I am twenty-six, one month shy of my twenty-seventh birthday. I am neither old nor young. I am in that stage when the stiffness in one’s loins is relaxing, weaving the crochet of veins for the impending motherhood. Some days, I feel a heaviness in my breasts and a gentle stifling in my womb. The mother in me sometimes stirs softly, like a water spider on the sheet of a lake. She is so tiny, so rudimentary but even then asserting herself with the primordial force of the demiurge.

This morning I saw a girl, whose father used to be quite fond of me. He is dead now. I saw that the girl was weeping by herself in a corner of the meditation hall. I felt the movement in my womb, and the thick, viscous love—the colostrum of love—started flowing through my breasts. I went to that girl and held her in my arms. She drenched my robe with her tears. I was so full. I was crying too. Why are we born with so much capacity to love?

These loves I speak of; the love of the departed, of the blooming and of those to depart! Like I told you yesterday, sometimes I feel that my heart seems to cover the entire earth. I feel everyone’s love; everyone’s suffering like my own. A massive wave crashing at the shore! There is so much love in our hearts that has fermented, so many dreams prematurely aborted, such lofty feelings rationalised and made petty. I had asked you why we were born with such capacity to love?

You had told me, “You do know better with your ever moist eyes.”

But I don’t. I just feel the waves crashing against my heart. So violent, so alive!

What does alive mean? Is it not the kick of a child, that defenceless tiny being, in whom the life is expressing itself with such intensity? I feel the same kick in my womb when I think of you. I think when you love a man as a woman, you feel the love knotting in your genital, but when you love a man as a mother, you feel the knot in your breasts. It is as though love is asexualised. It is as though all heat has been sublimated and liquefied into the mother’s milk. Freud understood it right when he spoke of the Electra-complex or the Oedipus-complex. But that is one-way traffic. That is an inspiration. When inspiration becomes expiration, it is suddenly transformed by the fire of detachment, the fire of death. And when we breathe out, we are asserting our greatest love for life. We are accepting life in its all transience; we are accepting its terms of death, of separation, of sacrifice. That acceptance is the mother. That acceptance is the beginning and the persevering force of life.

It was a great pity that Freud could never become a mother. Or, his understanding of love wouldn’t have been so lopsided. Yes, there is sexual love. Yes, in that kick there must be some latent seeds of desire. But Freud reaches only that far. He knows, it seems, nothing of the liquefication of love in the mother’s breast. Hesse speaks of the Mother, the sad, all-encompassing mother from whom germinates everything and into whom everything shall perish. She is neither cruel nor not-cruel. She is. And the milk flows through her. And hence the life. And hence the death. I remember this mother very much when I think of you.

I pass by a brothel. The trinkets of broken glass bangles, a few gold-varnished earrings, are already giving away to rust in a dumpster outside the brothel. This is a house where no woman is allowed to become a mother. The beautiful little bonsais of desire! But what if some roots penetrate too deep?

We are tricked into believing that brothels are geographical units. I wish it were that simple. Some women are married into “not-brothels”. And yet they remain a bonsai. They make love; they become pregnant, they procreate and yet their faces never gleam with the afterglow of a mother, the radiance of the flower whose roots draw their nourishment from the seat of the netherworld. To become a mother means to plunge into the darkest abyss, the primordial murk and coax the seed to flower. To caress the bud with such enormous love that the seed finds the courage to bloom again. The mother is a bridge between these two worlds. The mother is the courage, the courage to face these both worlds.

Had love peered at me through different eyes, I wouldn’t have found courage to meet its eyes. But you have made a mother of me.

I don’t know what death is. Does it mean you are dead in this realm, and your higher self resurrects in some other world? Tolstoy had said, “Maybe this world is another world’s hell.” I am almost convinced.

These days my heart is as though liquefying. I cannot think. My heart is too full. It isn’t sadness. I don’t weep because I am sad. This morning I was lying down on a mattress, and slowly the sun rose from the east. I felt the gradual warming up of the earth. The leaves were breathing out warm moisture, and the windowpane was covered in vapours. I closed my eyes again. The sun climbed gently from my feet towards my thighs, my groin, my tummy, my breasts and then gleamed inside my eyes like warm jelly. And my heart just welled up. Just like that.

Loving you is like loving the setting sun. So radiant, so frail and yet so vigorous. The last beam of life quivering with such intensity that it breaks my heart to look at you. You told me yesterday that you don’t have any wish to go on living in this world for another hour, but you would live another year to see me. I shall live next year and the next and the next and the next. Perhaps I won’t. But suppose I will and you won’t be there to see me, to look at me, to look after me. You ask me why my eyes are always teary. I live with the apprehension of this separation. You are my closest window to death. Through you, death peers directly into my eyes.

I may write words after words but what can I ever say. The sun is setting. The horizon where life and death meet seems to be burning brightly. I sit here. I look at that brightness and feel the heaviness in my breasts again. I hope, when you will be gone the passage will be blissful. You must know that you were loved.

([email protected])