Mother Inferior: Prologue

Note: I just started working on a new book. It's not a kink/sex book. It's a book I have pitched to my agent and they love the idea, so I will not be posting the chapters as I write them over here but I am presenting the prologue in a few weeks and I wanted to get feedback on it. It's a book about step-parenting in India. It's very personal. I am posting the prologue here because I would love it if you would give me feedback on whether you would want to read this book based on this introduction. It's a different style of writing for me and I want to know if it's working. Also, sauteli ma, means step-mother in Hindi, you'll need that information. Thank you!

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Prologue: Mother Inferior.

Sometimes I think about how they used to be a family once. They had an entire life together and I had absolutely no notion of their existence nor did they have any inkling of mine. It's so odd that two people I didn't even know could have had a meeting facilitated by the matrimonial section of a newspaper I didn't even read and it would set off a chain of events that would have such a profound impact on my life, but I would have no idea it was happening. Two strangers who were ill-suited to one another decided to marry and it charted the course of my entire future. If I had known, maybe I would have been a happier person that year. I'd like to think that but it's probably more accurate to say that I would have disbelieved the impending impact of the entire affair, scoffed at the exploitative potential of arranged marriages and carried on with my sordid life. It is only now, powered by the magic of retrospect, that I am able to look back at that year, and that version of myself, and inject into my memories a sense of giddiness that wasn't really there. We do that to our memories sometimes. I know I did it to my memories of the morning my uncle—my mother's brother—passed away. I was swimming in the pool at the club when it was happening and it must have been a morning like any other, I must have felt like I always did when I swam that early, but ever since I discovered that I was swimming while he lay dying, I look back at that morning as if I actually felt the ominous sense of dread I now associate with it. In much the same way, I look back at that year of my life as if I knew that somewhere far away, my life was being sculpted by the hands of others. Of course, I didn’t, I had a very narrow and self-interested view of my existence back then and it was motivated by a singular goal.

In the December they got married, I was immersed in preparing for my Secondary School Certificate examinations. My entire life had led up to those exams. I suppose, that is the case for a lot of students in India. From the second you put on your first school-uniform and step into an educational institution, you are made aware of exactly what you are working towards. Excellence, outstanding results and board exams. Your transcripts are exalted as the ultimate evaluation of your entire self but for me, there was something different at stake. I grew up in a wealthy, but small, city renowned for its manicured gardens, civic amenities and socially-sanctioned elitism and I was never going to live up to its standards of beauty, propriety and class so I had to get out of there. I had always known that I had to leave in order to be happy and do what I wanted with my life, but it became exceptionally clear to me the year I started dating—people of all genders—and gained a reputation as an immoral, and just for good measure, ugly slut. I started plotting my escape in the earnest and there was only one path that seemed to make sense. It was the path of academic brilliance so undeniable, I would not only be able to secure admission into any university I wanted to attend, but also be able to support myself through it all. No one told me I had to be entirely self-reliant and emancipated in order to chase agency and autonomy, but when you’re born a woman, especially one who deigns to have a voice, an actively desirous vagina and ambitions, you learn that lesson pretty early in life. Two paths hang before you, presented as the binary illusion of a choice. Either, you live the life your parents would want for you—husband, children, a career that is good but not so good it emasculates your husband, thin waist, beautiful home and the type of sunny disposition that is charming but completely non-threatening—or you justify the right to your choices by paying the price for doing whatever you want with your life. If you are undeniably brilliant, you may get to choose what you want to do for a living. If you make the money to do it yourself, you can demand the right to pursue what you want with impunity because you don’t need the support of anyone. If you emancipate yourself from the need for your family, you can go away. Away was the promised-land to me when I was growing up. I knew I would go there someday and when I made it, I would learn whatever I liked, be as gay as I wanted, speak as loudly as I desired, wear my sexuality on my sleeve, love whomever I chose, work wherever I wanted and question only myself when I wanted to make a decision for my existence. Those exams were my path to away. While the prognosticators of my future were promising themselves to each other for eternity, I was sitting at my desk, noting equations and theorems until that was all I could see.

Well, almost all I could see.

I had planned my race to escape that town very well, and I was in the home-stretch, but that year an unforeseen distraction in the form of an adorable eight-year-old had shown up in my house. After her dad, my uncle, passed away, my sister Dalisha and her mom moved to our city to be closer to family and opportunity. I had known Dalisha all my life, of course, but until then, I only saw her during holidays and on special occasions, and even when I did see her, she spent more time with my younger sister than she did with me. I’m not exactly the sort of person to whom you bring a child to entertain, you could bring a child to me if they needed help with maths or a teenager who was struggling to date, but a tiny, warm, whimsical, affectionate creature who wants to play is not exactly my cup of tea and I am certainly not theirs. In the initial weeks that Dalisha was in our house, I was terrified of her. She followed me around the house, armed with a Barbie doll and dressed in her custom-made satin night-suits, and I ducked into the bathroom at times, just to avoid her, but she was persistent and she followed me in there as well. She took liberties with me that no one, not even my sister or parents, had ever taken. She climbed into my bed, she sat on my lap, she made me play with her dolls, she asked me to dance with her and she demanded I put her to bed beside me. I’d be immersed in my world of unrelenting goals and success and she would just show up, gap-toothed and giggling, demanding I put everything aside to cater to her. Generously, I can be described as private and touch-averse, but most people would use the words cold and distant instead. That didn’t matter to Dalisha at all. Things like that don’t seem to matter very much to eight-year-olds. She saw me study all the time and thought I needed to take more breaks to play, so she came at me with a dozen outfits so we could put on a fashion-show. She saw me alone in my room all the time, so she climbed into my bed and pulled my covers over her as well. She laughed and she cried, and she brought all of those emotions over to me as if I knew what to do with them, and for her sake, as the closest thing to a proper adult in our band of children, I had to figure it out.

If I had known the course my life was going to take, maybe I would have paid more attention to things I learnt from being a part of raising Dalisha. Maybe it would have given me pause when one day, a few months into living together, she started to refer to me as her sauteli ma. It started as a joke, though it is still how she refers to me all these years later, but if I had known that at that very moment, when she was bestowing upon me this strange title of being half-mother, two people I didn’t know, who had only been married for a few months were sitting together at a doctor’s office and looking at an ultrasound of a womb that was bearing a child who would one day grow up to refer to me the same way, I would have been awed and amazed by how Dalisha had managed to foreshadow my life. I didn’t know. When I packed up my bags and left that town, the child was two-months away from being born. When I was sitting in a classroom, in a city that was new and exciting, his mother was satiating the cravings for pani-puri that her pregnancy was demanding. The day I was hiking alone in the foothills is the Nilgiris after spending the week in the beds of a series of lovers, the child I would one day call my own was being born and I had no idea. A part of me still cannot shake the feeling that I should have been there, even though it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; a part of me believes that some kind of premonition should have gone off in my chest while I was walking alone in the forest and I should have been altered to the fact that a birth taking place so far away from me, into the family of strangers, was going to change my entire world. Something should have altered them as well—a sign, a signal or an omen—that from the second that child was born a clock had started to tick and it was counting down to the end of that familial unit and to the birth of another. They were a family once. Just them. I had nothing to do with them at all. They knew nothing about me or my existence. And now, they are my family too.

This is our story.