by Anju Sharma
It shocked me to see the picture my daughter took of me.
We went to the park every evening. She played with a friend from school who lived close by while I walked with the friend’s mother. We had met through the children, and like our children, took to each other well.
My daughter was close to seven years old, her friend eight. There were times they played like a dream, and times when one sulked, wanted to go back home, or turn away altogether.
Usually, it sorted itself out, but on some days, one of us mothers had to shoot apologetic glances, stuff our belongings in our bags and leave without the drawn-out goodbyes. There were times my daughter mumbled I never want to play with her again. She is the ruiner of things. I won’t call her on my birthday. I never contradicted. I was too familiar with this contempt—the kind that arose from toomuchness. It’d settle down, only to come up again so much so that I could live a lifetime in this churn, riding its crests.
I didn’t want my daughter to inherit the chains I did.
The park had a large football field with an enclosed children’s play area. A walking track ran around its circumference. The grounds were rarely used for tournaments anymore. Those were held in a better maintained playground in the vicinity. This was a free place for children to run around, chase each other, play frisbee or badminton, dash in and out of the play area. The field was large and freeing and boundless. It was here my child ran away from me. Flew away like a bird for shinier, brighter objects.
It was the opposite at home. My child flew into me like a bug to a bug zapper, fly to a rotting fruit. At home, we were a desperate, single, tangled matted head of hair, the only way to unknot and separate the strands was to put scissors through them—something I dared not do, not just yet.
But here too the dull monotony of routine hung at the edges, like tassels on a curtain. Dread had a way of seeping into me at the contact with the cold stone bench. The mothers, helping their children up a slide or down a swing, a coarse mix of grit, pride and exhaustion on their faces, were my own reflection.
The fathers in the park never gave me that feeling. They didn’t look crushed, forlorn or struggling. They were welcoming with a generous air of goodwill and cheer.
Fathers were playful. It showed in their easy smiles, self-effacing grace. They had the air of someone taking on another person’s job and for that reason brought abandonment to it: more ideas, more energy. They could simply shake off toomuchness like drops of water on thick shiny wings.
They could be better mothers than mothers as they were not required to be.
*
When my daughter and her friend were bored playing, they ran to us. She wrapped her hands around my waist. I kissed her head and tried to free myself. She took my phone and asked me and her friend’s mother to pose for her.
Both of us laughed, in the pitying and indulging way of mothers. I said to take the picture quickly, for this was interrupting the walk. She took one and then one more, asking us to look properly into the camera and not keep turning away.
Finally, I put out my hand. Ok, I said. Thanks for the pictures. That was enough. Now please let us resume our walk. The friend’s mother looked on from some distance, smiling, ready to accommodate another demand, if need be.
My daughter made a sad face. I said, Okay, we’ll do one thing. You keep the phone and take all the pictures you want. We’re going to complete a round and come back. Meet us at the same spot, okay?
It may have sounded like a game to her. Same spot. Few minutes. One round. Yayyy, she said and began to focus the camera here and there before we could even turn.
These days Tamara finds excuses to keep running to me even when she is with friends, I said to the friend’s mother when we were a little distance from my daughter.
She nodded. I noticed that, she said. It’s a phase, I guess, she added after a pause. Children will do things without reason and make it look like there’s so much meaning to it.
That sounds like us! I said and we laughed.
Juhi these days will not talk to me as nicely as she talks to her father, she said as we strode round the curve. Hmm, I said and looked at her. It’s funny, she shook her head. Between I and my husband, I take practically eighty percent of Juhi’s load. I mean, that’s the wrong word to use, she laughed. I smiled back.
Juhi can see that! she continued. Her homework, her bathing, her cabinet cleaning, her vitamins—I mean she can see that for sure. She will be eight now. And then this is the deal I get!
I know, I said. Sounds so familiar… and so dispiriting.
But why is that? The friend’s mother looked intently at me. I turned my head to meet her gaze. Why do you think that is? she asked again.
I shook my head and shrugged. I thought to slip in a word about phases myself, or children being children, or the most beguiling mother-child dynamic, but she was speaking again. Maybe it’s because I give in more easily. Or just because I am mother, we are mothers, you know, easy target!
I was thinking the same thing, I said.
She laughed a little ruefully. Perhaps mothers are those shapeless, formless things you can tug at and pull at and never expect them to break. Playdough!
Chewing gum! I said.
Yes, blow us huge and round and tight, she said.
And we’ll burst on your face, I completed her sentence. We were laughing a little too loudly now, hysterically. Hyena moms. Someone turned to look at us.
There’s something I feel, I said, after we were silent for a while. It seems to me that loving too much is punishing.
But how do you not love your children too much? she asked, aghast, slightly disappointed in my theory.
I don’t know, I said. Maybe love them but not let them know? Hide our love!
That sounds like a super-secret extra marital affair, she said.
Maybe that’s what it is in the end, I said, and we laughed again.
*
My daughter came running to us before we could reach her. She was done taking pictures. She thrusted the phone into my hands and ran to the play area to join her friend in the great digging adventure.
Ah, the bottomless adventure of digging tiny pits, I said theatrically. It wasn’t the first time I said this witless and labored phrase. It had become one of those handy but utterly dried up hybrids of a joke that parents often resorted to in the company of other parents.
I had used the same phrase with my daughter’s other friend’s father once: bottomless adventure of digging tiny pits. This was a couple of years back. We lived in another part of the town. That day he had come alone to the park with their son. He had laughed and looked at me with some concentration that day.
You said you were in advertising, right? he said.
I grinned and nodded. Once a copywriter, always a copywriter! I said.
He and I were sitting on two ends of an empty bench in the children’s park that day. Same swings and slides and boredom, just arranged in a different pattern. Only, that day wasn’t like the other days; that day boredom had taken a rain check. It was a lovely evening—clouds very white, sky very blue. Breeze that made you laugh and tuck your hair behind your ears. Breeze fanning something between him and me.
That’s how I saw that evening. Of course, the loveliness never spilled into the other evenings, but something like a faint imprint of it remained on all the other times we met. In fact, I’d probably have been terrified and disappointed if it became anything else. I hadn’t expected anything. Or, to put it more truthfully, I’d have liked to test something there—something about him, his place and his beliefs, and then flash his poor scores in the end in the most dazzlingly seductive way before his drunken eyes. But the tricks and processes needed to get there were too exhausting, they demanded intricate planning and an extraordinary amount of boldness—a heaving effort that my body and brain seemed entirely incapable of.
On occasions I met him along with his wife, we spoke differently. We laughed less, avoided looking directly at each other. He kept turning to her while I looked away. It was clear: no matter how gushy and witty I became, or how much attention he gave me when it was just us, the presence of a spouse (his wife or my husband) worked like a ladle to empty a too-full pot of stew. Sponge for the empty effervescence.
*
Tamara and I came back from the park at our usual time. Birds made a clamor in the sky and mosquitoes landed on bare legs. Once home, we followed the same routine in all its elastic ways. Tamara spent her downtime reading a book before she went in for a shower.
I, at the table with my cup of tea. No reading, nothing, just me and the cup of tea, dissolution of the day, a sip a time.
Tamara called me into the shower to check, as she did these days, if there was still soap on her. I wanted to say, shower time is your time. You’re old enough to get the soap off you. Scrub, scrub some more, bend and scrub. Do what you have to, but please spare me from this zillionth thing that I am made to do, that I needn’t do.
I had used those desperate words with her before, not too long back, on a day she screamed Mumma Mumma from the bathroom, as though water had shaped itself into a monstrous beast and suffocated her. I was on a call with an old friend after a long time. We lived in different time zones and barely ever hit the sweet spot to talk.
I disconnected the call and went running only to find her standing in a way that her belly protruded and a cluster of bubbles hung around her belly button.
Look, look, she pointed excitedly, Can you do this?! That day I rubbed soap on my daughter’s little body roughly, carelessly. My nails scratched her scalp in the shampoo. Never break my calls. I told her. What makes you think I will come running any time you call me? What gives you the right to call me any time anyway?
My daughter, who was struck into silence, turned where I turned her body. That night, she turned away from me in bed.
*
After checking the soap on my daughter, I came back to the lukewarm tea, wondering where Tamara’s father was. The scooter was not parked in the compound so I assumed he was out buying cigarettes.
Shortly, Tamara appeared before me, preening a little in her dinosaur robe. I looked at her encouragingly. She walked away then to change, taking small doll-like steps. While she dressed in the other room, I thought lazily to check on the day’s messages, emails on the phone. The phone opened on the photo albums and I remembered my daughter took pictures in the park. I could see the thumbnails, all orange and green from the grass and the sunset.
I enlarged the pictures. There was the untiring drama of the sinking sun—at least six or seven images of just that. A blurry shot of someone jogging in the distance. Someone was walking their dog, a few strays sprawled under the shade of the trees, spiky palm fronds that looked like giant combs of the skies. The steeple of a neighboring church at a stark angle.
There’s the picture. Her friend’s mother and I were walking. The picture was taken from behind, from a distance of twenty meters. Both of us mothers are completely unmindful of the picture.
I zoomed in and saw the yellow t-shirt that the woman to the left wore hung to a side on her bony shoulders, so a black bra strap was clearly visible. She also had a gray mesh that fell like a dingy bridal veil from the top of her head down the length of her hair. That stranger was me.
My hair never looked that gray in the mirror.
That arm was my mother’s arm.
I held up my arms to see, and to my dismay, they didn’t hold their shape as they should have. I remembered, to my horror, my grandmother’s arms that my cousins and I jiggled with our little fingers when we were small. Moved it like a leathery skin boat that was once sturdy, ferried passengers ashore, but now flailed and thrashed.
My grandmother was about eighty then. I was thirty years younger, on that path already! But this path wasn’t my choosing!
Is my body walking with certainty towards the dark, ungainly slots that wait for it to fill them? And would I have to make efforts—arduous, burdensome efforts—to keep it from doing so? To keep its outlines intact, to retain the semblance of a shape familiar to me?
I heard the sound of the main door opening and closing and knew my husband was home. In a few moments I heard him talk to my daughter. I got up to put the latch on the door.
I pressed the power button again to bring back the photo and saw the tiny yellow circle on top. Live mode. Was I ready for this? I touched the screen lightly with the pad of my index finger and held it there. The picture moved. The two women on the screen began to walk now. The woman on the left—her whole body looked fluid. No. It looked unhinged. Everything jutted here and there. A pointy elbow, thin plank of a hip, loosely screwed shoulders. As though the nail that held it all together was pulled out more than half way, and any moment all of her would collapse.
By comparison, everything about the woman I walked with, my daughter’s friend’s mother, everything about her was so right. Her hair, dark. Her back, straight. Her walk, purposeful. Her arms, gleaming.
I had my daughter in my forties. I was an old young mother. The friend’s mother was nine years younger than me. A decade could extrude a whole new person.
There you go, I looked at the picture again and spoke sharply to myself. Look how your body got back at you. Look how time got back at you. How it jabbed you here and there. Take that. And that. Looks good? There’s more coming my dear. You’re going to have it real good.
My hand went on the delete button. But what was I going to achieve by deleting the image? This picture was the only picture of the friend’s mother and I walking in this park, in this city, in this country, in this phase of our lives, when we had young children who played on the swings and dug up earth. The only picture while she and I walked and walked around the large football field, with our different skins, different hair, different walks and bodies. The only picture of us talking about the things that wrung us both the same way: how difficult everything was, how watchful we had to be, how unprepared we felt. And how, without our having to say so, this little time in the park made us feel less alone.
I removed my hand from the button, opened the latch and stepped out of the room instead. I sucked in my stomach and straightened my shoulders a little. Just for some practice. But it was too tiring.
Anju Sharma is a writer from multiple places in India. Her work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, and Nelle, among other places. Her writing has been placed for Bristol Short Story Prize, Bridport Short Story Prize, Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, Willesden Herald Short Story Prize, and Witness Magazine Literary Awards 2023.