Simple Instructions for Healing (as clear as they’ll ever be)
Find the right ingredients. What does right mean? No one gave me all the facts either. My secret face is different from the one for everyday use. Tougher, sturdier, made of thicker fabric. It can be controlled, manipulated, twisted and distorted to suit the recipe.
Acquire a vessel for preparation. Might be a pot or a pan, a sink or a bathtub, perhaps the occasional liver or kidney, but not a brain and mostly certainly never a heart. There is simply too much gathering inside of you, a growing collection of sorrows, insecurities, grudges, and fragile joys, the most precious and delicate of cargo. Amreeka. Land of the azad, home of the bahadur. Or so they say. Kis cheez se azad?*
Panic. Remember your own mortality, and by extension remember that you are nothing but what you leave behind. Let legacy consume you like a relentless unexplained illness, a childhood montage of hospital beds and IV drips, chronic vomiting and diarrhea, fading in and out of consciousness while your mother’s beautiful worried face disappears and reappears, a flashing sun in a spiraling galaxy.
Come back down to earth. Things are far too scary up there, in the place where we speak of death and dying without rebirth and returning. There is more of you every year, lessons learned, dreams lowered into the ground, fires extinguished. Sab bemaarian nafsiyati hoti hain**. We just didn’t know it back then.
Gather the land beneath your feet in ravenous fistfuls. Unclench your fingers and watch clumps of soil dissolving into your hands. Why is it that when you witness your own grief, you are compelled to turn away? At funerals you would watch the wailing aunties with fascinated envy. You couldn’t fathom sobbing, rocking about, flailing your arms in distress, feeling the pulse of azadi*** in your body.
Try again. This time, look for someone who both can and will explain what things mean. Be specific when you ask questions. Liberate your curiosity from the locked box, or tuck it away dangerously.
Let me start over. When my words get too close to a deep wound, I dissolve completely into abstraction and allegory. The truth is too tender.
Accept that you only have whatever you have, however bruised the vegetables and no matter how dubious the expiration date on the yogurt in the back of the fridge. It still isn’t too late. Barri ho gayi ho, ye bachpana chor do. But amma, my bachpana is all I have left of my bachpan****.
Create something delicious and watch yourself forging life in the fires of your womb. Maan ki zubaan bolte hee tujhe apni maan yaad aa jati hai*****. Embody someone you used to be. Your secret face has a child’s eyes and it really wants you to play.
Enjoy your feast. Welcome the fruits of your labor, invite them to enter your lips, walk down the red carpet of your tongue. It was never your fault, not some character flaw of yours, nor some horrible misstep that you could have foreseen and out-maneuvered, engineered out of your lives.
Rest. The only thing left to do is nothing.
* America. Land of the free, home of the brave. Or so they say. Free from what?
** All sicknesses relate to the psyche.
*** Freedom
**** You’ve grown up, let go of this childishness. But mother, my childishness is all I have left of my childhood.
***** As soon as you speak your mother tongue, you remember your mother.
