My mother believes that for life to have meaning Mount Everest should exist.
And if Mount Everest exists, which it must, one must forever, at any point of time, whether one is wailing having just been born or a teenager biting her nails over typing… or a young adult fixing his hair before an interview or a middle-aged woman deciding to ‘fuck that shit’ and take her anti-anxiety pills or a sixty year old man just realising that Instagram isn’t the enemy, whatever one identifies with (absurd concept!), one must be willing and able to climb Mount Everest.
What’s more, it is essential that Mount Everest exist in every aspect of life: health, friendships, love, cooking, dancing, laughing, crying, sports, homes etc. If one is unable to climb Mount Everest for paltry reasons like illness or death, one can be labeled ‘weak’, ‘lazy’, ‘spoilt’, ‘indisciplined’ or ‘selfish’. The last one because you as a representation of your mother are hurting her by not hurting yourself enough to be meaningful.
If your fingers are soft are you worth anything? my mother grapples with this question daily. Then she weighs herself and puts on a face pack. Because there is no excuse not to look good should the need to traverse Mount Everest arise without notice.
There is no such thing as a not-Mount-Everest, that is a myth propagated by Arvind Kejriwal, the man whose only contribution to society so far has been free tickets in buses for women who want to pay for them and who desperately want to trade this unasked for privilege with not getting raped. Mother knows that there are things like sunbathing and laughing and staying still on a rug but those are things that keep your fingers soft.
One would be tempted to wonder about how Mount Everest came to loom, a gargantuan shadow, upon my mother’s vision. Perhaps it was something she learnt as a child watching her own mother’s back arched, squatting close to the earth, planting a piece of herself each day into the soil. Especially on the days she had no pieces left to give. Perhaps survival was a gold medal that if you won once, you needed to win again and again. There was no surety on the myth of when someone planted Mount Everest into her soil and how it grew to be as monolithic as it did, as inviting as it did to her with its inhospitable streaks and blankets of white. Its very trait of being insurmountable giving the zenith the power to bestow worth upon someone. Who taught Mother that her worth, along with mine and all others, lives outside of us, on top of Mount Everest? What blade of grass or mound of snow in her remote, mountainous village spoke such stories into her soft ears which are now hardened like her meaningful fingers?
“Everybody finds it difficult. There are no levels of difficulty. There is no such thing as feeling, there is only indolence and infirmity and free time for people to indulge them.”
Since mother has given birth to me and has had a myriad of experiences in her time on Earth, she has had all experiences that can be had. She knows exactly what ails me and it is nothing that I think or feel it is. It is simply a satanic resistance to climbing Mount Everest.
“Why should I climb it?” I ask often.
“Do you want to be useless all your life?” she counter-questions.
I have no answer to that because I wasn’t mulling over whether I have a use or not up until she declared that I didn’t. Now it worries me that this state of being useful is something that only people climbing up Mount Everest possess. It can’t even be a Kanchenjunga, that would be a two-word horror story: second place.
I have tried to think of spots that could be housing my self-worth, perhaps it lies in the middle of a book about heroes who on the daily do at least one villainous thing and villains who daily get a lot of love letters from women like me seeking their self-worth in reforming them.
Maybe on a hammock under palm trees with sunlight glinting through? It is the only place that was outdoors that I remember sleeping off in without a worry about how useful I was being in the world.
Maybe at the end of a tongue that was drinking whiskey with me, talking about our own insignificant hills instead of mountains, wondering where the next dopamine hit will come from while halfway through the present one.
Maybe in my mother saying while holding me, “You are enough. I love you. I accept you just as you are.”
It would be more realistic to climb Everest.
insearchofthebeautiful 