Memento Mori

The Portrait of a Lady

Ma always wanted to put up lots and lots of portraits on the wall. Family pictures, the photographs from her wedding, the photographs that chronicle the years of my childhood, our individual and collective insanity on the wall. Captured with a borrowed camera, for we couldn’t afford our own. Now that the wall is ready, she wants it to bear testament to our years spent mourning the loss of a wall big enough for all her miseries. My brother complains that he doesn’t want to be a part of this display of madness. He wants to be an address written on a piece of paper hurriedly, and kept somewhere, forgotten, and always thought about. He wants to be the carefully misplaced memory, marking its presence through its absence. He wants to eat, sleep, die, live, exactly in that order. And not be chronicled. Leave a blank square for me, he tells me.

Ma is the chronicler of the family. I go through her diary of recipes and decide to bake biscuits as she fusses over the golden wall. She takes her measurements and I take mine. This green diary has all the recipes she has never tried. Wrote them down and forgot about them. One must write recipes, Ma says. And leaves it at that. As if I don’t need to know why one must do such things. I don’t ask but I bake the cookies instead and she chooses her photographs telling me stories about them. This lipstick that I am wearing belonged to a friend of mine, she tells me. I borrowed it for my wedding. This saree your Maushi bought me for her wedding. Look at me in this one, standing in front of the dressing table your Atya gifted us on our wedding. I am looking at myself in this picture. She is looking at herself. She always is. The cookies are done. And so is her selection. Brother has been included in the pictures. He doesn’t get his piece of square space. He gets a frame instead. My picture has me and Baba smiling at each other. And a few others from the time in Kodaikanal. Fog, homemade chocolates, a disgusting beanie on my head, and me swaying, with one hand holding a ridiculously thin tree; this picture nauseates me. A picture of me in Ma’s saree. A picture where my brother is dressed as Buddha. One where Baba’s broken teeth can be seen. And one where we can just see Ma’s face with Baba’s lurking in the background. When the guests come visiting, they will be greeted with so many faces, each one different from the other. Some friendly and some hostile. The wall is a map. It is flat globe. It is loud and it is garish. It is disputed property. The ones standing in front of the wall, will see their reflections on the frames, and not just the faces occupying most of the frame. When the occupants of this golden wall die, and the frames are pulled down, brother will get his square space. After all the happy, hostile, wanted, unwanted faces are pulled down, the wall will be a cemetery.