[Digital Poetics 4.25] Rote Learning by Abeera Khan

Image by the author

1. My mother and I are sat on the swing in ف’s[1] courtyard. Across from us, ف paces back and forth. She is shouting -  it is directed at us. Her mouth is slightly foaming; spit occasionally flies through the already humid summer air. The loose end of her chiffon sari is bunched, flung across her shoulder and tucked in around the side into her petticoat, exposing her wrinkling midriff. Her husband stands close. Ever the loyal soldier, his quiet baritone occasionally joins her high pitch in agreement. His displeasure shares her sense of righteousness but is dignified in its high contrast to her frenetic rage. His relative calm is misleading, he is neither ally nor voice of reason. Instead, his remarks bolster ف’s tirade. 

My mother and I are silent, waiting for ف to tire so we can escape to our room. Any maternal care that could be expected towards her daughter-in-law and grandchild is absent. There is only the wrath of total authority.

This is my earliest memory of ف. I think I was five. When I recollect this scene now, the narrative is clear. The visual details, however, are slightly more unreliable, layered in with later memories. I remember staring at my feet, but the feet I see when I remember are an adult’s. I remember the motions of their admonition, so routine it sedimented into its own choreography. I cannot remember my mother speaking, though I’m sure she did. In this scene, the swing is located across from the stairs leading up to the roof and ف and ف’s husband are standing in front of the stairs. This can’t be true, as the swing was only moved there in the last ten years or so. In my mind, this tirade unfolds during the cooling, half-light of maghrib. This can’t be true either. For all her volatility, ف would never have competed with the unsynchronised and simultaneous azaans from the surrounding masjids.  

This is both a first and a rare memory. It is the only one I have of ف directing her anger at me. In my naivety, the offence I caused was beyond my understanding. I could not have anticipated it. I know now that her rage at my transgression was simply an excuse to discipline her daughter-in-law. 

One of my mother’s many first cousins lived – still lives – behind ف’s house. They have four children, all older than me. The countless summers spent in ف’s house involved playing make believe with these cousins – my second cousins - and other neighbourhood children – some of whom my third and fourth cousins - on alternating rooftops. The houses are close to each other, so close that someone able and willing could hop from one roof to another. For ف, her son’s wife and children should not spend excessive time at their maternal family’s house. It amounted to a slight to ف’s position as mother-in-law and paternal grandmother. How much time is too much time? No one was ever sure, including, I suspect, ف. There was never a coherent application of this aggressively enforced rule, beyond the arbitrary logics of patriarchy, which enabled a woman readily scorned. 

I had spent the better half of that day at my mother’s cousin’s house. Usually, I would be beckoned back to ف’s for mealtimes. In this instance, the summons came in the midst of my aunt laying out lunch. My aunt insisted that I stay and eat with them. Not knowing any better, I obliged. The meal was probably served on the chinoiserie imitation melamine plates that were seemingly ubiquitous in the first, second, third, fourth cousins’ homes. I probably ate the black lentils and plain white rice with my hands. It probably felt like a novelty because eating with your hands was discouraged at ف’s dining table. By the end, my hands were probably caked with dried daal and mashed white rice. I was probably thinking of the next game to play once the plates were cleared. Maybe I was beckoned back home after I ate, but probably I skipped back home in my own time through the usual route via my mother’s cousin’s and ف’s adjoining back gates.

The memory involves many informed guesses. What I know for certain is that I filled my belly without intent to offend. 

2. There is something stone butch-like to ف. Of course, ف was neither a lesbian nor a touch-me-not. My ability to write this is proof enough. But, for over five decades, ف’s husband spent his mornings assisting ف’s bathroom routines. Her inability to participate in her own ablutions is, to me, a stone orientation towards oneself. She is a far cry from the white, American, working-class origins of the stone butch. But, in the ecosystem of the small city in North India where she has spent all her life, she is a gender deviant. 

She deviates from standards of femininity, from her clothes to her relationship. In the summers, all the Muslim women wear cotton or lawn salwar kameez. She wears saris with sleeveless, midriff-baring blouses, or she did until she became bedridden. When I visit, leaving the house necessitates a chador over the head and around the shoulders. All the elderly women I know wear burkas to leave the house. ف remains conspicuous on the streets, chiffon pallu bunched in the summer, cotton dupatta dangling in the winter. She has never worn makeup, not even a bit of kajal. I read the gold on her ears and hands as a marker of class status rather than feminine adornment. 

ف fails at heterosexuality. Or, at the very least, doesn’t properly reproduce it. She is bullish with her husband while he spends his retirement fretting about her comfort and enabling her emotional whims. That she married below her family’s class bracket is a fact made known only by him. It is an expression of his gratitude. She is not affectionate towards her children or grandchildren in a tender or maternal sense. She curses like a rickshaw wallah when she is angry. There is a pedagogy to this - I learn new phrases if she slips up around me. She is stubborn, paranoid and resentful in ways that I have yet to witness in any other woman.

There is an absence of traditional femininity to ف and a masculinity in her constitution. I don’t read her as a woman deliberately defiant against gendered expectations. ف is not a feminist. To me, her queer grandchild, this is queer deviance: unapologetically perverse.

3. One day, ف’s nephew, my father’s first cousin, reveals that ف’s mother, his grandmother whom he never met, would strip to her underwear in her courtyard while the help would bathe her by lunging buckets of water from the family’s well. For ف’s mother, just as for ف to come, hygiene was both a hyperfixation and an impossibility. One cannot clean oneself without touching the dirt one is trying to rid oneself off. The disgust towards filth, whether its potential or actual presence, was too distressing, or perhaps too lowly, to deal with themselves. 

Mother and daughter both outsourced the business of their hygiene to other hands, whether they be labouring or loving. 

4. Apparently, ف and ف’s mother shared the same affliction. Share may not be the most accurate verb to relay this connection, as ف’s mother passed well before ف’s children were born. ف’s issues rose to the surface upon the birth of her second child, my father. My guess is that ف’s decades’ long mental illness was a predisposition that bloomed in the wake of postpartum depression. Untreated, or rather, treated poorly, the possibility of propensity festered into an actualised predisposition. 

Inheritance is too romantic of a frame. I will settle on share for the time being. In any case, there seems to have been no overlap in the manifestation of mother and daughter’s shared affliction. We can presume that ف’s formative years involved witnessing motions that she would eventually mirror or mimic or whatever occurs when a daughter follows her mother’s pathological footsteps. But the familial narrative of a psychological fate genetically transferred is troubling, veering on the offensive. Nevermind the agency of the afflicted. This narrative rids the people in their orbit of responsibility.

I think there is a political urgency to these distinctions. I refuse to believe ف’s fate was entirely determined by heredity. Taken to its logical conclusion, the notion of predestination, whether biological or spiritual, is reactionary fatalism. I am firm in my belief that the trajectory of ف’s life would have looked different had she received adequate material support. 

5. March 2023, ف’s husband dies. We see it coming but I am stuck in London. India has barred visitors from the UK. It doesn’t matter, though, because I wouldn’t have been able to secure a visa in time to attend the janazah . I am distraught: worried about my grieving father, mourning without my family, struggling with the lack of closure wrought by distance. 

In my zoom therapy session, a handful of weeks later, I cry and cry and cry. Who will take care of her now? I sob. I’m worried. She’s alone now. I don’t think she grasps what’s happening. He enabled her all these years. Now she doesn’t know how to take care of herself. She never received the help she needed. 

My therapist points out, gently, that even in the wake of her husband’s death, ف commands my attention.

6. The invisibility of ف’s compulsions didn’t occur to me until my cousin paid us a visit at ف’s house early one morning, some years ago. This was a cousin from my maternal grandmother’s side, so ف’s compulsions were, to her, lore. I, on the other hand, developed adjacent habits by absorbing ف’s morning routine. 

We washed our hands often. Before we sat on her bed, opened her fridge with its plastic-covered handle, answered the plastic-covered phone, made her paan with a light touch of chuna, played caram with a heavy dusting of talcum over the board, sat on her bed to watch tv using the plastic covered remote, have her read us a story from her Urdu magazines while we lay next to her on her bed, or give her a hug and a kiss. Cleanliness was not a virtue, it was a house rule.

Sitting on the swing in the courtyard, waiting for ف to finish her daily hand washing at the kitchen sink, my cousin asks why we have to speak in hushed tones. I can hear the tap running. I can feel the force of ف’s hands rubbing by the rhythm of her bangles’ rattle. The response slips from my mouth before the thought has a chance to crystallise: if it’s too noisy she loses count. It is unintelligible but I can hear her keeping track under her breath. I add: she gets upset if she has to restart the count.

I spend the rest of the day mulling over this response. Countless summers and winters in ف’s home are suddenly visible from a new perspective. I couldn’t recall playing in the mornings. I couldn’t remember learning the rule nor its justification. Its obviousness had emerged out of me as if an observation about my own interiority. I couldn’t explain to myself how I knew to avoid her losing count.I didn’t realise this was a fact held within me.

7. Knowing what I know now, I am curious not only about ف’s experience of motherhood – of mothering my father, the event that initiated her compulsion – but also ف’s experience of being mothered, the memories of her own mother. How old was ف when she first witnessed her mother’s obsessive compulsions? Were they ubiquitous in the way ف’s are a constant in my experience of her? Or did they appear as a response to a traumatic event, catalysed by an eventful spark, the way ف’s did after she birthed my father? 

 The early parent-child relationship is, according to psychoanalysis, the blueprint for one’s future relationships. My childhood is doubly mediated, through my parents and their parents before them. Psychological reverb. When ف has spoken about her mother she tells us of her physicality – her beauty – predominantly. She recalls her childhood through tales of mischief and adventure. My knowledge of their shared dispositions was gained through other family members. ف has never acknowledged it. I want to ask, did your mother count too? If she did, did her bangles jingle the way yours used to? How old were you when you noticed? Did you notice? Do you see her in you? Do you see yourself in your children the way I do? 

As I write this, I feel the peeling on my own typing hands. The flaky patches around my knuckles, the untended rawness on my fingers. I wash my hands frequently. A motion learnt by rote.

Endnotes

[1] ف (‘fe’) is the twenty-sixth letter of the Urdu alphabet. Its English equivalent is the letter f. 

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Dr. Abeera Khan is Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality at the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies. Her writing, research and pedagogy is concerned with the interrelatedness between empire, gender, race and sexuality. She has published in The Contrapuntal, Feminist Review, Feminist Formations, lambda Nordica and Religion and Gender. She is co-editor of ‘Abolitions: Writing Against Abandonment’, a 40th anniversary special issue of Wasafiri Magazine.