by Vivek Shraya
I slowly climb up the stairs to my bedroom. The entrance is almost completely blocked by snow. I scrape my way to the top of the heap, crawl into my room, and manage to stand up when something hits my back. I slide to the ground and land on my face. Something turns me over.
Are you okay?! I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to throw so hard!
Wh … aa …?
The snowball! I am sorry!
I hear another voice.
Is he okay?
I don’t know!
I’m okay … but who are you?! And you?! How did you get here?!
Slowly, buddy, take it slow. First, let’s get you on your feet.
Out of the white, two brown figures gradually come into view. Two men who look like they could be my older cousins. I have never met them before. They have my dad’s eyes. My body softens. They help me up.
Are you okay?
Yeah, I think so … but you might not be!
I quickly reach for some snow, squeeze it into a ball in my fist, and throw it at the man who struck me down. We all laugh. Hours pass like this, us chasing each other in the snow. We build a tall fort in the corner between the foot of my bed and the wall. We make snow angels and snowmen until all the snow is used up.
EYEBROWS
I learn a lot about how to be a boy from my brother and the lessons he learns in school. Not in the classroom but in the gym change room. Lessons I miss because I change in the corner, facing the teal-tiled wall, so that no one can accuse me of a wandering eye. I listen intently as he tells me how the boys discuss the pros and cons of shaving their pubic hair and other regions of their body. Girls don’t like hairy. He even purchases his own trimmer. I hear a sharp buzzing coming from the washroom as he mows down his legs and chest.
But I am in no hurry to follow his lead. No one is going to see me naked anytime soon. I am more preoccupied with eyebrows.
I’ve watched my mother pluck her eyebrows hundreds of times. Whenever she is in the washroom, she is armed with tweezers and concentrating on her reflection. Once she spots where to strike, her hand lifts mechanically, tweezers tighten, and she precisely pulls the bad hair from its root. Her mind is somewhere far away. She is calm, comforted that there are things, however small, that can be removed, that can be changed. When she is summoned back by the sound of the garage door opening or remembers that she has to drive my brother to basketball practice, she puts down the tweezers and pencils thin almond-brown arches over the surviving hairs.
My own eyebrows look like a variation of Bert’s from Sesame Street, two furry caterpillars forever headlining my face. So I pluck. And pluck. It’s hard to stop. My face is changing, my eyes seem to be getting bigger and brighter, my face narrower. People say tweezing hurts, but I like the pain. Like when you floss your teeth for the first time in three weeks. I try to reciprocate with my brother, imparting to him my new lesson. He is surprisingly dubious.
When my mom tires of me constantly borrowing hers, we head down to Zellers where she buys my first pair of tweezers. She splurges on the fancy gold-plated ones. She hands them to me in the parking lot. Thanks, Mom. This passing of the torch has to be a sign. A sign that she knows my secret and loves me just the same.
GOD IS HALF MAN HALF WOMAN
Lord Rama is banished to the forest for fourteen years by his wicked stepmother. She wants to ensure that her own son will be crowned and rule as King of Ayodhya. This is where the Ramayana, one of Hinduism’s central texts, really begins.
Sita, daughter of the Earth and wife of Rama, dutifully follows her husband into the wild, tending to all of his needs, only to be kidnapped by the evil ten-headed demon Ravana. She is imprisoned in Ravana’s garden for years until eventually being rescued by Rama and his army of monkey soldiers. Before returning to his embrace, however, she must walk through fire, to prove her chastity. She emerges pure, and together they happily return to Ayodhya where they assume their rightful throne.
But as time passes, there are whispers of doubt in the town. If my wife was in another man’s kingdom for that long, I wouldn’t take her back. Sita is banished to the forest again, but this time by Rama himself, who is only doing what is best for his kingdom. The people must not doubt the purity of their sovereign. Rama is the Righteous Ruler and Sita the exile, giving birth to their twins in the forest.
Fast-forward thousands of years later, and my mother is in the kitchen. She has just come home after her nine-to-five and has fed us our roti and dhal. Next, she stuffs hash browns into sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunch, paper napkins with personal mom doodles included, and arranges our breakfasts on the table for the morning. Mini-Wheats in the bowls, multivitamins on the spoons. My dad isn’t at home, he’s at work. Or he’s asleep, and the house is quiet to avoid disturbing him. Dad needs his rest. If his clock somehow synchronizes with ours, and he ends up at home and awake for dinner, he rests his hand on his head for the duration, bearing the brunt of the world, and I wonder why we make him so sad. Should he laugh in these few precious moments we have together, it is like the first glimpse of sun after a Canadian winter. If she cries because we haven’t taken the garbage out or because he has bought her another present that she will have to pay for, we all know how to tune her out. So she learns to scream.
It’s not until I am a little older that I find a new story. At a street-side vendor’s stall in India, as I am flipping through the stack of familiar pictures of Hindu gods, I freeze at an image I have never seen. It is of a deity composed of Lord Shiva’s left side and his female consort Parvati’s right side. Ardhanaraeeshwara.
All the lines that divide what men and women should be and should do begin to blur in the light of this explicit fusion of two gods and two sexes. I inhale deeply and exhale completely. It is as though I have found an old picture of myself or the answer to a question that I didn’t have the words to ask. I bring it home with me and tape it to my bedroom door as a declaration.
I am not invisible anymore.
This book wouldn’t be possible without my mom, Shemeena, Juliana, Katherine, Maureen, Kathryn, Marilyn, and Michelle. A special thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press, Cherie Dimaline, Trisha Yeo, Margot Francis, Tegan and Sara, Farzana Doctor, Brian Francis, Amber Dawn, Hannah Dyer, Natalie Kouri-Towe, Nat Hurley, Nigel Wynne and Adam Holman.
Photo Credit: Matt Barnes
VIVEK SHRAYA is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. God Loves Hair is her first book.
@vivekshraya / vivekshraya.com
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