I don't know the scientific terms but the title is trying to be clever; having two personalities for us is not a disorder, it's the very order, the only way we know & live, it's the only way anyone we know lives.
We grew up dancing with our cousins in parties and praying behind our teachers religiously. We smuggled VHS Bollywood movies, Disney cartoons and New Year's shows with neighbours and denied having heard of satellite dishes planted in our back yards. I remember my sisters would wrap the VHS in a black plastic grocery bag, I would hide it under my T-shirt, tucked into the waist band of my shorts & I would cycle as fast as I could to deliver it to the neighbour 5 houses up the street in exchange for a new one our guests hadn't seen. I also remember pulling annual all nighters in mosques with the same sisters holding the holy book over our heads & praying in repentance. I wasn't quite sure what I was regretting or confessing. Some years I thought I'll just bank the credits with god for later, when I actually needed to do something bad, or just in case I HAD committed some sin & had forgotten all about it. No harm in washing out the year's baggage, I thought. I did not believe smuggling the cartoons or dancing on the school desks between classes was a sin. After all, we did them in front of our parents too. But I did carry that burden around on a daily basis; the sense of having done something the teachers or the kids' program's nice lady on TV would find sinful. We lived double lives ever since we left home at age 7, ever since the introduction to the first social community outside our homes & our aunts' home & our family friends' homes: we lied to our school teacher about our dads not praying, about our deepest secrets as well as the most basic occurrences; the holidays, the food, the drinks. We were taught to guard our inner lives from our outer lives and the other way around. Our parents had no idea we believed & prayed with all our hearts!
So it's no surprise that we still fake everything. We go to work, we hang out, we laugh at our colleague's jokes and sympathise most deeply with their weekly struggles with their privileged toddlers, we get excited about their weekend plans on their white boats and politely, kindly cheer for the employee of the month. & then... we leave work. We slowly peel off the mask on the way to the bus stop, we swear at the fucking public transport, always either late or early, we collapse into the tired blue bus seat, scroll through the feed on our phones, hide ads that are irrelevant -these days all of them, and we cry the uncontrollable hot burning tears of a broken bird that's so far away from home it can't sing its song but shivers at the sound of the familiar birds at home with their torn & bloodied throats. We scroll, we cry, we hate the long legged blonds in between the videos of the smoky and blood-stained streets of the place we didn't call home for a very long time & we do again recently. We get a headache, we get off the bus & go home to heat up dinner and watch TV and laugh at American jokes.
For the longest time I thought I belonged to nowhere, I thought I would live this life like an unwelcome foreign bird that will never be chosen the bird of the year, not a native bird of the land. But these days there's this tiny minute hope that the land I fled could be home again. And that I may not have to lie all the time. The hope terrifies me.
Comments