, guilt, fear, and thwarted hope into forms we can finally face. The latent, he insists, does not vanish; it simply waits for a breach. He once dreamt of his patient Irma’s throat, which he described as an elaborate scene designed to absolve him of responsibility, a wish for recognition and release, in the guise of a diagnosis. Freud understood that what cannot be confronted in the world often resurfaces in disguised, intimate ways. 

In the end, I keep circling back to the same questions: how do we hold the lost chances of retaliation, at the small injustices that gather under our skin? Where do we set down what the world has no room for? Perhaps we misplace it into our children, our silences until we learn a gentler way of carrying it. How do we learn to live with the weight, and not create casualties along the way? Maybe this is the ultimate rite of passage: learning to hold what broke the women before us, and learning, slowly, not to let it break us in turn.