Becoming Amma

I spent a lot of time running away from Amma. So when I shifted to Bombay I thought I could breathe easy. Only to realize that the noose wrapped around my neck was the umbilical cord. Amma was not going to let me go.

Maybe that is why when Kavi proposed to me, I said yes. He was the one who would storm the Bastille and rescue me from my mother.  

Kavi was 40 - about 20 years older than me. He was so perfect that he could have been fiction. Something women conjure up to garnish their dreary existence. Impossibly good looking, terribly mean, intermittently warm, and with eyes that held the promise of the perfect man he would become - once I was done working on him.

He also seemed to be fascinated by me. Everything I did was performing art for him and he showed his appreciation by not ratting me out. When I was at war with the head of HR, I had graffitied his car, Kavi had walked in right then but he kept my secret. The first overture had been his. And how could I turn him down.

He had a string of bad relationships, and then he had found love. A little digging up on his past and I realized that he was a man who loved deeply. His wife had died in an accident a while ago, and he just couldn’t get over her.

The wife was a player and was probably on her way to meet her lover when her car crashed into a truck. He was seeing a Shrink for his inability to trust women.

“You healed me Saloni” he had said. And slipped on a ring on my finger.

I called up Amma. I needed to tell her. Was I scared that Amma would be jealous?

“ Are you ashamed of calling me Amma ? You are calling me Mom because you are with someone? Am I on speaker? Is he with you? He is going to betray you, just come back home. In time for the festival”

Amma didn’t like me have boyfriends. Amma was not puritanical or a prude. She had a string of lovers after the death of my father. She was plain selfish. She didn’t want me to have anyone else apart from her. She didn’t even want me to move out of our village. We were locked in a time bubble of pubescent war between parent and child. I hated Amma.

That, possibly, was why I accompanied Kavi to his ancestral house, without even telling her about it.

10 kms from Jalpaiguri was Naharpur - a world that seemed to have fallen in between the tectonic plates of reality and myth. And the beautiful house that Kavi’s ancestors built. He wanted to get married to me right away. We would go away to the US after this. He even had applied for the visas. But then Amma happened. Like an act of insidious inception Amma destroyed my faith in Kavi. Why didn’t I resist? Because I was just a haunted house possessed by Amma’s strong will.

The Betrayal

Two days into the vacation I saw some lingerie lying around. There must be an explanation I told myself. By the time I decided to confront Kavi it had disappeared.

Then I started getting paranoid. The food tasted weird. The water left a metallic taste in my mouth. I suspected I was being poisoned. Amma had gotten inside my head.

“We women of Puthur Village are unfortunate in love, when we chase it we hurt ourselves” Amma had conditioned my response towards love from the time I was 6. So was Kavi more distant since we had come here or was I working a self fulfilling prohecy?

That night I woke up to hear a woman and Kavi speaking in low whispers.

“Why go for someone like her?” The woman said.

“I am tired of the women you find for me. “ Kavi protested.

“Will this one last?” The woman was very cut up.

In the morning I wondered if it was just something I had dreamt.

After all I was Amma’s daughter. Amma was a paranoid schizophrenic.  I wondered if I had hit genetic lottery. I really didn’t want to grow up to be my mother.

Amma had once told me “Men always betray. A man betrayed Goddess Mariamman. She cut off his head. Why put yourself in a situation where you are forced to kill?” Amma was turning senile. Was I turning senile too?

For the first time, I missed Amma. I wanted to be home. I hated small towns. But this was the first one that scared me.

….Amma is always right

I wanted to get out. I wandered around the huge mansion. The part of the mansion I had been warned off because it was decrepit and might collapse any day.

My phone was not working because someone didn’t want me to make calls? Or was it my mind playing tricks? But then I was smart enough to recognize a network jammer when I saw one. There was no other reason a box of that shape and size would be mounted upon a wall in a heritage building. Kavi liked the quiet. And he did tell me this was going to be a detox vacation. Maybe there was a point to it all. I just needed to speak to Amma.

I finally came upon a bolted room, and found that there was a feeble network signal right at the door. I just needed to inch a little closer. But the door to the room was shut. I unlocked the door.

I stepped inside. And made that call to Amma. I told her I missed her. And it was my birthday soon. And I had never celebrated a single birthday away from her. Amma was terse and monosyllabic in her response. She was upset with me. It made me feel better immediately. This was normal.

But as I turned to go, I saw the contents of the room, and it took me a while. It took me a while to form the shapes I saw into a coherent response in my mind.  It was a torture chamber, with implements of torture spread out neatly around the room. And then I heard the door shut behind me.

There was Kavi standing there, looking disapproving – and dark. And yet so handsome. More handsome than ever. Rage suited him.

“Why couldn’t you trust me when I told you not to come to this wing. Now look what you are making me do. Now you’ll die too, and I will be alone – and a year and a half behind on my therapy. My shrink warned me that you might cause a relapse. But I took a chance on you, because I loved you, why couldn’t you do the same with me. Why did you have to betray me”

It all made sense now that I discovered Kavi was crazy. He had killed his wife. And seemed very enthused to kill me too. He grabbed me, and pinned me to a chair, and tied me to it.

As he got the brain crusher ready, he explained the process to me like a professor. 

“Some of these are antique,” he explained. “The last one I had picked at Sotheby’s. It was used in World War 2 by German interrogators.”

It was my birthday tomorrow. I was going to die, one day before my 25^th birthday. Probably Amma would still cut the cake for me not knowing I was already dead.

The grid fitted snugly around my skull. He placed the nail in the groove and started tightening the screw. The nail started digging in the skull. Beyond the thin soft flesh of the scalp. It was drawing blood.

The pain was becoming unbearable.I could taste that metallic taste of fear in my mouth. My eyes hurt. My body hurt.

I screamed and screamed.

Becoming Amma

Struck by the primal fear of death, not mom, mum, mumma, mother, I called out for Amma. And in that one moment, I knew what I had to do. I felt a surge of adrenalin and power. I transformed from a helpless flesh into teeth, talons and a roar.

As I stood up, the ropes falling to the floor, Kavi looked terrified. I caught him by his neck with one hand. With the other hand, I grabbed his hair.  And I ripped his head clean off.

The tender tendrils of nerves that connected him to his body swayed gently.

I held the head up by the hair, staring into its lifeless, shocked eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror in front of me. There is something terribly beautiful about power. I was myself but eyes were glowing, my teeth where shinier and sharper and my nails were retractable.

I could smell blood. And I wanted to lick the blood off the dripping head when the door opened.

It was Amma.

“Throw that piece of garbage away”, Amma growled. Suddenly, I saw Amma as I never had before.  Her teeth feral. Her nails sharp. Her ears pointed. Her eyes glowing. Exactly like mine.

“ I am not going to let you push me around any more.” I growled back.

Amma roared.

All the fight went out of me. The mirror in front of me showed a fierce creature. But I was no match for Amma. I didn’t want to argue. I let the head drop with a plop on the ground. Kavi’s head bounced off the floor and rolled under the ankle slicer.

Later in the car, Amma handled Kavi’s mom who threatened to tell everyone that her daughter was a freak. She would drag her to court. A murderer. A monster.

“You talk about police and court, well take it to court, but who’ll believe you?  Now what if we tell them what we know about you? Your son was a serial killer. That can be proved in court.

And of course - there won’t be a single day you would be able to sleep soundly in your bed. You know what you saw.  That was just a glimpse. There’s much more to us”

Staring out of the window, I broke down. Amma whacked me on the head.

“Stop crying. I told you to listen to me. I told you that guy was trouble. And I told you to come home. If you had transformed in front of me I would have told you all the dos and don’ts. Mariamman protects us all.

Then her voice softened.

“I heard you calling out for Amma in front of that man. You aren’t ashamed of me anymore are you?”

I wasn’t. I understood her now. After years of resisting I had grown up to be exactly like Amma.