wounds

Father died yesterday.It was a slow,yet painful death.He had been suffering for the last five years or so.Or was it seven?

Mary wondered.Time,an ever confusing chain of significantly insignificant days and nights indeed.Forgetfulness always pervades its way into routines,and makes you question your own sanity at the end.No,Father had been sick ever since she could remember.It didn't matter how long since.All that mattered was that she wouldn't have to look after him anymore.She wouldn't have to spend her days losing track of time anymore,tiresome and lonely in that dark room that smelt of urine invariably.

It was the morning of the funeral.The sky looked bright, and the sunlight weaved abstract shadows on the car porch.They had put up the pavilion last night.Yet sunlight still seeped in through its thin fabric,like an intruder walking past a sleeping dog in the darkness.Mary stood at the verandah, gazing at all the arrangements that had been made.She wore a black kurta, that clung onto her petite frame with a sense of morbidity.Mary remembered all of a sudden that Mother still hadn't woken up.She had cried to sleep last night near the coffin refrigerator,in which Father lay still.Mother loved him.She could,afterall.Mother never knew the monster that Father really was."Twenty years ago,when I had found out that that I was pregnant with you,I wished everyday while waiting to hold you in my arms that you'd arrive looking like him,so that loving you would feel like loving him all over again", Mother had told her once.Imagine loving someone for something they aren't, your whole life.To be blissfully unaware of who someone you believe you know everything about really are: as much as it sounded like a privilege to Mary,the thought of it had a tint of pain to it that made her flinch.Maybe deception is what love is all about; to let yourself be oblivious to the flaws and masks of your loved ones.

The shriek of a car loaded with tarpaulin sheets honking at the gate shook her off those thoughts,and Mary went inside,to wake up Mother.It was nine already,and there was a plethora of things to be done.Everytime she walked past her dead Father,her eyes couldn't bear to look down at his cold,shrunken face.Mary knew that to stare at her father's corpse meant nothing but to simply stare at her own dead soul.He had killed her for the first time when she was seven.She didn't know what was being done to her.Across the years,he kept on killing her again and again,until one day,when she was sixteen,she fought back.She knew by then what the wounds meant.He never touched her again.But the wounds never went away.They bred and bred,all over her, festering and cutting through her body, transcending into one huge blob of blood and pain constantly pushing its way across her heart,making her choke and stutter at the sight of him.Yet she forced herself to ignore the nausea that bloated on the tip of her tongue, everytime she tended to him after he fell sick.She never told Mother.She didn't feel the need to either anymore.She knew he was succumbing to the inevitable silence of death,like a dying tortoise unhurriedly making its way to the vastness of the ocean for one last swim,all these years.There is and was no better repentance than death.

It was ten,and the church choir had arrived.The prayers were to begin.She looked at the figure of Mother Mary, iridescently glowing under the yellow lamps.

Mary,the Virgin.

Mary, who was worshipped for being pure.

Mary,who carried the Son of God in her womb.

Mary who was never touched and made unholy.

She smiled at the holy sculpture,whom she was named after,whose heritage she carried, just like the thousand other women who had lived and died before her,bearing the cursed weight of womanhood on their shoulders, stained by man's sin.

Yet when the prayers began,they chanted :

"The Father,The Son,and The Holy Spirit,amen."