This article is my memoir to my immigrant mother. As a person of colour, specifically a woman of colour, travelling to Australia from India and assimilating within the culture was not easy in the 90s. Her hardship serves as a victory within our modern society and deserves to be told.
The apple of my eye
My mama, at 52 (although she deems herself no older than 45), is the apple of my eye. Apple, diamond, beauty, you name it. I say she is the apple of my eye because I tend to liken her to an apple. As weird as it sounds, I like to think of it as a compliment. An underappreciated yet loved piece. An unknowing beauty. A persevering fruit within the coldest of winters. The gleaming red amongst the lifeless grey.
As I look at her presently, her laugh lines deepen when she smiles and her wrinkles crease on her forehead from the years of straining and harsh concentration. Her glasses lie on the top of her nose, the slight bump giving it an edge and her sharp eyes penetrating even the most persevering of thorns.
She was a warrior in every sense of the word. She was an apple through and through.
To begin with, born on the 20th of November 1969, my mother was the third child in the busy household of four. She wasn’t good at sewing or knitting or too good with her hands. She had slight tan skin from the hours she spent outside, running around with the other rowdy kids from the street. Her big, toothy smile gleamed proudly as she would race sturdily across coarse, dandelion fields. She would laugh fully and heartfeltly embrace the rays of glimmering sunshine, even though its scalding touch left rotten marks on her skin.
And because of these marks, my mother was never told she was beautiful. She was too dark, too mousey, and too short with thick Ram-dev ji hair. I knew that was why she never failed to remind me how beautiful I was.
She was smart, however. Awfully smart.
Like comparing apples to oranges
On the weekends, her siblings would follow her to the local bookstore. Long layers of dilapidated and discoloured bricks would line the entrance, almost as if there was an illegal undertaking being recorded. She would spend hours at the library - a safe haven, almost. She was the happiest then. Graduating with a PhD and becoming a lecturer was a cherry on top to say the least.
High school in Australia was, funnily enough, very different. Respect was not expected and had to be earned. Pronouncing the word ‘eschool’ with an ethnic accent would barely help this process. Bindis were likened to red dots and the decadent aroma of expensive spices would be condensed to ‘curry’. Being a ‘red-dot wearing curry-muncher’, teaching was reduced to supervision and my mother was no longer a highly respected university Mathematics lecturer. She was just the casual, replacement teacher who wore clothes that never seemed to fit and smelt a bit funny.
She had started swearing. The words foreign in her mouth, almost rancid to us. Poison would have sounded better. The disgusting rotting of an apple when exposed greatly to the even harsher Australian sun. There was misery caused by the helplessness and inability to accept that things would get better.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away
Mama could’ve had twenty-three published works by now. Twenty-three. Speaking statistically and coming from a woman who had completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics and a lifetime’s worth of equations, she was probably right. I still remember her words ringing profoundly through the dark, luminous emptiness of one fateful night. We lay quiet, feeling the depth of our silence. It was comfortable and lulling. Soon after, her icy, rough hands found mine, engulfing them in our collective cold. The passionate red of my fingertips was now a warm magenta, and no longer painstakingly miserable.
She was a university lecturer before she moved to Australia. Her words, nostalgic and mellow; she told me she had felt as if her world had been destroyed. What she could have achieved had she stayed. If she pushed back then, she would have been happy there.
I remember looking at her stunned. The sandalwood fragrance of a mother’s love, coupled with the mellow bitterness of experience and anxiety, loomed around her petite figure, like an ominous cloud, unwavering and threatening. Her hawk-like eyes were no longer filled with warmth, now engulfed by a dark-brown unease.
I held her that night. It felt unsettling, yet oddly truthful. Her heartbeat, strumming slowly, mirrored mine, and her perfume’s intoxicating scent became a barrier for the outside world. It was just me and her, in our own little world. We stayed like that, her cradling me against her chest for a few minutes. When she held me close, and sighed deeply not wanting to let me go, I knew I was at home.
Her home may not have been in Australia, but holding me that night might have been the closest she would feel to going back. I was glad to give her that. That’s all I could probably give her then.
I could feel her coming back to me then. She was an apple, with the rotten part being sliced off – still useful and nurtured.
A ‘so-called’ Rotten Apple
After almost twenty years as a highly respected teacher, my mother now stands tall in front of everyone, receiving the most honourable award as a high school teacher. Her glamorous red saree and Bindi demand the attention and respect that she so wholeheartedly deserves. She is sunshine personified. She is beautiful. She is an apple.
And in this moment where she smiles proudly and looks for me in the crowd of hundreds, she is everything.
Written by Anika Katyal
Edited by Jessie Liu
Cover art designed by Jessie Liu