Simulacrum

In Burnt Sugar, Tishani Doshi writes, “reality is co-authored.” What she means is, both remembering and forgetting are a reimagination of memory. If memory is unreliable, how could I argue that it wasn’t greed but hunger that made me gobble food faster than it took Ma to pee in a public urinal? Golconda Fort, Hyderabad, 2008 — Deuta went missing for ten minutes when we caught the bus back to Secunderabad. I waited in a pool of unfamiliar accents for them to come back, stalling the driver, trying to fit as many pieces of jackfruit chips as possible in my ten-year-old mouth.

When they came back, I expected praise. A pat on the back for single-handedly handling an entire tourist bus’s dissatisfaction. Instead, they showered me with scorn. Embarrassment. A scarf that I used as a makeshift hijab because my tears wouldn’t stop falling. I argue that children always remember punishment/ being called a sloth/ absence of affection.

My Co-star app’s homepage tells me I am not a tomb. Why do I retract into myself each time I die at the hands of my mother? When we walked past Nariman Point months after Ajmal Kasab blew the buildings apart, I found myself wishing I was stuck in a room with him, his gun at my throat, begging him to take me before everyone else. So many nights I closed my door and put a wooden chair against its broken lock, as I looked for the longest cloth to wrap around my neck. What is it about this version of reality? It exists nowhere outside my memory.

My gynecologist is worried about my uterus. I forget to take progestin for six hours and red dots start appearing on my underwear. “Your body is asking you for help,” she says. I know what is wrong, I have been decaying for years underneath. She talks to me about the dangers that come with the thickness of my endometrium. I have known this since 8th grade. It’s been eleven years and I am still failing. My insulin levels are high, and I am ashamed of the darkness I carry on my skin. It wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t eat cheesecake every day, Ma says on the phone, ten and a half hours ahead of me.

I won’t lie. I have imagined her dead several times. Every time she caught me mixing water in the Frooti bottle, every time I licked the chocolate covering off the Choco Bar and lied that it came in a faulty packaging, every time I ate the last slice of Black Forest pastry and pretended she forgot serving it to guests last week. I attempt to rewrite memory, but she isn’t tricked. She remembers more than I do.

In my Human Rights class, we talk about the rights of non-human entities. Bethany, one of my classmates, says that alligators or crocodiles, she can’t remember which, would eat anything that looks like food. “Although typically, they don’t attack humans,” she adds after a brief pause. Our professor smiles and reassures us – humans are smart enough to stay away from Type A predators. How does a child stay away from her mother?

If animals do not have the language of humans and their core memory is fabricated by us, does that mean even the most well-loved pets are enslaved? When an infant cannot yet speak her mother tongue, we mistake her pain for frolic. When I was five months and some days old, I cried for hours and hours. She tried feeding me, rocking me to sleep, taking me on a walk, distracting me with plastic toys. Nothing worked. Worried, she took me to the doctor. He laughed and asked her to ignore me — sometimes the child just wants attention. She has looked the other way ever since. I am still hungry.

That incident, like many others, is not my memory, but hers. A version of episodic truth she constantly co-authors into mine. Co-Star’s daily horoscope asks me, “Are you courting sadness?” And not, “Why are you courting sadness?” I want to deny it, but I have never known otherwise. What do we owe ourselves besides effervescence? I think of the news clip where they showed dogs being tied with thick ropes, hidden at the back of trucks and trafficked into Nagaland. I think of how language fails them. I think of my smudged kajal and puffy eyes, feet dragging to the backseat of our Ford Figo as Ma decked up in her royal-blue Mekhela Sador for a relative’s wedding. Don’t sulk in the photographs, I am reprimanded on our way to the banquet hall. I imagine the dogs smiling when the cameras flash in their faces.

For my mother, aphorisms are the absolute truth. I am a piece of coal, and no milk can wash the dirt off me. Pigs, when put under a high amount of stress, display higher levels of cortisol. It is a sign that they know their fate – slaughter is approaching. Their skin starts discolouring, muscles tremor and the heat of the body keeps elevating. When my parents found out that I asked my 1st grade best friend to do my Handwriting homework for me, I had to hide under my father’s study table to escape the wrath of the wooden ruler. To delay few seconds of torture surpassed every treatment of kindness that followed it.

When Ma was in her youth, a python kissed her feet. She was spared by its venom because of her goodness. Honesty is her piety, and I am everything but. I must remind you that memory is altered by its authors continuously. It is common practice to cook crabs alive. When I see a packet of crab crackers at the Asian supermarket in Knoxville or order California Roll at Uptown Escape, I do not imagine the fear in its eyes as we drown it in a blaze. We only remember their taste. Our memory erases theirs.

Her memory erases mine.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Salamander, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, South Dakota Review, Passengers Journal, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is a Poetry Reader at Grist. A Brooklyn Poets '22 Fellow and recipient of the 2023 Spring Fellowship from Sundress Academy for the Arts, she co-founded Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Instagram: @shlaghab Twitter: @shlaghaborah