It is the second national lockdown. I have a precious hour to myself where I am not cooking, cleaning, laundering or homeschooling. I have decided that given I cannot travel geographically on Earth, that I will explore cosmic travel again. I play a cosmic travel soundtrack that I randomly find on youtube. I start my meditation and again, I explore a new past life regression. Apart from this time, unbeknown to me, it is a parallel universe exploration.
I am a four year old Indian girl. My hair is brown, not as dark as you would perhaps expect and straggly. I manage to get away with washing it infrequently and I do not have the luxury of conditioner, so it is naturally matted, further adding to its straggly look. I also manage to brush it infrequently. Once a week or thereabouts, my mother insists on giving it a good brush. I usually run around the chair a few times, delaying the inevitable. Its painful. All the tugging hurts and I’m required to sit still, ‘on my bottom’ which she reminds me repeatedly, as I shuffle incessantly on the hard wooden chair.
I live with my mother and father in a small Indian village. We have a small shack that combined is 3 rooms. A bedroom, a kitchen and a room that has a bucket and a hole in the ground, that is our loo. I suppose it could be called a bathroom. My father comes home, stressed from work, and every night, I curl myself up into a tiny ball on my patchwork covered mattress and hear the sound of him trying to rape my mother. Sometimes she manages to push him off her and other times she is less successful. I am still being breastfed. She continues to feed me until I’m six years old, when her milk dries up. I think we both enjoy the comfort of each other, the warmth of each other’s skin.
A few more years pass and my father’s work becomes more stressful. My mother grows in strength, possibly in unison with my growing in age. As a result, she is able to ward off my father’s advances and so instead, he starts drinking. This is quickly followed with also fucking the local village barmaid. Eventually my father rarely comes home. I am a teenager now and share the bed with my mother. She is a quiet lady, her dignity knocked by her drunken, philandering husband who she has grown to despise. His absence is a joy as it allows her a freedom to feel safe and lessens her anxious disposition.
At school, the local village boys all try to have their way with me. I used to dread the walk home but I couldn’t afford the bus. Some of the way I would run as fast as I could, stretching out my long limbs in the hope I’d get home faster. They would often wait for me, hiding down the grassy banks but i became fierce. My home life had prepared me well to fend off these attempts. I learnt to pierce through their eyes with my blazing black pupils, deadly and razor sharp, almost causing their eyes to bleed. And I gnashed wildly with my teeth and in those moments, I would turn from beauty to beast. They soon learnt I was too wild to be harnessed and left me alone.
As life passed by, I became a school teacher, still living at home, sharing the bed with my mother and generally content. At work, one of the teachers who had a soft gentle face, would often look at me for prolonged periods of time. I could feel his eyes gazing at me, in awe. As I came to know of him, he was always very polite and well mannered. Joe, as he was known, would frequently share large grins with me and it was hard not to grin back. After a few weeks of these grin offs, he eventually plucked up the courage to ask me out for a walk and a tea. I obliged and before I knew it, it became a regular weekly outing. With time, I then invited him over for supper to meet my mother. She was so excited and spent the whole day in the kitchen, cooking, preparing wonderful dahl dishes to impress my new suitor. My father was not really a part of my life. He continues to drink heavily and every now and then, I would see him and wave from afar. He would squint back at me, wondering how he knew me. He was such an embarrassment to me but i was also relieved that he had found someone in the bar lady who was equally inclined and so he got his needs meet and left my mother alone.
Joe became less able to resist me. We had started to walk hand in hand on our weekly walks, when we knew there would be no school children around. And then at school, at break times in the corridors, he would slyly siddle up to me and give my hand a soft squeeze. This then progressed to queueing up behind me, and being especially close so that his groin was pressing into my back body and I could feel his gentle breath on the back of my neck, just enough to make wisps of my hair sway gently.
One exceptional day, the bell rang for break time, and as per usual, we all milled into the corridors. I saw Joe, springing out from behind his classroom door and he ran up to me with complete excitement, arched eyebrows and wide eyes with his famously large grin. He grabbed my hand and quickly pulled me into the staff loo.
‘Quick, follow me’, he said.
As the door slammed shut behind us, he told me he couldn’t wait. He proceeded to kiss me urgently, as though he were devouring my face, swallowing up huge areas of my skin and taking my entire mouth into his, then sucking my chin. This urgency had come about from waiting for so long, for getting to know me deeply, and wanting what he saw and knew me to be. He ran his wet tongue down my neck, splashing saliva as he went, till he reached the top of my breasts. There he hurriedly undid my top buttons, and with both hands he pulled out both my breasts. He kissed my nipples, cupping my breast as they stood forward; firm and frigid. I slowly ran my hands up his groin and felt his hard, erect penis, pushing against his trousers, looking to escape. I felt scared. This was too much. I was at work. What if a fellow teacher tries to use this loo? I ran my hands up his waist, lifted his face away from my breasts and kissed him back.
‘Joe, it can’t be like this. Not at school.’
‘Okay, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t help myself.’ He paused as he did up the buttons on my shirt and checked his watch. He took my face in his hands, kissing my lips as though this might not happen again but at the same time, with a comfort, as though we’ve done this many times before. ‘We can get out before second bell. You go first.’ He pulled the door open ajar and glanced both ways before nodding his head for me to go. Then a few minutes later he also slipped out and we were back in the melee of school corridor life.
Every Friday Joe would come and have dinner with my mother. She thought Joe was wonderful and would save her best saris for his visits. He would always show up with a small gift for her; flowers he picked on his walk over to us, a freshly baked loaf of bread or japatis baked by his mother.
One day we agreed to go and wash our clothes in the river together. When we met up, I was carrying a small basket with my clothes on my head. Joe had his in a plastic laundry bag. We leisurely walked through the village, chatting and as we got to the woods just before the river, Joe reaches for my hand and gently pulls me around to face him. He has an enormous grin on his face and his doe eyes are wide and alive. In that instance, he drops to one knee and the laundry bag falls to the ground next to him. He looks at me intently, grinning.
‘Will you marry me?’
He looks like a young schoolboy down there, with such joy on his face as though he already knows my answer is going to be yes.
‘Why, Mr Joey, I would love to spend the rest of my life with you, you delicious human being’.
As he stands up, he kisses me forcefully and I have to use both my arms to keep the basket on my head. We laugh as I lose my footing slightly. When I tell my mother, she cries. She is so excited, she can’t stop fussing around me and talks incessantly about what she will do with my hair and the sari she will make me. I realise how painful it was for her to have married my father and for it to have turned out so appallingly for her. I think she feels she is getting a second chance at marriage by living vicariously through me.
The next weeks pass by peacefully and in the next few months, we are married. Joe has picked my flowers for me and my mother has made my sari, adding sequins from other saris and fabrics she has been collecting. It’s beautiful. It is a small gathering, my mother, Joe’s parents and his sister. The village mayor informs me that my father has passed. He drank himself into a coma and never came out. Died in hospital in his bed. Apparently his legs were covered in sores and he’d lost vision in his left eye.
After our wedding, life continued in much the same vain. We both continued to work at the school, happily married. I moved in with his parents and once a week i would go and sleep with my mother to keep her company. A year later I was pregnant and had a little girl. Two years later I was pregnant with a little boy. Between my mother and Joe’s mother, our kids were well looked after, whilst we both worked. When my little girl turned eight, my mother passed. When my daughter turned 18, I passed. I left the Earth peacefully. I was in Joe’s arms and he was stroking my hair, I closed my eyes and left. I’d been plagued with a few illnesses that took their toll so I was grateful for this peaceful passing.
I watched over Joe and would often weep as our children diligently took such great care of him, into his old age. My daughter would walk along the dusty roads to our house to comb his hair and make him a good hot meal and my son would cycle from his work and make sure he had enough chopped firewood and build him a roaring fire. Joe hung around a good 10 years more and then had a heart attack. Our son found him on the kitchen floor. We were buried next to each other and close to my mother in the same cemetery. They planted an oak tree above each of our coffins and the trees grew so closely entwined that even to the naked eye, it looked like one tree. The trees knew.
The message from my higher Self comes through thick and fast. Old people do matter and all the work and devotion that you put into this Earth, does not mean that old age is not worth living. Quite the contrary. How is it possible in my own mind I had the arrogance to not see that they matter so, in equal proportions. Why do we as a society not value the being but are so output focused?
And the second message, was let love in. Your partner is not your father. Trust in love, trust in good men and allow yourself to enjoy the mundane passing of life together without drama or spectacle. It is just as valuable.
