Meticulous Love
This image has been taken from Quora.
None of us have watched the film Akashadoothu that was inspired from the 1983 American movie 'Who Will Love My Children?' without crying. There is undoubtedly no heart this film couldn't sink. The kind of pain that came towards the end of this film is so excruciating that most of us might have felt like we were sinking into a turmoil minute after minute. What mothers do, no matter what kind of a mother they had the fortune to be in life, does not matter when it comes to how much they had to endure for caring about a part of themselves that walks in other body. It doesn't matter whether they gave birth to someone; what really matters is whether they allowed to identify and call themselves "mothers." Sometimes, I wonder how many of them have lost themselves when they lost a child and when they had to give up on one.
I remember watching Akashadoothu for the first time and crying my lungs out when I was a kid. I got terribly sick after crying that day. This is one film that made me realise that I am deeply sensitive as a person. Every time I read a piece of news about abandonment and hear people pass comments about women leaving children on the streets, I have always wondered, if they had been given any choice, would they still be doing it? I have also wondered why they never ask a man who could simply get away after something new has just begun in a woman's body and, most importantly, her heart.
Whenever I hear women being called sluts when they have byproducts of their helplessness, I can only remember Madhavi's face and think whether she would have also done it if she was left with no choice but to kill a part of her like that before her death itself? That if she had a longer life than she expected, would she have ever tried to get back her children or want a child again after everything she went through that nobody could ever understand, not even her partner. I used to get terrified whenever the song "Rappadi kezhunnuvo" from this movie came on TV. I would grab the remote and switch the channel because I knew how soon the dread of emotional turmoil would creep into my body in just a few seconds.
Motherhood is part inexplainable happiness, part inexplainable misery. I have understood that it is full of questions. Which way can I turn to make a choice for my child and feel light? Which way would we understand a young woman who wants a child without being married or a woman who just decided to call themselves a mother of a cat or dog if they feels the same towards them as a child? What is the correct way to be a mother? Should one give birth, adopt, or foster? What is the correct way to be fine while being one? These questions never stop, nobody has the right answers to these questions, and it's the only journey in life that comes with no formulae or protocols. We are just lucky if we get it right with the efforts. But the important question this movie asks is this: What is it to be not a mother after you have already become one?
After all these years, I am still amused that this story was written by a man. I have an enormous amount of respect for him and the actors of this film. I realised, even Shri. Murali, the male actor, when I was thinking about the scene of seperation they did. And this thought got to me while I was out of the room I was doing an emotional exercise during an acting workshop. I understood how much of a balance one would need as an actor to not cry and be character when the energy around him is so strongly on another realm. An experience of vulnerability in acting means submission to an extent, and when you loosen it, you're likely either completely become what it is inside or head or shatter around the energy outside. That's what Murali does in this movie. I kept wondering what this scene had done to those actors when I was walking out of the room drained and tired after a long cry in an acting exercise.
The day the writer of this story, Dennis Joseph, died, I didn't share a photo anywhere. I didn’t tell anyone that I was disturbed. All I was left with was an incomplete feeling of not being able to meet and ask him, "But how? "How did you write a character like Madhavi?" What made you disturb yourself to tell a story you saw in a woman's eyes? Tell me about all that you saw right there that made you hate everything wrong about her helplessness. Tell me how she was hanging in and how she was okay. And how you were too if you're today." I was left with a dread that the world lost a writer who chose to show the blatant reality of women who are not left with choices in partnerships and, most importantly, motherhood.
I ran away from this movie all this while. But today I'm letting it disorient me with all my will. Because when everything including fate turned its face from her, I want to look into her eyes today and see her, for it is the least I can do.
So, what does a woman do to not be a mother when they have already become one?
