Why do I write in English?

At eight, my neighbour insisted that her daughter should speak in English if we needed permission to play. Both of us blabbered in English and made a version of ‘potta English’ or nonsensical English and we had fun till we were caught. I understood that there was some power inherent in English that would overcome the underprivileged existence of me being dyslexic, non-normal, rebellious, subversive, etc. I slowly familiarized another language where I could be most expressive, honest and feel empowered. My tongue was not chained to English, but my tongue, chained to a small town with its quirky, restrictive behaviourisms, found its freedom in English writing. English helped me understand diverse literary traditions and helped me write to subvert the power dynamics around my experiential realities. Writing in English was my first foray into recesses of writing myself down. The alien language was intimidating in the beginning, spitting the fire of grammar, alien syntax and incomprehensible spellings. My trysts with the English language were like taming the dragon and riding it, and soaring over the world and watching it and penning the world down with the dragon wings. Nothing has been more pleasurable than that.

In this conscious choice, there was also this pleasurable and empowering realm of mediating bilingualism. I could think, write, dream and let myself free in two languages; and the literary tradition of the English language and the subversive wings it provided me more confidence to write what I like, and to let my creative imagination flow without restrictions. The language also gives me the liberty to define the real truth of my life, circumstances and the environment around me. English gave me the courage to dream and articulate what I could not in my mother tongue. I could speak of my traumas, my stories, my point of view, and spin out a vast tapestry of my truths and string them as stories to the world. English provided a window to my soul and I could see myself clearly with that window.
 

WRITINGS
 

SHORT STORY
 

My Father's Ghost
 

It is no trivial matter; even my therapist laughed at me when I told him my father's ghost visited me six times. Believe me, every time he came, he left a trail of his stench and both of us got into heated arguments. I sniffled and breathed harder to calm myself when he visited. I do not remember having adored my father like other girls my age. From my childhood, I have always felt deep inside that he was a bully, a tantrum-thrower and a stubborn man. I have had my own justifications for feeling so. However, as any believer of ideal families and values, I have often tried to rebuke myself for my cynicism and tried to overlook his shortcomings as he had some overlaying qualities of generosity and kindness.

When I was a child, we used to walk to the Parish through a poo-smelling lane that ran parallel to the railway track near our house. On the one side of the road was a slum, where snotty, unwashed children either lazed around the only corporation water faucet they had or foraged the railway tracks for junk, scraps or empty water bottles. I was friends with a couple of them as we had gone to an art workshop together during our school vacation. There was this girl who often played the role of Kali, who had round eyes and curly hair, whom I was wary of initially. But she surprised me with her kindness offering me lozenges whenever we rehearsed together. Another was a short guy with dark skin and cat eyes, and my brother told me secretly that he was a cross of Indian and foreign blood. I didn’t understand what my brother told me, but I kept checking on him to find out his ‘hybridity’. But, trudging across the path to the Church, my brother and I took great care to avoid eye contact and ignore them. As a result, we walked hoodwinked whenever we crossed the railway slum.

"Don't mingle with them." Mom ostentatiously covered her nose with her polka-dotted handkerchief. Once when I returned the smile to a girl with curly hair, who often danced and posed as Mother Kaali at the workshop, Mom pinched my arm.  

Our family often walked in a line. Father led the Church parade with his bulgan beard, and a framing mane whipped up to a cirrus by the tropical wind in a creased khadi shirt and rayon trousers, followed by mom, draped in her fine silk saree, powdered and polished to an eye candy; closely trailed by my brother, who wore his casual sandals, and tailed by me, bored and tortured by the tedium called 'church going'. Mom always hurriedly squeezed me into a frock and tied up my wet noodle hair with a denim scrunchy. I walked at the end of the family line, picking up a bunch of Malaysian railway creeper buds and tasting their tanginess tingle at the tip of the tongue.

On a cloudy, humid day, on our way to the Church, an old man was struggling with a pushcart full of wooden logs up the path's curve, which ran up to the railway bridge. Without a moment's thought, my father handed over his wallet to Mom, lunged forward and pushed the cart to the curve of the railway bridge where the slope ended. It was three in the afternoon, and as we were heading for the evening mass, Mom looked around, startled to see if any of our neighbours or friends had seen this generous act of kindness. After triumphantly setting the old man on a level, tarred road, my father came back huffing, drenched in sweat. My brother shielded his eyes from the sun, looked up and smiled at my father. Mom was visibly cross. 

"Poor man, he needed a helping hand." My father wiped the sweat on his brow with his sleeves. His khadi shirt was streaked with doughnut-shaped sweat marks. Though I reeled under a strong whiff of his sweat mingled with Givenchy and Cuticura powder, I puffed up; somewhere, I felt a trickle of warmth creeping up my spine watching my father help a wrinkly old man. My father is good deep down; I tried not to judge him.

I asked my father's ghost, "Now, now! Why are you telling me this story?"

My father's ghost looked around 45, prim and proper, and had a whisky slur. He wore his puff of hair on his thick mane, and his voice boomed with the arrogance of youth. Every time he visited me, he sat on the faux-leather, turquoise-tinted chair that he inherited from his father, which his father had inherited from his father and so on. I was the only woman to have inherited it, as my brother moved to London permanently, he asked me to safe keep it and handed it over to me. 

The ghost shrugged his shoulders and stared his ghostly stare. Exhausted with the shard of memory, I fell asleep, and in the morning, I found no trace of a ghost in my room. I hoped it was a bad dream, but then I swept off crescent-shaped nail bits that my father had filed from his toe.

The next time he came was after I wrote this 'Dad' series of poems which were not flattering to my father. I remembered and wrote the way he belted me when I was thirteen and in love with a boy next door. In my part of the world, dating or even having a crush on a boy was seen as something wayward and unpardonable. My brother sneaked into the diary where I had been writing all my fantasies about the boy, my childhood crush. I scribbled down that I wanted to marry this boy; I fancied kneeling and holding out my finger for the wedding ring to slide into my finger without getting stuck by an unwieldy wad of flesh. The next thing I remember was the hiss of a leather belt and the sting on my skin. I couldn't help but cry out, the door was bolted, and no one came for rescue. I could only see the violent swishing of my father's hairy arm brandishing his belt and the inexplicable darkness caving in. 

I sat tight, struggling with the memory I used as a resisting shield towards my father's sympathy-gaining, guilt-provoking ones.

"But, didn't I compensate?" My father's voice was young and booming, slightly older than his first visit. 

"Gee, thanks! Can you enlighten me on how?" For once, I enjoyed being sarcastic to ghosts. 
"You have an atrocious and selective memory." His face dimmed as his discs dilated. "I took your boyfriend out for a beer every time you brought him home." 

He cleared his throat and continued, sitting tight on the chair. "Your ex-husband was my favourite drinking partner." He looked at me deeply, and then he burst into a chuckle. "That is until he came out as a bisexual after birthing two sons." He sneered, threw his head back and guffawed.

I was glued to my seat. My father was still rippling with laughter. He always knew how to hurt me for my defiance and sarcasm. I also noticed that he didn't wear his hearing aid. Around fifty-five, he was tone-deaf when he was alive and refused to wear any. He chose not to hear; he sometimes assumed his imagined truths and fought for the things I never uttered.

"I wish you hadn't taken him out for drinks. I wish you had kept your distance and kept your nose out of every *** thing I did." 

I had no private life in my house; every nook and corner was littered with my father's books, diaries, old brochures, newspapers and bills. He wrote on every bit of paper and preserved it, kept all his drafts stacked in the library and never allowed us to throw them away. He had scribbled innumerable poems about his cursed life, lack of recognition as a minority Christian and hot women, who were named ostentatiously after the women of the Bible and the Hindu epics. I read some of them and wondered if these women were his lovers once upon a time.

"I have always been of great support. Whenever you and your husband wanted money, I was there to help." Father's ghost voice boomed, dispelling the darkness. Some noisy cicadas chirped their soul into the night. I didn't have to pinch myself and see; everything was real.

"I took care of the expenses of both your C sessions; we gifted your firstborn a few gold chains from Malaysia. But, of course, you sold them all!" Father was on his way to elaborate on all the favours extended to us. 

"Chains were mom's gifts!" I remonstrated weakly. I remembered with a pang when my parents travelled to the hills where I was working and how they adored my son with the gifts they brought from home. Mom gifted me a few gold chains, anklets, and a silver girdle with bells and cutlery; father gave me Simone de Beauvoir. As I puffed up with pride, I felt the heavy book weigh on my hands. Finally, I slept off, relieved that the resistant memories were slowly fading away. 

The next time he came, I woke up to see his silhouette on the same chair. He saw me wake up, cleared his throat, and rocked on the chair, becoming more coercive and aggressive. Finally, he started greying, and his double chin sagged. 

"I don't know if you remember, I washed your blood-soaked wash clothes after your Csessions, and you were not even conscious then." This floored and embarrassed me to no end. I sensed how he was twisting the crucifix-like guilt that had started growing in my heart since my first meeting with his ghost.

"You were dead drunk when you volunteered. Still, I am thankful. Usually, Indian men hesitate to do that. But, do you also remember the leer with which you looked at my ex-husband, who was helping me use the commode? That hurt me to no end." I felt the warm, salty trickle of tears plough down my cheeks. My father has won his third battle, I understood.

 After he disappeared, I sat up and stared at the darkness for a while. Finally, I couldn't sleep any longer, and I washed off the imaginary stains on the chair he sat on. I could still smell him on the faux leather sofa where he sat.

The next time he visited me was at three o'clock in the morning. I thought I was dreaming as I could see something that happened two years back, a few months before his death. I was in my old house; I heard him yell and shout, and I ran down the flight of stairs with the same panic that throttled me whenever I heard him scream.

He was shouting into his new Android phone.

"Hello, Google. Are you sure you want to help me? If you were sincere, you would have helped me long ago. But I found you incompetent, insincere, insensitive, and callous. You are doing lip service only. You don't want to help at all. Instead, you want to drag things endlessly to keep the money with you and splurge on yourself."

The old man yelled into the phone, expecting the lady Google Assistant to answer. I was open-mouthed for a second; then, I snorted and corrected myself, imagining that twenty years from now, if I am still alive, I'd be struggling with the nuances of more advanced technology. I imagined my grown-up boys and their wives, with a few sprawling grandkids around, would have the same shell-shocked look on my face.

"What is the use of an assistant here? You are not helping me. The system must help in times of need. But you aren't helping. You are negative in your attitude. To hell, with your assistance!" Father kept yelling into the phone.

"What is wrong?" I dared to ask, and he obviously didn't hear that. So I stood before him and gesticulated with my upturned palm asking what was wrong. At that time, I had just begun my Mohiniyattom classes, and the hand mudras were quite helpful in communicating with my father. He picked up the hand gestures pretty fast. 

"I won a lottery after playing in the online millionaire games. I could answer everything, and they promised me a million in my bank by next week."

"Who promised?" I asked, gesticulating with my jaw dropping and eyes bulging like zombie's eyes.

"Google had promised me money. That too in dollars. I want you to open my Google account and then let me know when they would deposit the money." 

I understood that my father had been taken for a ride and spammed ridiculously by some online gamester. Only two years back, he was enamoured by androids, like anyone else, and bought an expensive Samsung, burning his pockets for 36000 rupees. Since his new purchase, my father had had his meltdowns with the phone. He would rap the screen and yell. Somehow he managed his YouTube binge-watching where he'd happily watch aunty-porn, slurping and nodding his head in delight. On Facebook, he had at least six accounts and every time he forgot his password, he opened a new one, posted some inadvertent and embarrassing selfies, and sometimes posted porn links in public without even knowing what was happening. We realized that it was impossible to tutor or make him internet literate.

"Look, Father, the Google account is a mail account; it isn't a bank account. You don't have money there." I started shaking my head and waving my arms, saying 'no'. Father looked at me open-mouthed. I understood that he didn't understand a word of what I said. He unlocked his phone and showed me the 'Congratulations!' message. He then promised me some money to build the new house. I shook my head and asked my mother if she could write a letter to him and make him understand that Google is a search engine, not an ATM.

"What is a search engine?" My mother looked up from her Facebook and asked. 

When I opened my eyes, my father was sitting in the same spot and looking at me menacingly. Yet, strangely, I was not afraid. On the contrary, I thought it was time to confront him. He looked like a shadow of his old self. His ghost lost all his teeth; his mane had thinned and crept down like thin flax ropes.

He started accusing me in a whining voice. 

"You disapproved of whatever I did. Finally, after winning the lottery, you even disinherited me of the millions of dollars I was entitled to."

 I snorted and averted my face to avoid his spittle. 

"Look at the way you treat me as an untouchable! I am not even supposed to talk aloud, and you smirk and roll your eyes with your teenage rebellion and aversion towards me."

My father always knew how to churn up a tumultuous wave of guilt within me. So I gathered my courage and tutored him.

"Father, someone was trying to spam… err...cheat you on the internet. Google doesn't give away money just like that unless you work for them. Someone wanted to access your bank account and rob all your pension money."

I felt exhausted after acting out every word I had to say. Dumb-charading 'money' and 'cheat' was easy, but 'bank account' and 'pension money' were difficult to act out and mouth accurately. I flayed wildly when I said, "Google is not a bank but a search engine." My dance mudras did little help. The old man looked at me quizzically, shook his head and left me as exhausted as ever. I sank and cursed the moment I decided to gift him an Android phone. The phone just made him crazier day by day. He never understood the ways of the digital world, and the phone acted quirkier daily, leaving the old man looking foolish and senile. He cursed the Google assistant daily, and sometimes he threw his phone on the bed out of sheer annoyance. I dozed off again, wondering why my father was visiting again and again. Was it to apologize? Or declare his love? Or tell me that he just couldn't express anything when he was alive, and only after his death could he reveal his true feelings? I always thought that after death, people got a glimpse of 'the truth', but the visitations of my father convinced me that people remained the same old scumbag-of-nonsense. 

I was surprised. After death, we would remain the dumbasses we were when we were alive. This was new knowledge to me, and it was disappointing. I always thought we would be transformed into all-knowing, all-forgiving, all-enlightened souls after death. But, clearly, that was not the case. 

  “You just didn't help. Instead, you made fun of me." He shook his remaining mane, and he looked older than ever. 

I shrugged; someone had spammed him badly and whacked fifty thousand rupees from his meagre savings. I sat resigned and passive. I kept telling myself I was not responsible for his cyber ignorance; I tried to warn him, but he never listened….

"I lost a lot of money because you didn't open a Google account for me." His spittle sprayed all over my house plants and carpets.

I curled up defensively in the corner of my bed and wrapped my arms around myself. I don't know how long I sat like that, but I opened my eyes to a phlegmy morning, feeling my sore muscles and bones ache. I knew that my father had become a stale gag for the younger generation to prank and troll, but every time I heard him talk to Google, I either recorded it or wrote it down. 

I stretched in various Surya namaskara poses, knowing very well that my father would visit me more to make me feel remorseful of my resentment towards him. In the mornings, I started my day with 'OM' chanting. I felt trapped in Hindutva for a while and compensated with Our Father. Then, the weight of patriarchy sat heavily on my heart's brain cells, and I chanted the Bhadrakali mantra. That was compensated with a benign Hail Mary, which was rounded up with the Gayathri Mantra. Ten minutes of Wim Hoff's breathing in spirituality and breathing out negativity took a precious hour off me. I knew I was messed up inside and had to solicit all energies from the universe to help myself from my father's spell. Somehow, I considered this as a kind of protection from my father’s ghost, and I believed that the fluidity with which I could switch between the Hindu and Christian Mantras would reinforce me against him.

The next time he came, he was in his weakest form. He was hobbling and walked with the help of a wicker walking stick, which was slightly bent with his bent frame. He couldn't see me properly, as he was squinting in my direction, and he cocked his ears, though every little noise dodged his listening sphere.

"Do you remember when I came back for good from Malaysia, and I thought of redoing the Garden in a Malaysian way?" His quivering voice echoed from the well of weakness. My heart beat fast as in my five-year-old memory of my childhood, and I steeled myself.

I was five years old when he returned from a short trip to Malaysia, and like every kid with a foreign-travelled dad, I would snoop into my mother's wardrobe and come out of it smelling of Davidoff, Givenchy and sometimes, cheap attar in bottles. I found an easy acceptability among friends as some took a whiff and snuggled to me.

That year during Christmas, my brother and I went to our foreign-returned, potbellied, Givenchy-smelling, beer-sipping father and demanded a star and some Christmas decorations for our make-believe Christmas tree, which was a skeletal rose apple tree in our yard. Father said he would make the star himself and asked us to collect all the coconut spathes from our sprawling premises. He sliced the half-dry spathes into equal-sized thin, flexible pieces and tied them to a star shape with tag threads. He made two star shapes with them and wedged spathe pegs inside them for the 3D effect. He bought us some blue and red cellophane papers and tissue rolls and asked us to stick them neatly around the star frame. My brother and I scowled and looked at each other with disappointment.

"This is how the Malays make the parol-lantern star." Father held out his star frame to us.

We wanted the fancy ones from the shop, which looked glittery and Christmassy. Father then stomped into the garden with a sense of achievement, and he picked up a piece of termite-eaten driftwood from the kitchen corner, washed it up and painted Garden in teal blue, dotted it with different-sized polka dots and nailed it on the jackfruit tree. My neighbours, who peeked in to see what was happening, closed their mouths and giggled.

"People plant growing stuff in their garden rather than hang a fancy nameplate on a jackfruit tree." My brother rolled his eyes and sighed. I had tears in my eyes as I couldn't hide my embarrassment. "I want flaawerss in the garden." I lisped with my lower lip quivering with disappointment.

Father ignored me, dressed up and left for work, instructing us to finish the paper-sticking work on the star by evening.

When he left, my brother shoved the work on me, "I can't do it; I have a football match in the swamp. If you want, you can do it." He kick-started his imaginary bike, revved and drove it to the swamp, imagining he was Maradona. I rummaged for scissors and tried to cut the cellophane pieces into triangles. I couldn't even cut a single triangle, and I teared up, dampening the paper and letting its thin sheets stick together and run colour. I tried to save them by exposing them to sunlight, but that attempt was so clumsy that I accidentally bunched them into a colour-running, amorphous ball. 

I dreaded the evening and huddled up in the kitchen corner. 

"Where's the star?" My brother searched for the star everywhere in the house with panic loaded into his voice, after rushing back from the game just before father returned from work.

"You idiot! Where's the star?" I cringed in the corner and shivered. 

In the evening, my father thundered in.

"Didn't you make the star?" He asked my brother first. Then, I heard him storm into the yard to chop off a guava tree branch, the most plaint and hurting stick after cane, and he walked into the house and caught hold of my brother.

I heard the swish of the guava stick and my brother crying out.

"She told me she would do it. I gave her the sticks, papers and glue." My brother gave me away.

I heard my father's thundering footsteps and my wild heart echoing his steps. Then, finally, he found me in the corner and pulled me out by the scruff of my neck.

I felt the guava stick lashes on my skin, as father beamed triumphant and vengeful as ever when my skin rippled with pain. I tried to erase the memory, but the sting clung to my skin. I wish I could show and make him feel the photographic memory of pain and humiliation. Once again, my father disappeared in a poof after opening up the gashes in me. I decided I could never love him as much as I tried.

It was only when I realized that my father's control of the narrative was lost in my memories. He also only appeared for a short time after our last conversation. I was almost relieved that he wouldn't come back again. 

But he came as an eighty-five-year-old after a long and stressful wait. This time, he was almost falling apart, and he did not feel it necessary to remind me of the list of past favours he had done me. I could see my deadpan face in the mirror and readjusted the quotient of courage on that. Now it is a brownish red.

My father didn't say anything but sat squirming on the chair I inherited from him. I had many retorts and counters that I had gathered for the big day. The way he tried to seduce my nanny and tried to touch her bum when I was a little child was one among them. Another was my memory of him chasing down my aunt with his pants down when my mom was away. My arguments were strong, and I steeled myself.

My father could read my mind, and he looked misty under the cool, fluorescent glow of the night lamp. I was searching for more memories to stonewall him. But he sat there with his frail arrogance for a while. Then, finally, he stammered something; I could hear just a mumble. I was sure that he was trying to defend himself rather than apologize. Finally, I saw him disappear in the chair, leaving a stain behind.

 I worked days and days to remove that stain; that could have been his poo, blood, phlegm or any of the body juices. The stain was as stubborn as him, and it smelt of him.

After the sixth visit and trying to remove the stain for days and days together, I was determined that I did not want him visiting me during intervals.

 I picked up all the valuables he left me, including the Simon de Beauvoir, a suitcase, a leather folder and some pens, dumped them on the stained chair, and rang up the antique dealer from the nearby town. I pushed the chair into the street and watched from the window till the dealer came. I could see the dealer examine the stuff before he carted them off in his Isuzu pickup. He called me up and confirmed once again.

"Are you sure you are giving these to me for free?"

“Yes, absolutely!" I sighed, my heart slowing down with relief.

I opened my door and windows, and the vacuum the couch left was liberating. Did I smile? I don’t know. For now, I was lost in the music of my calm breathing.