Once when I was 10, I had a few luxurious hours alone at home. It was bright daylight. The height of afternoon, I think. There was no identifiable danger lurking in the corners of the house, or the street, which is probably why my parents could be so radical. I don’t think I planned anything special for my solitary hours, although I am very sure I was celebrating in my own inner way (the introvert’s way) about my brief escapade into the freedom of adults (I miss the simplicity—and security—of believing that adults had absolute freedom). What that celebration looked like, I have forgotten, but what I’m left with is a sensation. Funny, isn’t it, how we often expect memories to appear as pictures or stories, and when they present themselves as sensations, we might not even register them as memories but as constellations of emotion. Retrieving the memory of being free at home comes first with childlike elation, and second—well, that’s the locus of this post.
Despite the shockingly bright afternoon and the inability of things and people to hide in dark corners or shadows, I locked myself in my parents’ bedroom. I think I wanted the excitement of being in a dangerous situation—home alone, anything could happen. Things lurk. Things leap. The universe, including my parents’ bedroom, is savage, menacing. What could creep into the warmth of our home, the sun outside shining like a benevolent god? But danger is everywhere. It was a belief I inherited, now in retrospect I can see, and believed in so much that it materialised a ghost I had to battle with on my first afternoon alone at home.
What were the chances?
Incredibly high if you’re hosting the belief that the universe is a battlefield.
While lounging in comfort on my parents’ bed, I saw a ghost. It was white. As expected. And it flitted in the tiny slot between the locked bedroom door and the wall above. This ghost blew and danced and blew until it frightened me into a state in which I knew the end had come, and the only way out was to revert back to the world of adults and be rescued. Shaking, I picked up the telephone (this was the early 90s and we had one of those unashamedly orange Telekom phones), called my neighbour Auntie Asha, whose maternal buttery voice I always found soothing, and told her I was being pursued by a ghost. It was too frightening to be in this room by myself. What do I do? What do I do? The distress in my voice was enough to mobilise Auntie Asha from her home and two doors down to ours.
She stood by the gate—I couldn’t let her in because I was inside and she was outside and we hadn’t yet entered the age of automatic gates.
“Don’t worry, just open the bedroom door. You’ll see it’s nothing,” she coaxed from her spot outside the fence.
A lot of time passed. That much I remember. I also remember that in the passing of that time, Auntie Asha had to use her energy to repeat her assurances: nothing was going to happen if I opened the bedroom door.
I also remember the sensation of fear spinning inside my body coupled with a contradictory paralysis. No, it wasn’t possible for me to get up and open the door. The ghost would get me.
At last, Auntie Asha’s patience won. Her confidence, her calm, her care—these things won.
I opened the bedroom room. The ghost metamorphosised into a flimsy near-translucent tissue paper. Did I laugh? Maybe. Again, I remember the sensation more than the image of this memory. I began to deflate, relax. I thanked Auntie Asha. She was thrilled for me. I feel shame swirl in my stomach but now, thirty years later, it’s just a bite. I know it was much more than a bite for my ten year old self.
That episode stays with me and plays in my internal cinema from time to time when I need to understand fear’s region and customs. How fear jives. How it’s bedmates with that gorgeous entity, the imagination.
Decades have passed. I still sometimes freely give my imagination away to create national anthems in fear’s territory, but I’ve also learned to use my imagination to make things like poems. A few months ago, I dropped fear into my imagination instead of dropping my imagination into fear. The inspiration to drop fear inside the vortex of the imagination came from Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, among other things, and the eating of demons. She wears a garland of heads she’s chopped off. She has the right kind of rage. The right amount. She’s fierce. She’s wild. And she eats the things that scare us. I stepped into her fire. I discovered a poem.
I like the fact that whenever fear rises in me and my imagination starts expanding, I can now go back to that same imaginative space and retrieve this poem. Suddenly, I feel as powerful as her. And if I forget the poem, I merely look down at my upper right arm, where I have her face and stance tattooed on my skin, a perpetual poem.
“I Eat Fears”
I eat fears like
I eat glass sweets,
turn them around
in my mouth, run
my tongue over them,
licked and pierced
in a snap.
I eat fears like
I eat custard apples,
suck, spit, inhale,
squeezed against
my dark hands
massaged wet
for the festival of stars.
Your fears I eat,
one by one, juices
spilling over my lips,
bring them on a tray,
arrange your fears if you like,
garnished with memories,
past notions and motions—
I do not care, but bring them,
in cocktail glasses,
in a fistful of confetti,
in bowls made of sand,
what do I care how they come,
in what receptacle
you choose to present your
whirls and swirls?
On quiet midnight walks
people ask me:
how do you eat fears?
I don’t need to tell them
because this is
my utterance for you alone:
I’ve seen something
as clear and as gorgeous
as a seabird stopping
to watch itself
on the sea’s surface,
that fear is love
on a different route home.
So when I say
I eat fears
I’m only saying
it’s my gesture of love
for the love gliding
inside your chest
like so many nightbirds
dancing their way home
dazzled by starlight.
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