The Bureau

My mother has a green bureau. I don't know if that's what it is - it always seemed more like a cupboard to me. But she called it that and it has stuck. She's had it for as long as I can remember. It was in our two-room house in Anna Nagar where I was born and it moved with us to the house we still live in, the house where I grew up. And there it has stayed. Standing silently at the end of a little, dark, oddity of a passage that led to my room. The deep bottle green paint has chipped off in places and rust betrays its age and although slightly rickety and worse for wear, it has remained mostly unchanged through the years. Like the other furniture in our house, it is comfortingly constant. It stands in the same corner, mostly invisible, only noticed by outsiders or if one bumped into it by mistake. Come to think of it, it doesn't require too much effort to bump into. It looms. At 7 feet, it is the biggest piece of furniture we own and is responsible for obstructing the entrance to my room, forcing me for years to have to squeeze through into my precious sanctuary.

It always seemed like a brooding bureau to me. The big Godrej lock held all it's secrets in. My mothers secrets. No one else had a key - not even my father. And she rarely ever opened it. When she did, she would always make everyone leave the room. A source of great annoyance when I was an adolescent. I would yell and remonstrate to no avail. 'I don't care what's in your damn bureau, you can't evict me from my own room'. But I nearly always did. I was immensely curious. And I would try to imagine what it held. Gold and jewelry I used to like to think - that she would eventually give to me. Or perhaps old letters - from long lost loves. Books of poetry she used to read. Old report cards perhaps. Pictures of her in pigtails. Maybe she kept her Will there. Or her just odd things from her childhood.

Taunts by my father and me about all this secrecy never could force her hand. She wouldn't say a word - only laugh and roll her eyes.

A few years ago, I discovered a black and white, yellow edged, slightly dog eared picture, of my mother as a child with her family, lying on the floor one morning. Apparently the jangle of keys I had heard at 6 AM wasn't part of my dream. There had been a tryst with the bureau . I confronted her with it as I remember. Rather cheekily wanting to know why she felt the need to sneak around at unearthly hours. And for one small second she hesitated - I didn't really understand the expression that flickered on her face just long enough for me to notice before she quickly rejoined with a smile and a cheerful 'it's really none of your business sweetheart'.

And it wasn't. I hounded her too long about the contents of that bureau. Always irritated by the enigma - unable to understand what she could probably have to keep from us - her husband and children. And it always set my imagination ablaze. Torrid affairs, childhood secrets - A past?! My sense of romance knew no bounds. And I simply couldn't get my head around it. My mother! The one that woke us up, fed us, drove us, worked 10 hours everyday - only to start all over the next . What could she possibly have to hold secret?!

For the longest time, I couldn't reconcile myself to the fact that my mother has always been an intensely private person, as well as a woman capable of keeping her own counsel. What I know of her and how she used to be before she was my mother - is only what my father has told me. He accepts this about her. Half reluctantly, half admiringly. It was one of the things about her he fell in love with. He once let that slip when he thought I was too preoccupied with cribbing about amma to listen. But surely it must pique him a little. Or irritate him slightly. He is like me after all. Rather, I am like him after all. And so completely different from her. Such an open book that I have always struggled to understand this about her. That there is a part of her that no one else knows. Just a little part of her that she keeps from everyone else, a compartment she doesn't often visit, that lays standing in a corner, filled with a life time of memories. Like a bureau.

I did allow myself to nurture the belief that growing out of childhood would signal the unlocking of that lock, the opening of those doors. That in adulthood, Amma would trust me with those long enclosed contents of that bureau - with her stories, her confidences.

And now that I finally find myself on that threshold I am taken entirely by surprise. It is not what I expected. The contents haven't been revealed to me, nor do I want them to any longer. And yet I find that the bureau does indeed contain something for me. . It certainly wasn't gold or the gorgeous silks I hoped were waiting to be passed down to me. Nor anything as glaring and indecorous as a sudden, ready flow of a life time of confidences from mother to daughter. And yet it is substantial, an inheritance of sorts - a legacy if you will.

It seems too simple almost for all the build-up and curiosity that it was chased by. And yet it is profound . The legacy of the bureau, as I see it now, is the very idea of it - so strange to my nature and yet something I recognize as possessing the potential to be of great value to my life. It is wrapped in the understanding of what the bureau has represented to my mother, why it is so important that it continues to stand there, why she has guarded it all these years and rightly will not share it with anyone else.

At a time in my life when I feel transparent and laid bare, insecure about the content of my character and struggling with my identity, I've begun to see how important it is for me to have my own little bureau - a place where the truth and essence of me could lay tucked away, in safety and privacy. Not static, but not in a hurry. Gently being nurtured into maturity, as I evolve in my own time, away from the glare and harshness of life and everyday scrutiny.