My Mother is a Cannibal by Priyanuj Mazumdar

(CW: Physical violence, self-harm, fatphobia, homophobia)

My mother hates the way I look. I hate the way she looks at me. I hate the way I look too. I am not bad looking. Five-feet-eight, medium build, caramel skin. Not someone that lights up an auditorium. Maybe a corner of a cramped attic on his best day. I am no Aadi, our next-door neighbor. Surgeon, conventionally attractive face, razor-sharp jawline, and complexion so fair you could mistake him for a foreigner. A combination enough to make any Indian mother wet. In my mother’s eyes, he can do no wrong, but the same pair of eyes look at me like everything I touch dies. I was seven when my mother called me fat for the first time (in jest she clarified), and I spent the entire week crying my eyes out because it was so damn funny. My mother is a tough love person. I don’t know what that means, I don’t know how love can exist in the vapid absence of tenderness. Too much tough, too little love for my taste. I want to feel love that is soft, love that glues back my fractured parts so seamlessly you would never know I was fragmented. My mother isn’t a bad person, has her off days like everyone else, comes across as slightly deranged when she gets furious. Which mother doesn’t? We fight, she hits me, we move on. My mother loves me, I think. Please don’t ask for evidence. I mean, she’s got to, right? Maternal instinct and all. If there is love, it’s purely biological, like she is conditioned to love me. My mother’s reputation is infected by our small town’s small-mindedness. I have grown up listening to the most vile, absurd stories from neighbors and family and friends and strangers, stories you couldn’t conjure if you shoved a kilo of cocaine up your butthole and sucked on ten blots of acid all night long. How there was a baby before me who mysteriously disappeared, how my mother tried getting pregnant with another man because my father is impotent, how my mother tried to burn the house down when my father and I were sleeping one night. It’s easy to make villains out of successful people when you fail to become the protagonist in your own movie, especially when she’s a woman. My mother grew up in dirt and had to crawl through the muck to make something of her. My mother doesn’t talk about her past much. I know her father was a drunk piece of shit who broke her leg the night before her wedding. She had to get married in a plaster cast and her mother told everyone it was a freak accident but made no mention of who the freak was. My mother learned how to stand up all over again, spent years conducting surgery on herself so she looks nothing like her past. My mother is pregnant, our family doctor confirmed the good news yesterday. What an oxymoron, a sibling is the last thing I want. For the past twenty-three years, I have been feeding on scraps of love. If my baby brother or sister comes along, I will starve to death. My mother is an opportunist, wastes no opportunity to tell me I should hit the treadmill, run with the evening’s warm breeze, run until my sweat and skin are stitched like a medical marvel, watch what I eat like I am my own enemy and guard. When I told her I might be bisexual, she slapped me so hard it took two days for my jawbone to snap back into place. God created us in his image, she said, but I still don’t know what that looks like. I am waiting for God to email me a picture. Mother, why can’t I just be myself? Because you are getting fat. Chop off the chunks that make you look human. My mother is sick. It’s not like she woke up with the disease one day, the venom must have spread inside her for years until it became fatal to house. Spit it, spit it out, spit it, spit it out. My body is an exhibition of her sickness, and it’s on display year-round. A scar in every shape, size, color, texture, on my wrists, my torso, my knees, my skin, my bones. Body image is a non-issue for me. I don’t even feel like my body is mine, my mother owns it and lends it to me now and then for maintenance. Like I am a garage for human affliction. I saw my mother and Aadi kissing on the terrace on a full moon night three years back and started having dreams of kissing my mother even though I have never wanted to kiss my mother. Once, she tried kissing me on my cheek and I turned my face at the wrong time. A thundering slap followed the implant of her soft lips. I was seven and it was my birthday party, and my friends teased me for months that I couldn’t stop blushing because the redness on my face won’t go away. In my dreams, my mother is a lot less hostile. She apologizes for slapping me on my birthday, promises to never hit me again, then leans into me and kisses me gently on the lips. Lately, these dreams have faded. I have dreams now where my mother kills me, drags my overgrown body to the forest, feeds it to famished lions, and tells them to enjoy the meal. My mother hates me even in my dreams. The thing about dying is that when you crave it the most, it acts elusive, like the reverse psychology human beings are cursed with—the more you want someone, the less they want you. I have tried killing myself on several unremarkable nights, but I discovered I was born with a little-known disease called being a pussy. Once I made peace with the fact that I was too much of a coward to slash the source of my mother’s misery (me), I turned to my wrists. I am probably an anomaly when it comes to being an only child, in the worst way possible, but I dare not complain or my mother would start calling me a fat fag again and the only thing worse than verbal humiliation is when it’s in alliteration. I haven’t been home in two days and my mother hasn’t called (no surprises), so when my phone rings and I see Tejimola’s Stepmother pop up (from an Assamese folktale where a young girl bamed Tejimola is tortured to death by her stepmother and buried in the backyard where she re-emerges to life in the form of a bottle-gourd plant), I take it as a bad omen. Have you heard the news? My mother sounds fragile instead of menacing, and panic sets into my lungs like I am driving two hundred miles an hour on a rugged road without ever learning how to drive. What news? Aadi is missing. That’s so sad, I say. Terrible, terrible news indeed. Can you come home? my mother asks, and although she doesn’t wait for an answer, I leapfrog a wall to get to the deserted highway and run and run and run and run like I am a conductor, and electricity is running through me. Hi mother, she looks at me like a ghost, like I am the ghost. When you have been a ghost for a long time, you forget you are invisible. Her eyes avoid me like I am the sun on an eclipse, eyes barren like the desert, eyes sunken like my pride, eyes on the fringes of spilling out from their sockets. I make my mother red tea and sit next to her and watch her unfeeling skin quietly soak in sorrow like a patient injected with saline. My ecstasy is hideous. He will turn up, mother, don’t worry. She says not a word but sips on her tea, her red lipstick leaving stains on the white ceramic, her lips folding around the cup like a love song. My mother shows me a text message from Aadi: I can’t bear to stay here anymore. You were the only reason I did. See you soon, my love. I bite my lips, so I don’t give away my overflowing melancholy. He shouldn’t have left you behind, I would never do that. My mother jumps into motion like turning the key to a creepy doll, in a dizzying second, drags me out of my chair, looks at me with combustible eyes. Why do you hate me so much? I am your son, as if there’s a method behind this madness. My mother digs her nails into my skin, engraves new marks of disgust, I wish you had disappeared instead. Her words cut me deeper than her knife-edged fingernails dragging along my spine, I cough, cough, cough, cough, choke on my own spit, she pushes me against the wall, I trip, something cracks open between my skull and my body. It’s a warm, fuzzy summer afternoon, I have just turned twelve, my self-hatred disguised as an unfortunate accident on a bicycle. My mother knows better, nurses my shame, light kisses on my flawed skin, a pinky promise to love me more, a promise broken, crushed, ruptured, mutilated again and again and again and again. The glare from the sun, blinding like headlights, lights up my brown skin inscribed with maroon stripes, excruciating pain distracted by hysterical human voices. Dislocated spine, skin tear, possible paralysis, emergency surgery, operation theater, now. I am floating up and down, weightless, a big fat needle and a big fat figure in a scrub suit, masked, menacing, and then stillness. I wake up face down in agonizing brightness, back hurts like a bitch, am I dead. My mother stands over me, sullen face, puffy eyes, silently saying sorry for shoving me into the wet bathroom floor a day before my tenth-grade exams, hitting me with a wooden stick on my parent’s fifteenth wedding anniversary for messing up the chicken curry, kicking me over and over and over and over when she caught me and my best friend kissing behind the school bus. Aadi is no more, his body was found in the river, suicide case, my mother says. It’s dark outside, I can’t feel my back, my mother holds my hand, be gentle, like he is the night, and I have been blocking the view all along. My mother told me once that some animals eat their own babies. I see her now, I finally see her now, how did I not see her? My mother cries and cries and cries, and I wrap my fingers around hers, completely spineless. 

Priyanuj Mazumdar is a writer and editor from northeast India, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Southern Review of Books, Harbor Review, Allium, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. An MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, he edits fiction for Blue Earth Review and Iron Horse.

4 April 2025