Amma’s Handbag

If there’s anything that she called her own, it was her handbag. She held on to it as if it were a baby: her baby. Yes, but the baby was as malnourished as we were; it was pale, torn and carried marks of many a lives: lived and died. I remember the day the bag flew from her hands and fell down with a soft thud when he hit her hard. Real hard. She too fell to the ground, just like her handbag –

I often wondered, how and why she never changed her handbag. It was a black handbag. Often, I felt as if it were a part of her body. An extension of her hand. Or a saree (she only had two) that she wore to work for the office every day. Once I asked her, “Mother, why don’t you buy a new handbag?” She laughed, patted my head, and I remember very well that it rained heavily on that day and I, drenched in her tears, shivered like a leaf on a cold winter night –

And later, after many years, when she came home from office, she used to lay on the sofa and used to keep her handbag on a small plastic table next to the sofa; she used to stretch her legs, and I, who used to sit beside her could hear the crackling sound of her joints; as if her body and bones were breaking out of tiredness. And then, she used to take her handbag, open it, put on her glasses and carefully used to pull out a packet of medicines; sometimes, unpaid bills used to come out of it instead of her medical prescription. She used to sigh, and outside the night smelled of hunger, of rain and pain –

The handbag was her personal space. It was a doll, her little doll. Perhaps a little doll that she used to decorate and play in her childhood. She kept that doll at her side while sleeping, often searching for it in her sleep. Of course, she never thought that it would become a hand to hold on and the only companion at this age –

And when someone searched it while she was fast asleep, she felt as if her personal space was breached; he would never understand that, her feeling, for he thought it was his right; a right to encroach everything that he thought was his own. She felt humiliated. She felt a dagger go through her heart. She felt, as if someone put herself on fire; alive. And, all this I could see in her silent face: it was like a moon clawed by the dark clouds on a cold, cold December night.

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If there’s anything, even now, that she could call her own, it was her handbag. A handbag that carried the scent of her blood; scent of her aged, old body; of wrinkles. Of bamboo trees and burnt leather. Or the wailing of a flute, perhaps. It was a little shack that she could relate to, a place and a hand she could hold on to when there was none to live for –

And, sometimes, or rather often, it becomes very difficult for this ‘writing’ to differentiate between a mother who is going to die, a house that is going to be torn down and an old hang bag that stays with this ‘writer’ like a wound that could never be healed, till he dies!

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image: Satya Biruduraju