WOMAN

The morns are meeker than they were - 

The nuts are getting brown -

The berry’s cheek is plumper -

The rose is out of town.

  The morns are meeker than they were, Verse 1, by Emily Dickinson

There are a great many things that you wish for, but once in a while, on one of those days, you really don’t want that morning. When you crack open your tired eyelids only the sun and the crusty lorry on the road outside seem to be bellowing with laughter. Big heaves: the former blistering hot, the latter, smoky black.

It isn’t till close to mid day, when you play a random video forward on your phone while waiting for your coffee to fill in the office cafeteria, that you smile. The real one, not the bland, social one usually reserved for others. You don’t want anyone to know that your favourite search phrase on YouTube is “laughing baby”. 

Your head hurts from the vodka of the previous night, but you suspect it has more to do with the unbearably forced conversation rather than an excess of alcohol. You laughed at their jokes once, especially the risqué ones. Ten years ago, as a curious, lusty, just-turned twenty, you had liked that they could be indecent and you could too, without actually saying it. You had been looking forward to a wonderfully flowing, cosy evening of good food, moderate drink, and lots and lots of laughter. Maybe that was where you went wrong - men are rarely known to grow up, and that’s why you have always been thankful that you didn’t know your husband when he was a teenager. 

Some hyperactive HR female has decided that the easiest way to meet her quarterly KRA, namely ‘employee productivity’, is to get the women to spend less time looking at themselves in the mirror in the toilets. Hence the poster - “THE SEXIEST CURVE ON YOUR BODY IS YOUR SMILE. FLAUNT IT!” Capitals written in pristine white, sans serif type, against a crimson red background, pasted strategically next to the mirror, a little above your eye level. You think then, that the men’s loo should have “THE SEXIEST SERVE IN YOU IS YOUR RESERVE. SO SHUT IT!’ But not near the mirror, please. 

You flash yellowish teeth at your dull reflection and remember a time. The only time, in fact, your mother called you “beautiful”. You might have been secretly smiling to yourself then, because at the rosebud age of sixteen, your long time crush had finally proposed, elevating you to that of a girlfriend. Since the precious deed had been done on a Saturday evening, and the motherly compliment was delivered to you the following morning, you had had to wait a whole day (and night) before breaking the news to friends at school. Of the proposal of course. The compliment had felt comparatively duh then.

You also used to be called “Miss Smiley” by friends, after your ready smile and engaging conversation. You loved to laugh. Not the trilling, musical, girly variety. The open-mouthed, full throated, belly rolling HaHaHa! You still have a child in you, your favourite professor at college had said, as ‘constructive feedback’ on why your masters application could have fallen through. 

Grown ups are serious, responsible people. So you grew a crust, rounded out, became measured. You massage your throbbing temples with your hands. Surreptitiously. Grown ups show cracks only at certain times of the day. Your phone pings and you see that the jokes of the previous night have received a fillip, for the worse. Grown up women showing cracks? Hardly ever. 

The brain fog lifts at around five in the evening, when the interminable day also settles into its downward curve. Heels clack, bags are rustled, phone calls are made. What the … ? “Women Only on Wednesday! Gastro Pub, 8pm onwards” screams the mailer in your inbox. They really need to stop using red. 

The prospect of driving in horrendous evening traffic, going home, changing, and then shimmying into an Uber to the ‘party’ in question wrings a grunt out of you. You rest your forehead on your worktable, the cool surface soothing your hot skin somewhat, spurring thoughts into action.

When you lift your sapped out, warm head a few moments later, you send two messages. To the husband, because it was Wednesday, and to the girlfriend in whose name yesterday’s ruckus was created, to meet at the coffee shop next to Gastro for a tete-a-tete. 

Would you have preferred to have remained blemish-less? You had always assumed that mistakes, heartbreaks, low GPAs, silent rejections, broken relationships and missed promotions were part of every young adult-to-jaded adult trek. It’s easier to rail against the system, against yourself, rather than to do something about it. Another secret added to the List, right after “laughing baby”. For once you are relieved to be tired, because your mind does not rattle off all the things you should have done, didn’t do, cannot do; an exercise that you realise, in its absence, you have conducted for as long as you can remember. 

Another trip to the toilet to freshen up, and you wonder what happened to your laugh. If you tried, would it still be as fulsome? You rub your rounded belly thoughtfully. It growls back in response. This time in the mirror, you shrug at yourself and smile. What’s precious porcelain without the cracks from use, the chipped edges that mark your cup as singularly yours? You have what you have, and you are what you are. There’s no getting around it. You hunt in your perpetually expanding handbag, roll on some red lipstick, and mascara your lashes. First things first - food. 

The maple wears a gayer scarf -

The field a scarlet gown -

Lest I sh'd be old-fashioned 

I’ll put a trinket on. 

The morns are meeker than they were, Final Verse, by Emily Dickinson

For of a Truth ..

For of a truth, in these days of independence, of pushing and striving among all ranks and sexes, the gracious old-world flower of gentleness runs risk of being trampled out of feminine character: the more so, because it is a common fallacy to confound gentleness with weakness; whereas true gentleness is the handmaid of strength though not of self-assertion. For strength has any forms of manifestation, and the ideal woman of the East is strong in self-repression, in cheerful subordination of the individual to the community: since an Indian household is still a community on the old patriarchial lines. She is the outcome of an ethical, if not a material civilization. Analysis of the seemingly arbitrary conventions that dominate her life reveals an underlying canon of stern self-control; just as analysis of her rigid religious observances reveals a faith permeated with the poetry of symbolism. 

Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India, 1909

The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

Morning

The older you get, the fewer your comforts become. Drinking into the night and binge watching TV no longer helps you forget a bad day or to practise ceasefire from a domestic fight. The sharp edge of survival propels you inward, and you end up deriving sanity from small, harmless acts.

Right now that is your morning cuppa. Usually it is coffee, and it makes you feel grounded, the rising plume of steam from the cup creating a whitespace that calms. On other days it highlights the choppy waters that your uncontrollable life has become, prompting you to prolong that pause just a little longer. You also recently rediscovered the beauty of froth. Being hemmed in by the few minutes to yourself before the rest of the house - man, child, dog and the cringe worthy doorbell - awakens and trudges around demanding things, you are hyper focussed on that mug. With your brew in it. In the morning. It’s 6am and the night sky is wrestling with the day, slowly losing its midnight black colour to a conciliatory chalk grey. Standing against your spotless kitchen counter gleaming black you watch, head bent into your plain white ceramic cup, mesmerised. The placid surface of water the colour of dirty mud comes alive to the thin stream of hot milk that descends on it, creating tiny, perfectly circular bubbles, just one or two at first, moving this way and that, then more and many more, banding together to create a layer, layers of anticipation, all the while turning the concoction into a rich, fulsome brown. The brown of thick tree barks, with their age old wisdom, branches dancing to the breeze and sheer solidity. The brown of a milk chocolate bar, never mind that it actually has more sugar than chocolate. The deep brown of the labrador across the street, its tail wagging and perpetually wet tongue dripping saliva over your exposed toes as you rub him on his neck. 

Your fingers are cold and stiff from clutching the thick handle of the milk jar, a larger version of the cup in clear pyrex glass. They wrap around your mug, and the warmth seeps in immediately. You lift it and straighten up, the weight of your toil pleasurably heavy in your hands. As cup meets lip, the froth tickles, bubbles bursting into frivolity. So carefully created, so easily burst. A few more careful sips, this time your tongue feeling more confident, and the warmth spreads down your chest in a careful line of heat, gently pooling in your stomach. You flex your  chilled toes, wishing that they could get some coffee too. The smell of coffee is everywhere in the kitchen now, it’s hugging you and you lean in, wanting more, needing more. It is no longer small, or harmless. It’s a good morning and it’s almost everything that you will do for the rest of the day. 

It wasn’t always this way. Mornings used to be unrelenting, the cunning light cutting through the drawn curtains to prick your blissfully closed eyelids, forcing them open. Or your mother’s voice, booming like a drumbeat in a closed room, bouncing off the walls in her house and slithering under your door, “Wake up, you’ll be late for school!” They used to be cruel during the years you stumbled out of your room in a tiny flat in the city, eyes half shut, stubbing your toe on the raised edge of the toilet (we did it to keep the overflowing drain from ruining the house, you know, the landlady had explained practically) on your way to brush your teeth. Then rushing out thirty minutes after, late for the train and later for work. 

Now they are in hand, the mornings. Not because of your age, or because it’s a particular day of the week, or the fact that you consider five hours of sleep a luxury. But because, as the house wallows in chaos and the sun peeks through the clouds, you have a rite that creates it just the way you like it.