No Pasture

To begin to believe in the endlessness of the pasture, its golden expanse, a path cut through for your walking feet. To find yourself instead in a field of water. To blink and find yourself now walking on dark ice.

I am seven years old. I am watching my mother get dressed for work. My vantage is her bed, because during the night I had dark dreams and stumbled my way there. My arrival woke her, woke the line that creases her brow in two. Despite her exasperation I was comforted by the fact of her breath in the shadows. Now, in the first light, I see the partition deepened. Her limbs are slow, but practiced, too—she clasps the bra and slides the straps up, she snaps the shirt buttons closed. She pins her curls without glancing in the mirror, she dots her cheeks with red.

To imagine the glacier’s retreat. To remove your armour, to ask when you first donned it. To learn the name of this land, its other names, its first names, and before language, the sounds of the rivers and birds.

She has opened one curtain by whose light she moves in a trained arc. The other curtains, I understand, she left closed for me. Other things are illuminated by the pale rays of early morning: the wedding band on her slender finger and the mangalsutra dipping into her collar; claimed by one man in two cultures. The chipped gold frame around a photograph of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, atop the dresser, surrounded by stray earrings and tubes of lipstick and creams that smell of other, wilder places. Jasmine Night. Wildflower Meadow. The silvered scar above my mother’s left eyebrow, from an incident whose borders now escape her, a time she cannot name.

To train yourself not to ask for permission. To unlearn the litany of apologies, the shrinking of self. To believe we have always existed. To believe we have always transformed.

Before she leaves, my mother takes one deep breath. She squares her body. Then she glances back at me. I shut my eyes, wanting her to believe that she has completed her rituals in private. In privacy, she has transformed from a soft, slumbering animal to a woman with edges. If you ask her a question, she will not pause in thought with that humming sound in the back of her throat. She will respond directly, succinctly, in knife-sharpened English.

To look in the mirror. To know it contains all our pasts and futures. To remember the fields have flooded before.

When I have heard the front door lock, I too slip from bed. I trace my mother’s path, making clumsy her adept steps. I try to touch everything she touched. The creams, their scents unleashed, mingle as I smear them into my skin, jasmine meadow, wildflower night. Every window is closed but I can still hear the cars shudder down the road, and beneath that the wind lowing, and above that the pigeons rambling, the sparrows alerting each other to the still-rising sun, in this place where once wildflowers tangled and bloomed. I uncap the red lipstick but I do not want it on my lips, I do not want my curls straightened and restrained, I want no jewelry claiming my fingers or neck, the animal in me cannot so easily quiet. Instead I draw lines of red down my nose and chin, I dot my throat where my mother’s mangalsutra rests, I paint shapes across my arms and wrists. From within me comes a rumbling, roaring sound. From the dresser my grandmother watches. From beyond the window the pigeon calls. I remember that my mother did not look in the mirror, and I step towards its impartial light.

To imagine the pasture again. To note the changing light.