“Sometimes We Love by Closing a Door”: Grief, Mothering, and the Body in Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers
Fifty Mothers, Preeti Vangani’s debut collection, opens with a photograph of the first page of the diary her mother kept while in college in Mumbai. Her mother’s maiden name is scratched out, replaced with her married name. Her bank account number, too, is replaced with her husband’s name. In a caption, Vangani reveals that her mother didn’t make these corrections: her father did, “in jest.” This image perfectly prefaces the poems to come, which deftly interrogate the interaction of sociocultural beliefs and the body, particularly in relation to gender. Vangani reveals that factors far beyond our control—the body we’re born into and the constructs surrounding that body—control the choices we make. Sometimes, they make those choices for us.
The collection centers on Vangani’s mother, whose gender determined the trajectory of her life and her death. In “Frame,” Vangani examines her parents’ marriage as though she were an outside observer “to understand what the fighting was really about.” The poem exposes the larger forces at play: the fight about her mother going over budget is really about her economic dependence on her husband. It’s a fight about the pressure for her to marry young—“how her father was so quick to get her married off”—and to give up her education and potential career to be a housewife—“about who paid the bills and whose house it was.”
The inflection point for this collection is Vangani’s mother’s death from breast cancer when Vangani was only 21 years old. Just as her mother’s married life was shaped by constructs, so too was the end of her life. Her death, Vangani writes, “could have been avoided had the male doctor not insisted ‘We try to preserve the woman’s breast unless it absolutely needs to be dispensed with.’” The line hits like a knife to the gut. The abstract becomes terrifyingly concrete, and, like a wound, the reader feels the inexcusable cruelty of medical misogyny.
Vangani escapes the cultural pressures her mother faced largely because of her mother, who urged her to go to college and become self-sufficient:
Before every exam, rubbing warm oil
into the pain on the inside of my elbows, she’d whisper:
I don’t care first or second rank—I just want you
independent . . . (“Party Ghost”)
However, this insistence on Vangani’s independence creates an almost unbreachable distance between mother and daughter. When her mother learns her cancer is terminal, she doesn’t want to interrupt Vangani’s education. Her parents keep her mother’s declining health a secret: “Those were the days my father with silence, sparser calls and / strategic dilly dallying,” Vangani writes in “Business School,” “sold me a world where my mother was being saved.” Even when her mother is on the edge of death, she refuses to call her daughter back from her independent life. “[W]hen Mummy arrived at the beginning / of her end,” Vangani writes in “How We Got Out,” “staring at her definite unreturn // not once did she call my hostel to say Come back.”
Vangani’s journey into adulthood is shadowed with guilt. In “Party Ghost,” after her mother’s death, Vangani regrets becoming “[s]o independent / I missed her dying / and death. Where was I?” She imagines, in “Business School,” her mother suffering in her absence, wondering “what Mummy’s voice sounded like—internal scream, / knife against serrated thumb, or bitten tongue, when she discovered / she was terminal.” In “After You Died,” she clings to the things her mother left behind, stealing her mother’s lipstick and “Janice-Joplin-style-prescription-glasses,” which obscure her vision to the point that her mother’s house blurs. Similarly, grief blurs the way she perceives her own life, to the point where, in “Fifty Mothers,” she sees her infant self as the cause of her mother’s death:
At the funeral, one mother gossiped that the medicine my mother took to boost her natural milk was perhaps carcinogenic. Another consoled me with the velvet of her hands, It couldn’t have been that, no. Besides, my mother quickly shifted to formula. But I couldn’t not believe that my hunger was what wrung my mother out like a raisin.
Only through a shift in the way she perceives and conceives of motherhood does Vangani overcome her grief. After her mother’s death, Vangani realizes that her mother isn’t the only one who cared for her in these ways, and that caring for, or mothering, others offers the kind of comfort and unity she misses from her relationship with her mother. In a series of poems sharing the title “Fifty Mothers,” Vangani turns to her community and family, her sisters and aunts and female relatives, for mutual care: “I have fifty mothers in total. Four are my mother’s real sisters, forty-five are cousins. I call them all maa-si, meaning like-mother. But when your original mother dies, likeness dies and you end up with fifty mothers.”
She and these other mothers share their pain, both physical and emotional, by giving voice to their burdens so they can carry them for each other: “My youngest mother slid into depre-ssshh. [. . .] I have a mother who thanks god that her husband is hard of hearing. I have a mother who wants to be absolved by god.” After her biological mother’s death, four of her other mothers spare Vangani from some of the most brutal ceremonies of grief, dressing her “gone mother in a bridal maroon. They did not let me enter the room. Sometimes we love by closing a door.” Vangani’s body becomes “an apothecary shelved with fifty mothers’ cures.”
Eventually, Vangani learns to mother herself. She begins to care for her aching body the way that her own mother once did, “hold[ing] the grocery bags / like a baby” in order to ease the arthritis in her hands. In “Raising Mothers,” she begins to see signs of mothering everywhere:
The pill also a mother, dissolving
my aches invisible as the grace I trace in the blanks
between my friend’s fingers chopping walnuts cooking me
aji da gallina, seasoning the chicken with mother-
like accuracy, the sense of her knowing I have long been
motherless itself a mother to me.
The collection ends with a page of Vangani’s mother’s diary with one sentence written on it: “You must fall in love with yourself.” The words are scrawled across the page with no attempt to fit in the lines, as if the thought itself is too large for the confines of the rules we’ve made for writing. So too, in these poems, is her mother’s soul too large for the confines we’ve made for life and death, just as the true meaning of mothering—and of love and grief and care—is too large for the definitions we’ve created for the words. “What is to mother,” Vangani asks in “Raising Mothers, “if not to suspend / moonlike faith in the face of a stubborn night?” These poems are that moon, shining so intensely that even the most stubborn night cannot help but let in the light.