ANJANA APPACHANA was born and educated In India, where she did her BA (Hons) in English at Delhi University and her MA in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. After working in India for a few years, she went on to do her MFA in creative writing at Penn State. Subsequently, she has been living both in the US and in India.
Appachana is the author of Listening Now and Incantations and Other Stories, and her work has been published in various journals, anthologies and magazines, including Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. She is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and an O. Henry Festival prize.
In 1976, four years before I left New Delhi for America, I had a concussion and lost a few days of my memory, and not long after I lost most of my mind everyone commiserated about my lost memory. They said, "Poor thing, but never mind, only a few days of memory she has lost, so much worse it could have been" Of course, there was no poor thing but never mind- w-much wore it could have been about losing your mind. Nothing was worse than that. Mallika't be mental, everyone would have said, had they known the truth. Mental meant mad, mental merited no excuse, better dead than that.
Now, had my mother’s been different, they would have married me off, because of course- marriage cured all ills Marriage was more effective than any psychiatrist. A psychiatrist merely treated mental, whereas marriage cured mental. After marriage, crazy people became normal. Homosexuality became heterosexuality. Heavy periods became normal periods. Irregular periods became regular periods. Recalcitrant girls became adjustable girls. Even pimples disappeared after marriage!
But clearly the magical powers of matrimony failed to convince my mothers. Instead of marrying me off, they constructed a story about my illness, and they did a fantastic job of it. You see, the secret to a credible story is for the seller to believe it too. As my mothers told friends and neighbours what had happened to me, so persuaded were they by their own fabrication that everyone else was too. Ma and Shantamama were sisters, and they had practice creating stories from the time I was in Ma's womb. If they could have reconstructed history for my sake, they would have somehow also accomplished that. As far as they were concerned, any lie you told to protect your loved ones was the truth. And when it came to telling stories, no one could beat my mothers, whether it was their versions of the Mahabharata or their versions of our lives.
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