“Our Mother Rapunzel”
by Shivani Mutneja
Our mother could have been Rapunzel, it didn't occur to us when we read the story at first, half the story, only the image of the entowered Rapunzel letting down her braid for the prince to climb up, we didn't know the rest. Our mother had a braid which reached up to the back of her knees. Every morning after the house had been cleaned, we saw her undo the braid, untangle the hair which was divided into two with a middle parting, comb them thoroughly and re-braid them for the day. The younger one of us held mother's braid while being breastfed, she played with ends of the hair, caressed the strands folded in neatly, the smooth, silky texture of them was woven with the comfort of being mothered.
But our mother couldn't have been in a fairy tale because she reminded us often that life wasn't a fairy tale and hers most certainly hadn't been one. She married the opposite of a Prince Charming, a man who she didn't love, a man who had filthy habits, chewed paan, smoked cigarettes, drank till he went blank and had no spine to speak of. She repeated this story to us, of marrying a lost and hopeless man and flogging him like a donkey to make him bear the burden of a family. This was the ghastly tale that sunk into us.
Then we read the full story of Rapunzel whose mother craved a salad green from the garden of a sorceress, a green that Rapunzel's father was caught stealing, so he had to promise the child-to-be-born to the sorceress. What an obnoxious bargain, we thought. Our mother’s father had also struck an unfair bargain with the sorceress, in this case the sorceress was our mother’s marital destiny which imprisoned her in the tower of matrimony with a man who was incapable of reaching up to her. If I stretch this analogy beyond this, it will seem ridiculous, though it does seem that similar to Rapunzel’s story, in which the Prince’s sight was restored by Rapunzel’s tears, my mother’s tears gave insight to my emotionally blind father, but many tears over many years.
**
The magical part of the tale, of having a braid long enough to be used as a rope or a ladder, wasn’t unbridled fascination for us either, for we wondered how much it would hurt the scalp to have someone climb up your braid. We had braids by the time we were ten, which were pulled at by cousins and friends. Our braids were our mother’s labour of love, she sat us down every Sunday to oil our hair, the oiled hair was neatly separated into three thick portions which were then braided, sometimes a red ribbon was added to these portions and tied into a bow at the back of our head. We went to school with our thick black hair stuck to our scalp, not a strand astray, we were preparing for hair long enough to ensnare a Prince Charming, we were becoming Rapunzels.
Our hair was different though, the elder one’s was straight, silky and brownish like the mother’s, the younger one’s was thick, curly and deep black. Our personalities seemed embodied in our hair - straightforward, blunt and smooth; unwieldy, wavy and unmanageable. The older one’s hair when left uncombed gathered dust to resemble a broom. The younger one’s hair when left astray became a dark web. When the younger one lost her hair to typhoid, the mother combed away thick bunches and her heart sank. The elder one lost her hair to wilfulness, her mother saw a hairdresser chop the length and her stomach knotted up because while the younger one’s hair had come back thicker after she recovered from typhoid, there was no cure for the elder one’s wilfulness.
**
Our mother continued to have long hair, people continued to marvel at the length of her braid. Like clockwork every day, house cleaning, breakfast, unbraiding and rebraiding, lunch, dinner, sleep. She undid and redid herself each day as her pudgy fingers deftly entwined the silky strands. On the days that she washed her hair, she was impatient for them to dry to be braided for she said that she couldn’t focus till her hair was astray.
We forgot about the fairy tale till a mysterious illness struck our mother. For months she suffered, wasted away, barely eating, an illness that had no diagnosis and made us hope for a miracle as if we were in a fairy tale. After eight months came a diagnosis and a medicine. A rare disease, a travesty of a fairy tale, an inversion, a rarity of affliction. She was prescribed a heavy dose of steroids to supress the sorceress of an immune system that was attacking her mucous lining. Her face became round like the moon, her hair thinned out, she couldn’t braid it any longer. People marvelled at how she had changed.
She didn’t feel like herself without the braid, her body was on artificial energy, our father complained that she was moody and angry because of the steroids and immunosuppressants. In the story the sorceress had tricked the Prince with Rapunzel’s hair, when he was pulled up to the tower he found the ugly, unpleasant witch and not the beautiful woman he had fallen in love with.
The steroid dose was tapered gradually, her hair grew back, it was curly and frizzy this time. She found an uneasy calm in braiding the frazzled grey hair, with no aspirations to length or fantasy.