My share and what it got me

"Update", read the email title when I peered at my phone through sleep soaked eyes at 5 am today. "I have deposited 90/- into your bank account" he had written. After two decades of a paper relationship of which there were some good years, maybe, and 23 years from the day of many smiles that I remember as my wedding day, I was getting the last piece of shared value that we had had together. An old bank account in Vasai, closed after many signatures and 180/- dollars divided by two, quite nicely. Hisaab.

I do not need a Pandora bead from my bracelet to reminded of this. I did not need anything, really. I am well, and I am happy. So after buying sambhar and dosa batter, I walked over purposefully to the shop that sold brass lambs and idols that I had seen countless times before. I wanted something solid and strengthening to commemorate the last string that tied that other life to who  I had been.

I searched the shelves even as I soaked in the characheristic fragance of agarbattis so reminiscent of a life left behind without really meaning to, it had just stayed there as I walked on maybe. Some idols were rough with jagged edges; others too large or too small. The crawling Krishna reminded me of the beloved one from my childhood that I had brought back in 2010. And then I saw her: hidden behind another idol. I asked to see her and there, each fold of her garments perfectly formed, each curve of her many arms, lifelike, she stood: a five inch Kali.

My nose tingles now with much emotion as I think of her standing tall on the slain demon at her feet, each arm raised in strength. She stands with her heel on his neck and to me that signified every fear I have had to face at the death of parents, at the societally sanctioned oppression from in-laws and the neglect of a relationship that just shriveled away, untended ad left me wondering what else, how much could one person do to sustain and revive it.

I see myself from 2013 waking up every day that winter through that summer into almost the next fall, counting ten blessings before my feet touched the ground. I think of how every sentence had to be read to decide that the children were taken care of, how I survived the quiet disappearance of friends at the imagined contagion invisible in the D word, how the the children and I held on to each other until the rapids were behind us. 

And I walked down that Naigaum street past the chawl and the garden, past the fabric shops into that lane where a Persian bakery makes Christmas cakes and a Nativity scence follows a Durga pandal. I walked with my Teeamma to see the Shakti with many arms. Just as I had been promised by my strong and dimunitive grandmother, all those years ago, I too grew many arms to fight my demons. Many helped and many still do. 

And I walk on my invisible multi-armed Shakti walking beside me.

I cleaned the idol with a freshly cut slice of lemon. She gleams like gold, does Ma Kali.
And I stand there with my tiny hand in my Teeamma's strong one.