Femme Maison
Kavya Murthy
I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by Chantal Akerman when I was 27, in a small dingy flat I was subletting in Bangalore, clicking on a file from my hard drive at random. I was not a patient viewer of movies and ordinarily shunned cinematic tedium. I did not have the ability to surrender to cinema. But it was the structure of Delphine Seyrig’s face and the way she wears her hair that had me stay minute after minute—the neatness of her attire and work in the kitchen, the rhythm of her day. It reminded me of my mother, who is structured, as Jeanne Dielman is, by habit, neatness, and the ritual activities of the household.
Some years ago I had taken it upon myself to offer my mother the psychic security that she had ensured for me through my childhood and a home away from her drunken husbands. Two cumulative marriages had failed and harmed her, and she lived in a state of alarming stillness. Having finished my postgraduate exams, I took the first job I found, allowing me to move my mother out of her second husband’s abusive household in a carefully planned operation—overnight, with hastily packed bags, fleeing before we were found out.
Until then, I had big dreams for my life—perhaps I would be an anthropologist or a contemporary avant garde performance artist or even move to a remote jungle to study primates. But that had to be put aside; now I needed to earn money and my mother needed my full attention. I was full of a youthful fervour for justice for my mother, weighed down and held up by my conscience. My mother on rescue did not seem to me to be the mother I knew as a child, the mother I hoped would return to me after sufficient safety and rest.
She seemed remote, and my love for her felt insufficient. I watched her sitting alone in her bedroom, talking to herself, year after year. Always a small Philips radio playing old Hindi songs on Vividh Bharati (from All India Radio), embroidering flowers and animals on handkerchiefs, and knitting sweaters (always without button holes), and staring right past me even when I stood in front of her. The tragic lyrics of an od Hindi song played on repeat - is ko hī jiinā kahte haiñ to yuuñ hī jī leñg/ uf na kareñge lab sī leñge aañsū pī leñge (“If they call this living, I will live; I will not sigh, I will seal my lips, and swallow my tears”). The song was from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, an influential Hindi drama film from the 1950s about a struggling, unpopular, and unpublished Urdu poet writing about social issues, who falls in love with a sex worker who becomes his muse.
Pyaasa is one of the great romantic films of Indian cinema. But my life made for a different kind of film, one that unsettled and could not easily accommodate romantic plots—whether that of the bourgeois family romance; or psychoanalytic Oedipal unfolding; or queer coming into oneself; or the persistent romantic myth of liberal individualism—that of overcoming and self-actualizing against all odds. The arc of these romances, against which so many of us, myself included, measure the unfolding of our lives, was interrupted. It was history, tied to my ankle. The history of my family, of psychiatric provision in India. It was economics, tapping at my shoulder. What takes shape in the absence of a romantic plot? I don’t know, but I start with the first premise of psychoanalysis—to speak before plot, and see what takes shape.
*
I was three when my mother lost her mother, and she threw my grandmother’s ashes into the pit of the coconut tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up in Bangalore. It was a defiant thing to do, but I did not know if she did that because she was untethered by grief or too tired to go to the river to inter the ashes after many days and nights at the hospital where her mother had passed away from diabetes-related illness. Her atheist brother might have encouraged this defiance of ritual. With their mother gone, my mother and her six siblings were suddenly at sea, floating away from one another without the moral and emotional center that held them together. A few years later, when my mother’s life began to come apart, her siblings would blame the ashes in the backyard for her fate. They said the coconut tree was now haunted by the unhappy spirit of my grandmother.
“What takes shape in the absence of a romantic plot? I don’t know, but I start with the first premise of psychoanalysis—to speak before plot, and see what takes shape.”
My mother began to really believe it a few years later, unable to carry the weight of her current circumstances, casting about for reasons why her life had devolved to the point it had. I grew afraid of the backyard in the dark. It was a time when my father was drinking heavily in the evenings, smashing every object my mother cherished in his mercurial rage. Their age difference of thirteen years was an immense weight on their marriage, and in his possessive jealousy he would destroy her collection of ceramic and wooden elephants, folk dolls, and carefully grown cacti in pots.
She was convinced it was her defiance of ritual with her mother’s ashes that caused this instability in our home. She tried to undo it. She began to visit godmen and gurus in the small towns of Chikballapur and Vijayapura in Karnataka, and I was taken along with her as she told them of our family coming apart. One godman would listen to the tales of my father’s punishing temper and hand us lemons he sanctified with a magical word muttered under his breath, saying the lemons would protect against more bad luck. My mother would put those lemons everywhere—in my cupboards, her purses, the car dashboard, and the pit of the coconut tree. Uneasy as I was, I would carry a lemon with me everywhere and believed my mother’s assurances that this would pass, that we were living under a bad star and Saturn, that temple visits and prayers would restore some balance to our household.
My father was whiskey and rage. He would say that he had a noose around my mother’s neck attached to a long rope, and was waiting to see how far away she would walk. To protect me, she could not walk too far from his orbit and allow the noose to tighten. She stayed very still, her body a shield that would get me to adulthood, each year depleting her psychic and material resources, holding onto lemons and prayers. How much of the lemons was fear, how much was her mental illness? As her child, I believed the godmen’s assurances and my mother’s hope in them, since she was all I knew as safety. I grew up around this blurring of her self, unable to parse where she ended and the illness began, not knowing for many years that she was as ill as she was.
*
When I took my mother into my care, I made a decision to live with her in Bangalore, which I had tried for so long to escape. I thought the language (Kannada) and weather (always a cozy 22 degrees Celsius) would restore her to herself, tether her to our past. Being in the kitchen cooking familiar dishes was a comfort to my mother. But for all the coconut and coriander (the key ingredients in her cooking arsenal), she remained very still and unmoving. She needed medical intervention, and I took her to the country’s largest public institution for mental health care—National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS). It was not common for the people around me then to speak of mental illness, and I knew very little about it. Most people around me assumed her distant affect was a result of some sort of trauma—or that’s what I told myself. In that hospital, I navigated the outpatient department in what felt like completing the challenges in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix—running from room to room, filling up forms and paying fees, speaking to people who might be doctors or fellow patients, it was impossible to tell. But NIMHANS was reputable and affordable and also felt like a last ditch attempt to make sense of why my mother was so far away.
And soon, her foggy condition was given a name—schizophrenia—and it became a definition I could navigate by. With medication, she began to emerge from the mist. On her return home, she went back to the kitchen, which was like earthing for a loose current. In the kitchen I could recognize her, and she seemed to recognize herself as well. In the mornings she would sit at the table sorting tender leaves of coriander, snapping the stalk off chillies, grating fresh coconut for the meals of the day, in quiet and rhythmic motions.
The hospital that I turned to for my mother’s care is the fulcrum of mental health care in India, with a legacy of a hundred years. Most practitioners in psychology and psychiatry study here, with the institute receiving “INR 850 crores in FY 2024-25”, 85 percent of India’s budget for mental health, but only 0.9 percent of India’s annual budget for health services of INR 90,659 crores.[1] NIMHANS started off as the Mysore Government Mental Hospital in 1925, when Indian doctors were permitted into the higher ranks of the Indian Medical Services after the First World War. The campus was situated in an open, green and elevated part of Bangalore, as an extension of Lalbagh Botanical Gardens. The idea was for a mental health institution in an urban center with mixed communities and salubrious weather, and over here mental health was Indianized to include not only psychiatry and neurology, but Indian philosophy and healing practices. The idea behind this hospital was to treat patients at the acute stage of their illness. In the words of Mirza Ismail (a Diwan, or senior official, in the office of the Mysore Maharaja, the principal ruler of Mysore State after independence in India) who worked with the first Indian doctor superintendents, Francis Noronha and then M.V. Govindaswamy, “[I]t is not merely humane but economical to deal with mental patients at a stage when they are suffering from a partially curable form of illness rather than to delay, and segregate them when they are intolerably a social nuisance.” [2]
This hospital became part of the All India Institute of Mental Health in 1954, and National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences in 1974. In this system, families were considered the bedrock for patient care, with public mental health facilities relying on families to ensure patient care in the hospital and on discharge. This was considered crucial for integrating patients back into their communities once they were discharged from hospital care. This is the system I first entered—a large public health institution that is stressed by India’s sheer numbers, yet is simultaneously the most reliable. My mother’s admission into hospital depended on my physical presence. Her care depended on me, the witness to her stories, illness, and life history. Once she was deemed well enough, I was the community who had to absorb her back into her life, the sole bastion against her isolation and slip back into illness.
But I did not have access to the apparatus of the family, the thing on which the medical institution’s idea of community and care depended. There were no interchangeable human bodies, aunts and uncles and relatives by marriage, who could support me as I supported my mother. Her mental illness and isolation emerged from the violent severance from the families that had looked away as she was harmed by two men. I had to juggle every role that I could–earning an income, being attentive to her medical needs, and ensuring she felt that she had her family and home. I had to give up opportunities, the freedom of my sexual and romantic explorations, the mobility I had earned from my education. It made me think of what the Red Queen tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
“I was the community who had to absorb her back into her life […] But I did not have access to the apparatus of the family, the thing on which the medical institution’s idea of community and care depended. ”
It was in the frugal home to which I brought my mother that I watched the scene where Jeanne Dielman meticulously peels potatoes, her hand almost slipping on the knife, the camera resting on each passing second of the activity, Jeanne Dielman’s face expressive in its impassivity. It was like my mother was in the screen, in a neat cardigan and sitting at a table, switching lights on and off through the day to mark the passage of time. The potatoes could be the coriander leaves in my mother's hands, and like Jeanne Dielman my mother never looked up, sleep-sorting the leaves, practiced hands doing what they must—quiet, rhythmic, and unnerving, caring for her child.
Risperidone, the anti-psychotic medication she was prescribed, was doing some part of the work, but to return my mother to herself, she needed to be Mother, reenacting her last memory of motherhood and home. I was the purpose of her activities and self, as she brought groceries, cooked fresh meals, and ran the home with great economy. I played child to her playing mother as she packed me lunchboxes, even standing by when she sorted through my cupboards as though I was a teenager. My mother could really be my mother if I regressed into a child, allowing her to organize our family by the memory of the past.
Aunts, uncles, and cousins who strayed back into our lives for a quick look would call me “a daughter as good as a son”; so dutiful, taking on the work of the outside world to earn money and provide for my mother with no man in sight. Some friends who came over would tell me I was like a lazy son or husband, having my mother cook for me as though I was deficient of feminine adulthood. I was a daughter like a son or husband, a stunted child in perpetual adolescence. I was casting myself into characters that supported my mother’s imagination of herself. My transmasculine, butch appearance and bearing fed easily into these ideas—I looked like a son (short hair, pants and shirts—no sarees, skirts, or kurtas), and in being fed and watered, behaved like one. My butchness became a kind of cocoon I did not know how to break out of.
The trick was to pretend that there were no missing pieces, that a decade had not passed with its domestic abuse, schizophrenia, and loss. She replayed the activities of the past, coriander plucked with the unnerving rhythm of a potato peeled in Jeanne Dielman, for a child who was a husband or son or daughter. But there was a glitch, distorting what should be a perfect image, the perfect set up, the perfect recovery, like a hand peeling a potato and slipping. I wondered, as I watched Jeanne Dielman, what would transpire.
*
Some years later, I read about Chantal Akerman's preoccupation with mothers and daughters. I found her 2013 book My Mother Laughs (translated by Daniella Shreir in 2019)—a book about her relationship with her dying mother and their time spent largely in a small flat in Brussels. It feels like reading a version of Jeanne Dielman. Akerman wanted "people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes” of every action in Jeanne Dielman, and the book was written in that way, full of the gestures, stillness, discomfort and silence of intimacy, illness and time sequestered in the domestic space of mother and child. In My Mother Laughs I found not only my mother, but myself—the lesbian who is not quite, the normal that I am not quite, the butch who does not match the heightened femininity of the mother. Like Alice shrinking, I had had to hold back essential parts of myself, contained by the family roles demanded by my mother’s care.
As I read the text I thought that there was a prosaic, banal quality to the tedium of the house that I was trapped in with my mother, the femme-maison and architecture of our relationship. Within the slowness of this house, time was slowed down and stilled by my intense awareness and attention to her illness, movements and medication. I began to create the controlled day, the controlled environment, and things in order for her to be well. There is not enough room for my desires or excesses. In the antiseptic environment of our home, there can be no triggers, no men, no unknown entities to infiltrate the walls of safety, nothing to jolt the rhythm of the day or invite hallucinations. I have to perform a kind of conformism, the good daughter-son, sacrificing and dedicated.
When my father left us behind, he also left behind a portion of our household accoutrement: a sofa, the big king size bed, chairs, crockery and cookware, and boxes of sundry objects. What remained with us from that household, many years later, was a box of photo albums and the old Minolta rangefinder camera, the object my mother had rescued from his drunken furies.
She had trained that camera lens on me through my childhood with a singular obsession. I was her compliant little model, obeying her instructions, poses, and costumes. I am dressed in flowers and leaves, silk and skirts, theater costumes of the god Krishna or a policeman, in matching colored frocks with hairbands, clips, and shoes. My birthdays are documented in embarrassing detail, and I am found seated in between my parents in the annual photograph, looking safe, well fed, a little hulk of a happy kid. I am the center of the room, the apple of the camera lens, spoiled, safe, beloved. The photographs are scarce by my teenage years. The following years, the camera was mine, and I turned it on myself, our dog, my teeth that were changing with braces, away from the family that no longer held me in its gaze. We were untethered from one another.
I look at these photographs now and remember my mother’s attention in my childhood, which had me believe that I was the center of the universe, “Her Majesty the Baby,” to paraphrase Freud. I mark the passage of time since I was dressed in little tutus and allow myself to feel a sense of loss that I cannot surrender to the safety of my mother’s whimsical photoshoots. In the photographs I look at this time from before, when I had a family, a mother and father and home, and there were no lemons, hallucinations, drunken evenings, and uncomfortable stillnesses.