By Debabrata Sahoo
REASONS TO REMAIN
OR
DEB, WHY DID YOU LIVE?
Because the rain came down and washed away my sadness.
Because my sadness was flimsy, even if the cause of my sadness wasn't.
Because when I realized that, I became doubly sad, and even that wasn't enough.
Because years can pass by like this—waiting in the antechamber of death.
A female primate grieves by carrying the corpse of her child for weeks and sometimes even hitting it with a stick, I once read in a book titled Every Creature Has A Story.
For years I have carried this body with me.
I have manhandled it.
I have grieved for it.
And I have no place to put it down.
Because home is where you go to die, and I didn’t want to make a mess under a borrowed roof.
Because the man who’d once raped me had called me beautiful, and I didn’t want to ruin a beautiful body (of water).
Because in a book on the aesthetics of ruins, I once read: a ruin can be beautiful even if it is not functional.
When I read it, I thought: like my mother.
I thought: like my poem.
I thought: If I had once lived inside her body, could I now live inside a poem?
Because I remembered the word stanza means room in Italian.
Because I believed literature could be a morally acceptable substitute for life.
Because I believed I could, by walking the tightrope of language and logic, change even the material conditions of my life.
Because I didn’t want to leave my mother a note written in a language she couldn’t read or write.
Because I was an only child.
I wanted to wait at least until my mother died.
Because when my mother died, I couldn’t decide if I was waiting for her to die so that I could kill myself, or if I was waiting for her to die so that I could, finally, start my life.
Because the dead can make room for you, the way you make room for them on a mantelpiece.
Like how my mother, when I was a child, wanted me to die and leave her alone.
Like how I sat in front of the pyre and wondered for hours: Is loneliness pain? Or is pain the presence of other people?
Because every day I have lived in pain, including those days I have wanted not to, is a working demonstration of the fact that, contrary to what I had once sincerely believed, my life has at least up until this point not been unbearable.
Which is to say: I haven’t made a choice to live. I have merely overestimated my pain, this unbearable-bearable pain, which passes through me like wind through wind chimes.
For what am I, when I am not in pain?
What shall be left for me—left of me—if I am robbed of my pain?
I am in pain, therefore I am.
Like Sisyphus.
Like Naranath Branthan, but the West only knows itself.
Because, some day, I too want to go to the West.
Not to earn its riches or breathe its clean air, but to see the fall.
To see how those lobe-shaped leaves soften the ground.
To see how a thing can be dead and beautiful.
Like a dream.
Even if it is American.
I know how all this sounds, but please hear me out: no reason is ridiculous if it keeps you going.
~~~The End
Notes
Every Creature Has A Story is the title of a non-fiction book by Janaki Lenin.
The quote "home is where you go to die" is taken from the internet.
Stanza: from Italian, meaning standing place or room.
Sisyphus: A character from Greek mythology.
Naranath Branthan: a character in Malayali folklore who, like Sisyphus, rolls a boulder up and down the hill.