Field notes on replying to your mother’s withheld concern about your new jean jacket in the language of small, sewn memories

by Abhilipsa Sahoo

Yes, Ma, I embroidered the back of it. No, not because I missed the peeling cement flakes of your room, not because I agitated you on the phone again with my voice returning to me like a tide dragged under by equal parts disorientation and despair. I just couldn’t sleep last night, Ma. Like all the nights preceding it and the rest that are yet to stain my under-eyes with the ombre of their unhurried drift toward a fresh spill of daylight. Yes, I, too, wanted to spill myself into someone—no, not anyone here, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. So I opened the tin cookie box—you know, the one disguised as a bequest for three generations. Yes, the one with the needlework kit you handed me the last time I visited. I held it real close, Ma, as if it could contain the tears bubbling at the kohl-rimmed shore of my eyes. I was only trying to catch a glimpse of your face, even half the divinity of it stored in my tired brain. You carved my heart out of yours, Ma—yes, you even taught me how to outline it, to fill the inside with the hues of night-sky blues and citrusy-pinks of the dawn. Remember the plane you thought was just a cluster of blinking stars? Yes, that one—eight hours later it carried me away, tucked into a new life on an opposite coast that keeps tiptoeing surreptitiously, just beyond your reach. No, Ma, I haven’t forgotten you, only got hooked on a new-found obsession that tops yearning homemade meals and going back to sleep inside a pit of misplaced hunger. When strange faces claimed me like a discount code that’s already expired, I bent over the denim anyway, stitching memories jagged as this borrowed skyline. I remembered the chilly winters by our window grills—the ones you polished with vinegar and newspaper on mango-scented Sundays, stray prayers floating in from the neighbor’s broken tape recorder. I stitched the balcony rail that cradled your lemon seeds, the pink plastic bucket with its crack trailing water toward the hibiscus. I threaded the shadow of your thumb pressing atta dough, as if that gesture alone could hold a household together. Yes, Ma, I even remembered your hatred for roses—how it stained me the way cheap perfume clings to a blouse. The closest thing you ever held was a cabbage, so I stitched a cabbage instead: leaf by leaf. Every decorated curl was a quiet refusal to bloom. The lizard in the ceiling corner, the temple bell trembling under your devotion, the moths haunting our tubelight every June—they’re all here now, somehow, non-consensually sewn into my jacket. Last night, Ma, I performed our delicate missing without protest, without prayer for erasure. No, I didn’t falter because I stopped loving you. Yes, I faltered because love keeps pricking—like a performer who falls through the trapdoors, again and again, and keeps on performing, hoping one day we’ll stop speaking in voicemails and simply answer each other’s calls.

Abhilipsa Sahoo is one of the 100 commended poets for Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2019, and a Best of The Net nominee. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Perverse, JAKE, Bending Genres, Redivider, and elsewhere. She’s a software engineer based in Bengaluru, India.

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