I don’t always find it easy to write. Words wouldn’t come, or if they do, they are not the right words. Sometimes a long walk helps, but other times I find myself miles from home with blisters but no brilliant conceit. At that point, I have to resort to writing exercises, such as “Write a story from your mother’s point of view.” or “Write one sentence of exactly a hundred words.”
When I was 12, and my mother was 42, my friend said to me, “Your mother is so beautiful.” My mother? Beautiful? I looked, but I couldn’t see it. I was the beautiful one, and my mother was just my mother. Though she was honest in every other way, my mother had led me to believe that I was probably the most exquisite, clever and talented child in the whole world. If I couldn’t make it on to the school baseball team, it was only because baseball was a very silly game.
When I was 15, I discovered that my mother had lied to me — I was quite unexceptional. This was a painful realisation, and I took my anger out on her. She used to say, “Just wait till you have kids. Then you’ll understand.” That turned out to be true. Though I didn’t intend to lie to my boys, I couldn’t help giving them the impression that they were geniuses, their drawings second only to the young Picasso’s.
I slowly began to be able to take my mother’s point of view as I reached her age: when I was 36, I could appreciate her courage at 36, leaving Kerala for a life of Canadian winters; when I was 42, I saw her in me and she was indeed beautiful. By the time I became interested in her childhood I couldn’t ask her about it. I know only a few stories.
It seems that her mother had an elephant brought to their compound in Mavelikira. My mother was made to get on her hands and knees and crawl under the great beast, all around and between the four legs in figure eights. This was considered to be a character-building exercise, to ensure that my mother grew up to be courageous and determined, in the face of whatever circumstances she encountered in life.
The last summer we spent together, my mother told me of her plan to walk across Canada. “I want to prove that a 65-year-old woman can accomplish whatever she sets out to do.” Twenty-one years after her death, I’m a very different person, but I look just like her.
A sentence of a hundred words (like Lao Tzu’s famous journey of a thousand miles that starts with just one step) starts with one word; though that first word can be almost any word, and the second word almost any other word, you find, with each successive choice you make, the possibilities narrow. But even if the first word is ‘A’ and the second word is ‘sentence’, your very own sentence of a hundred words, (like the journey, a metaphor for life) will not end exactly as this one has ended here, with a period after “99, 100”.
Try it. It’s a good exercise.