Fragment as Revisionist

The story of my mother accidentally dropping me in an overflowing gutter during the worst of Bombay monsoons is just that: a story my mother relives in pieces. How she had to search for my arms in mud-brown water, wrestle them free from the earth’s slippening stomach, hoist all twenty-five kilograms of soaking wet on her hips for the walk home. So I plot around it, hoping to give the memory shape and credence, willing it to outlast the storyteller. I see rainfall, like it was yesterday, as incessant as I know rainfall can be: sharp liquid icicles one after the other. I see nothing, as the rain would have wanted me to, the world whittled down to nebulous blobs of color and movement. And I see a woman, no older than the hand writing this, the weight of a five-year-old as significant as the sundry weighing her down. The world as it appears to her: lacking dimension, a depthless infinitude where water falling from the heavens strips form and meaning. What is a child in the shadow of this audacity? What is a paper-thin life constructed carefully to keep a small body alive? (Remember what happens to paper in water.) As the revisionist, I become the blinding rainfall in this memory. I am the water blanketing the world into my arms. I am the arms that drop weight into water. I am the woman drenched, willing it to memory, doing nothing.