On the Ballad of Being
Writing
Kerina Majeulla
I forgot Mother’s voice in the noise that my years kept making, but I remember the clang of her wedlock chain; thaali, in Tamil. She used to have safety pins clinging around the dove pendant of it. After full meals, she would wistfully take a pin out, usually staring into the vast nothing and pick on the food between her teeth; it was horrifyingly human to watch her do that. The sound of her thaali used to make the same kind of noise that reformed altar bells, a little in waddling and a lot in passing. I used to recognise her movements, twisting and turning in bed, when something had gripped onto it; I knew her being with that sound. It was alongside her presence.
A few years before she passed, she had changed her old thaali and reconstructed it into a new one. When she came home with the new one, it did not occur to her that the new one lacked a hook that could help her manually screw it around her neck. She popped her tongue out in solemn dailiness and went back to the jeweller. Once melted and sealed tightly around her neck, she would not be able to remove it ever. But before they moved her from the ice box to her coffin, my uncle cut out the thaali with the same pair of pliers I used to rip out my braces at home. The grit of that plier gripping over her chain sounded like blasphemy, which kept rapping around the room. I make a fist every time I think about that gnashing noise. My mind finds itself flimsy of life and its perimeters when I think about her thaali and the jazz of it. I choke when I hear something similar. The clang of my mother’s thaali and the roar of my father’s bike were the two notes my childhood had faded into - her sound, delicate and ringing, his, guttural and unrestrained. My father’s bike never sounded like a machine to me; it sounded like him and carried a rhythm so reverently bound to his body that I couldn’t tell where he ended and the bike began.
Father used to have a bike that would cough out smoke on his behalf; it rumbled like someone let their dogs run around. We used to know he was coming home, even from a mile away. He drove it up to its full capacity until the thunder of its motor wore out; one more heavy rain would have torn it down. Even when he got a new vehicle, he still kept the bike on and clutched the brakes. He stood next to it, with the weight of his self wrung around his throat. The bike had a roar to itself; when about to kickstart it let out a soft ticking sound that startled the faint of heart, when about to duck into a brake it compelled into a bazaar of bizarre choking charades. This bike used to sound like classroom chatter, dubbed a fish market. Dad used to say that when I was a baby, I would still bravely sleep well with the bike’s ratchet around. It was his way of imposing his cyclic homage of the bike on me. Now, with his new vehicle, we find out he is coming home with two honks, sometimes he follows up with a third honk when he aggressively wants to give notice.
Catty has this thud under her feet when she walks. She walks like she is convincing herself that she is a ghost with very legit footsteps. Her heels would land on the floor with so much of her wobbly being, and would then be followed by the chaffing of her nightgown. This makes my teeth cold and sends circuits of sharp stings to my eyebrows. I thug this out for her; the way her shadows pry behind her when she thumps a trail from one room to another, the way her already small figure commemorates less of herself as she stomps away with the furtherance of her routine, but I would still be able to hear the floor snatching onto her heels like gnawing claws that want to be humble hands. The sound doesn't forget; it lingers like breath on a mirror.
The echo of one carries into the pause of the other. Jess is a 10 year old version of 50 year old Catty.Jess used to oink like Peppa Pig when she was even smaller. She also used to run into walls and pine for help. Now she heaves a thoroughly washed-out sigh after all her sentences. She gets me to wonder if the sighs belong to her. Her sighs sound like being put to bed. What world politics her pencil-box drama carries is between her and her God. She’s perfected the slow exhale of shrewd disappointment; over dinner, socks, school rules, and even-numbered yoga class days. A sigh that leaves too easily, like a balloon forgotten in a child’s loose grip. There are no cheap seats at the back for her sighs.
I hold my breath a little when I’m around them, to recognise the music of them and to love them a little louder. The score of the being haunts me, miles away from home. I miss even the noise they made to fill the room. There’s no such thing as quiet when memory is fluent in sound; My memory aches for my mother tongue. When I hear foreign words, I sift through them like a thief righteously, hunting for phonemes from my mother tongue that sang me into being. I have never stopped hearing voices, beats, monologues, and sounds in my head, even when I have no thoughts. I carry around my tipsy phone with voice notes from people with names that take in pronunciation, the swirling of tongues, and the bending of ears. Silence, to me, is only ever the static between moving memos. In looping and living, wringing and ringing, these jingles come and take me out of exile. They knock the wind out of me. I play the rest of my life by ear. It's the music of the being that gets us to skip a step when we walk.
Concept Note
There is this one lyric from one of Berlioz's housejazz songs that says, "Jazz is for ordinary people, jazz is ordinary people", a line I take salvation from when I have the chest for it, when the room is quiet enough to let something small be said. I have known my family like this. Their noise finds the lighthouse in me. It tingles the love I have known, it thrills the life out of me. That's the pulse I was nodding at. That people are still singing while fisting life, that there is a pep to our step, a beat to defeat. Even our quiet needs to be held.
This piece comes from being utterly in love with my family. It comes out of memory, autobiographical, the private kind, the kind lodged in sound. It is on the veneration of the noise that stays when the vision moves on. It told me where I was, who I belonged to, what was ending, and what was beginning. I keep them in writing because memory is fickle, because silence makes thieves of us. To be taken away by someone’s entire being, so wholly, so fatally, that even the noise their body makes makes you want to ruin your entire life and follow it anywhere. It is the recklessness of devotion, the way sound can anchor you to gamble with grief and life all at once. I hope when you read this, you stretch and fetch your voice. I hope you feel it rinse the base of your neck. I hope you read it like you’re saying it for someone you don't allow yourself to miss.
Artist Bio
Born and raised in Tuticorin, Kerina lives and loves it in Bangalore. Besides reading, writing, and word-searching during her corporate office hours, she chases stories, different and alike. She shares a tattoo with Lana Del Rey and hopes to run into her twin someday. She journals on the margins of her crosswords and ends lunch with a cube of quiet cheese. Find her fist for writing at www.knucklesores.wordpress.com.