Trust Me, You're Alive

I dreamt of my mother last night.
Last week while reading Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, I thought of my mother’s handbag that she’d carry to Thrissur while posted there. I would forage in there when we stayed in Medical College quarters when I was 6 or 7 or 8 or 9. 
She would have just arrived from the railway station, and I was always in excited anticipation of something, anything, she would bring for us. A bright-covered Kalikkudukka, or grey slate pencils hidden in her purse. Sometimes I accompanied my father to pick her up, she usually got down at Pettah station. It was only a little closer than the main Trivandrum station but it was way less crowded and the traffic was better. Pettah also has a nice railway canteen.

Once we were home I’d grab her handbag and open it up like a hungry child. It was a portal to a secret world that I didn’t fully understand and believed seeing was as close to belonging as I’d ever get. My brother and I were simpletons, but I was especially one. I had bobbed hair and filled water in holes I dug around the house to watch it quickly vanish into the red laterite mud, played cricket with our neighbors, the weakest link in our team of 4, and sold fish-leaves (leaves as stand-ins for fish) in the back of our house to my imaginary, loyal customers. Nobody was impressed.

I was interested in specific compartments only. The pouches on the inside secured by zips. Any trinket shoved in there was an object of interest.

My mother always carried with her a small yellow mirror, smudged in places, owned and well-used. I think she might still have it. She also carried a small round kajal box, the kind you use your fingers to apply. A few stray hair slides and pins at the bottom of the side-pouch. This assortment of slides, whether wavy or curved, brought me joy akin to finding treasure and to this day I do not know why.

For as long as I’ve known her my mother has worn liquid bindi, but I don’t remember seeing the slender bottle in her bag. Instead she’d keep a leaflet of round pottu‘s, for my mother never wears any other shape, only round. Sometimes the leaflet came folded, other times it had a transparent front. For reasons I cannot fathom now, that was what brought me the most joy, my main treasure, and seeing it made my day. The maroon bindis stuck against stiff white paper with adhesive, and a strange but sophisticated woman’s face on the cover (sleeveless meant sophisticated), was a world unknown to me and one that I couldn’t imagine graduating into, ever. It was my mother’s world. One that I could only access through the tiny compartments in her handbag, and sometimes when I loaned chiffon sarees from her bottom-of-the-almirah section to drape shabbily around myself while she was gone.

I didn’t really connect the Whisper (Always in the US) that I found in there to the same world though – I truly believed that was my mother’s serious secret that she shared with none, perhaps even her husband was unaware of her condition that she hid in the open almirah. Nobody else seemed to be alarmed or aware. And I wasn’t a snitch.

The Whisper package was a brightly beckoning blue-green, but I was positive nothing good would come out of it. While I was curious and scanned to speculate from its illustrations and texture what my mother’s illness / clandestine operation might be, I was not in the least bit interested. Of course my instincts were right, this world was deciphered by the time I was in 4th standard, when friends with older sisters relayed to the rest of us their knowledge of periods and what awaits us. The hushed discussions didn’t stop until all of us had gotten our periods.

Anyway, back to the bindi. And my dream.

Last night, I dreamt that my mother had a whole selection of bindis with her, of all shapes and sizes, in black and maroon. Even I still own only round ones, but the last time I was in India I searched many stores for the tilak, the long tear drop shaped kind, but couldn’t find them anywhere. I was surprised because of the number of teachers and friends and women I’ve seen wear it throughout my life – Had the world of Bindi’s changed? Had the humble circle gained supremacy or even a monopoly in the world, just when I wanted to switch?

In my dream, my mother also had the teardrop in her collection. I was surprised by this too, and I said I was going to take that one.

In reality of course this wouldn’t happen. My mother, who started wearing kurtas and churidars only a couple years ago and that too only outside of work, might try tilak bindi, but I wonder if she’d ever fully adopt it. She only tried the kajal stick when I was in undergrad, by when I had moved from using the Himalaya kajal to being a lifetime devotee of Maybelline’s Colossal kajal pencil. She said the pencil wouldn’t do so I brought her a mini Himalaya One morning, I saw her emerge dressed with smudged kajal under her waterlines and near the corners of her eyes.

What did you do?! How did you draw it, it’s literally a crayon?! We both erupted into laughter. She switched back to her kajal soon. But I had also started wearing sticker bindi’s right about then, I later suggested she should wear them too because in the Trivandrum heat her liquid pottu would melt and drip along the frown line between her brows, a crease formed due to her questioning eyes over years – at students, at colleagues, at anyone. I have the beginnings of a fault line between the eyebrows myself that I try to smooth out sometimes when I notice. Every time I see Tina Fey on screen I wonder if she does the same thing.

My mother would wear adhesive bindis once in a while ever since so I think I’ll find that in her purse once again now if I searched. (I did the last time and I did find it :D).

What’s in my handbag?

Recently while traveling I was navigating the headache of switching between my handbag and toiletry kit minitubes of moisturizers and travel-sizes of perfume and spare earrings and pouches packed with a pair of tampon plus disposal bag, a sachet of cleanser I got years ago at the dermatologist, a kid-size toothbrush for my Invisalign and whatnot. During a train ride I thought of all the switching back and forth I’d have to do going from a 3-day trip to an upcoming 9-day trip and the woes of it.
For a second I had a flash from my past (and where, I think, my dream really came from), of how a tiny square of maroon bindis in my mother’s bag would send 7-year old me to heaven, how that was the pinnacle of womanhood in a world that I thought I’d never be ushered into.
(But fret not, it comes for us all). And how it’s a mindless chore most of the time now, to pack these bags and to go over the checklist, over and over. I also smiled at what a joy it would be for my niece when she peeks into my sister-in-law’s makeup kit for the first time to discover a new world.

Stray hairpins can be found all over my apartment now – at the window sill, next to the bathroom sink, on the carpet next to my bed, in the living room open bin. The novelty and curiosity of it all is lost, except when I think back to what I felt when I used to look into my mother’s handbag.