Metamorphosing Into Mother - MidDay, June 17, 2002

A week after her first birthday, Baby A is now 27 years away from turning into her mother. I’ll have to break it to her gently. Maybe when she’s 26. Growing up I wanted to be my dad, moustache, chest hair and all. He’s a cool guy. He’d split lobsters down the middle and barbeque them for us, he’d play loud music, he liked hanging out in the garden, he wanted us to be in a band, he drove us around, he made the money. As eldest of six, I watched my mum always amongst her children — supervising mass bathing, feeding frenzies, packing us off to school, staying up nights with the brother who consistently failed in Hindi, spending days cleaning, doing the laundry and sometimes threatening to throw in all six towels and join a convent. She didn’t take to the radio being on. It interfered with her super powers — that special mix of sound and intuition that mothers combine to make an evil-child-radar. We thought she was just being a stick in the mud. Your first independent thoughts are to be as different from your parents as possible. They say doctor — you say rock star. They say rock star — you say porn film-maker. Get the baby-boomer treatment — produce hippies, the slacker vibe — yuppies. It’s impossible to foretell how your kids will make money. You can bet your last buck though that most everything else will be done like you do. Even as we speak I am turning into my mother. Irrational fears for the offspring, voice throaty from yelling a panicky ‘NO!’ the whole day, fatigue-whipped in the evening, a little bit of a grumble-gut, a little silly. (I also, willy-nilly, inherited my father’s facial hair, but technology and harsh chemicals take care of that twice a month.) Baby A’s too little, but already she imitates and can wag her finger and grouch threateningly. I now have a minor obsession with observing other mothers and daughters. To avoid the clowns, cake and crying ritual that comprise most children’s first birthday celebrations we hot-footed it to Goa for Baby A’s 01. Also on the ‘monsoon package’ were two Delhi mums, two nannies and a son and daughter apiece. On the bus to the hotel the mums were ecstatic. None of the above had seen the ocean before and typical of Delhi-wallas, it was making them a bit giddy. Loud phrases floated past, ‘leave the kids’, ‘should abandon husbands more often’, ‘go out for a drink’, ‘Driver where is Tito’s?’ When we reached, a loud banner fluttered a welcome to a music channel’s veejay hunt. The permanent roommate and I exchanged looks of horror. The Delhi mums went high pitched with glee. And that’s when I first noticed one of their little girls’. Eight years old and judging her mum with every furrow her little eyebrows could muster. A picture of her x-chromosome donor, she watched her like a hawk. It was probably the first time she’d seen her mum act like she’d ever had a life — she didn’t like it one bit. I wonder what she’d have said if I told her she had every chance of growing up to be just like her. Some colourful North Indian expletives I’d imagine. Give her 20 years. I’m guessing she’ll think it’s pretty much the best she could be. With a little luck and selective recounting of embarrassing stories, Baby A may eventually think so too

Feet

These days I watch the feet. 
Of women… 















Not just the texture, the varnish, the larger second toe (sure sign of a hen-pecked husband they say). Not the style of footwear, though that can be telling…

The way the shoe is worn, the degree to which it is, the weft of the laces, the wrinkles in the leather - you can tell if she walks or she drives, if she runs and she trips, if she carries her own children and shopping. You can tell whether anyone every massages her soles - the skilled hands of a beautician or the awkwardly firm and gentle ones of a husband or lover. There are the feet of lonely women, well pampered and glistening some, peeling and scuffed others. There are the feet of busy women, usually encased in sensible shoes. There are the feet of vain women, delicately painted toes peeking out of impractical decorations with fancy tags.

There are the feet of my aunt; well into her sixties, her husband a few years ahead of her. He gave up his religion to marry her, a stanch, family-oriented Catholic. He’s had his demons, she’s worn her martyrdom. Three children, several grandchildren and a lifetime later, theirs’ is an uneasy but loving truce. But, she says, giggling in a way belying her open heart surgery scars, ‘He first noticed my feet.’ And last week, after a rude fight, he bent his tall, creaking frame and kissed my aunt’s toes in reparation.

My mother’s feet are the most beautiful. Structurally perfect, soft, evenly blended the colours of peaches, milk and honey. The nails on the toes are rounded, slightly elongated squares, the arch is clear and high and strong and bridges the fat ball and the rounded heel. My mother has been lucky enough to always have had a car at her disposal. She wears good shoes and keeps a clean floor. But even though they have borne the weight of six children, her cherubic feet are a gift of ancestry. Her family were rich, educated, landowners. No doubt a great-great-grandmother ran in the soft soil of just ploughed fields with the same perfect arches or climbed mango trees in her mother’s grove clinging with the same perfect toes.

My daughter has inherited some of the structural beauty of her maternal grandmother’s feet, the arch, the heel, the colouring. But her toenails are the same hilarious shape as my sister’s... wide, as if meant to work in tandem with tiny-movie projectors. ‘Television toes’ we’ve always called them.

Outside my little girl’s school, the mothers wait for their children. The gate is opaque except for six inches off the ground where a grill allows the monsoon water easy passage. In that first harrowing week of sending my 3 year old into the real world without me, I would stand outside, earlier than all the other mothers, waiting for her to be released from the unknown, listening for her voice amongst the other toddlers. After four days of fears of abandonment (hers) and fears of her falling faint with crying (mine), I thought I heard her laugh. I listened carefully… there it was, my little girl’s voice and then she said to her teacher, ‘Look, look, I can see my mama’s feet. Those are my mama’s feet! She’s come to take me home.’

Of course I cried. But I also did a little funny foot dance to let her know that I had heard her.

The last time I watched television, the camera lingered, in closing, on the departing feet of a young woman, in her late twenties. The backs of her shoes arched inward slightly to accommodate the sway of her young woman hips (though the camera was focussed way below those). Her trousers and soles seemed sensible, but their no-nonsense belonged to the character, not the actress. Her feet and her stride, attached like a shadow, snitched on her true personality, giving her away.

The feet of unencumbered women, of women celebrated for their beauty, of women who are pursued – these women have well cared for feet. And they watch them as they walk in their delicate shoes, watch for the curve in the road that could unsettle them, or the unwieldy carpet fold that could catch their heel.

But the feet of women caring for children; some chapped, some bruised, some cheaply shod, there is a grace that comes from guiding another pair or two beside them. They stumble so the little pairs can catch up, they walk through the puddles because they’re dragged in… and when their hips sway, they sway with the weight of a pair of young legs wrapped around them, never looking down, one eye on the road, one eye on the faces of the children, smiling. Because they know; they have the strongest feet in the world.