Altar

I feel her eyes in everything - in the gentle sway of the blinds when I read at night, in the pesky flickering lamp, in the full, beaming moon.

Sometimes my mom feels like she is floating 3 billion miles away - shooting around as fractals of light, amongst deities and martyrs and the forever scorned. She’s the brightest shade of silver in the great cosmic soup, just like she used to be the most beautiful girl in the room. She can fly from Portugal to Tahiti to Mumbai to the sun in seconds. She can be summoned with one concentrated breath or one loving thought. I feel her eyes in everything - in the gentle sway of the blinds when I read at night, in the pesky flickering lamp, in the full, beaming moon. I not only think she can see me, I think she can become me too.

I remember one moment, weeks after she had passed. I was in the Mulshi Hills in India in the thick of the monsoon. I was full of grief, but full of whimsy too. I was at a treatment center for the depressed, the calorie counting, the rich and bored, the damned. And like always, I had to hide away.

In the afternoons, when the ladies took to their massages, and the men took to their personal training - I’d run to the little patch of garden at the far end of the property, the one with the little mud mandir for the treatment center staff. Headphones blasting “Taal” and “Laagan”, I’d run around the garden in the steaming, relentless rain - letting every crevice of my body be baptized and renewed by this ancestral water. Letting the monsoon hide my tears .. undulating between feeling like a film star and a heartbreak hotel.

And I’d make my way up to the little mud mandir, and touch my fingertips to the plastic rainbow garland on the door, and surrender myself to the cold cement floor. Clothes soaked, shivering and newly motherless. I’d sob to Ganesh - little plastic gold figurines on the altar, surrounded by smoke, fruit and ashes - praying to a god that’s not even mine.

I’d find you there - everytime. You’d flicker the bulbs, send a warm gust thru the crack of the door, you’d twinkle the bells outside with gentle wind. I’d let myself be full of tears and full of revelation. It was raw grief, but also raw magic. You were so present with me - there was no distance between where I ended and you began. You are my mother, the sky, the wind, the goddess on the mantle. You’d seep into my body and breath, and when I’d turn to gaze to the majestic, rain-stricken hills - it was you taking in the view and not I.

I feel all my dreams now, live with your eyes also behind them, Mama. You still have so much to taste, hear, experience here on Earth; we both know this. And I’ll gladly let you take over this body - to remind me of the sweetness of what it means to be still alive, to be the survived. That it’s not all ache after loss; that we can be converged together in magic. Watching this life together, side by side.