Mother in black and white
It is hard to see in this very posed photograph what my mother was thinking. The photographer had probably placed his camera at what he imagined a jaunty, chic angle to the subjects and asked the newly- wed couple to look at it. And given they got married over 60 years ago, I imagine that typically for this time, he had probably dived beneath a dark cloak which covered him and the large box-like camera after giving his instructions. My father is smiling quite openly but my mother is being coy, her gaze lowered, just a hint of a smile at the very corner of her lips. Her hands sit folded primly in her lap as she tries to decide whether she is the Sphinx or Mona Lisa today, or maybe both.
I find it very difficult to reconcile my black and white mother of the early days of her marriage with the larger than life colourful character she became later– almost as though taking a cue from the photographic revolution that happened almost as soon as she got married. The 1960s were about colour, the movies became a gaudy Eastmancolor, the photographs morphed into flashy Kodakcolor and my mother, well she emerged from her grey caterpillar self to become a beautiful butterfly.
To some extent, it was probably a function of age. She was only 19 years old in the photograph and had met the man who sat next to her and whom she called her husband, only once. At their wedding. Too late some would call it, to do anything about it. In those days, arranged marriages were not the loose informal arrangements, they are now, with families throwing a young couple together and allowing them several months and even years to go out and to get to know each other.
She had simply been shown a CV and photo of the man she was to marry. I remember her once — only once — slipping in an addendum to this incident and telling me that as he showed her the photograph, her father had added that she had three younger siblings and to keep this in mind when she took the decision. So you didn’t have a choice, did you, I had jumped in, always eager to bash tradition. ‘No,’ she had said calmly, ‘I am sure my father would not have forced me if I had said no, he was just reminding me that I was the oldest child and should behave responsibly. Besides, your father had a good job and came from an educated family so I said yes.’ I think she knew that to dwell on the arbitrary nature of the arranged marriage system would not find favour with her children who were living in a different world, so she avoided the topic altogether and even when questioned, never went into any detail.
Her own memory of the early days of her marriage, seemed to have been wiped clean or tucked away as a very incidental and small part of her life. ‘ What? I don’t remember!’ was her stock reply to all our goggle-eyed questions as we grew up and wanted to know more. My sister who was the boldest amongst us, once got a stern reprimand for asking ‘Did he kiss you right away?’ For all other questions it was an air of general annoyance, ‘ Why must you dwell on all these useless things? ,’ she would say with a frown as she folded the clothes or stirred the pot on the stove, always doing something alongside as though to prove she did not believe in conjecturing and other pointless activities. Her marriage, certainly the early days, was a no- go zone. My aunt, her sister in law, remembered her as a beauty and as the years went on and we employed more sophisticated ways of information gathering, we used to badger our aunt: What did mummy like to eat? Could she cook even at 19? Did she sew her own clothes? Did she want to become a teacher? It is strange how we relied on my aunt’s version of events with a mother who was alive and well. It was almost as though the girl who got married to my father and whom we see in this photo, flickered briefly and vanished.
Certainly, my mother’s later life — her graduate degree, her teaching qualifications, her success as a chemistry teacher at a prestigious international school, her career as an exchange science teacher in a Somerset school in the UK — all that came much later. Even after us. I remember as a teenager, seeing her correct exam papers strewn all over the bedroom floor. Maybe her stubborn refusal to acknowledge the docile young girl she used to be was one way of changing her personality, re-orienting herself to live in a changing world.
As I look at the photo again, I see a glint of steel in the curl of the lips. Is that just a demure lowered gaze or is she looking at the future she is determined to make? I feel proud that my mother came such a long way. By forbidding us — her children — from glimpsing her uncertainty she was probably shielding herself. The black and white photo is the only one that connects her — and us — to the person she used to be. I mentally hug a more recent photo of my mother with her short hair in rollers and thank her for everything.
