I loved her, she was my mother, but I frequently wished she wasn’t. When I was a kid, I would wish the cleaning woman was my mother. She was kind to me. It was different for Adil, she spoilt him and considered his mere existence a tribute to the perfection and greatness of God. It was like she’d sublimated the sense of inferiority that was her entitlement in a patriarchal culture in a sort of giddy worship of the male she’d given birth to. Her worth, her self, her daughter, none of it mattered next to the near flawless (to presume utter flawlessness would be to blaspheme of course) male being that had sprung from her loins. It was that which defined her. It was that which sustained her. I, on the other hand, was a perpetual work in progress, in my mother’s eyes; a gaudy, ungainly canvas badly in need of some masterstrokes. Was her disdain for me a manifestation of her self image? Her shaky mental state? Did her phobias and obsessions merit a deeper examination? For a long time I simply thought of her as odd.
