5 AM each morning, I would hear the alarm on my mom’s phone ring as I continued to salvage my sleep. The vague awareness of her sipping chai and meditating using her beads would engulf me in the darkness while I lay beside her, mostly asleep. My mom’s prayers and my own dreams would form a peaceful start to every morning. Although we would be shrouded in darkness, we were still extremely visible to each other, so very aware of each other that we would get used to it and not think about it.
5:30 AM each morning, I would hear the words “Gauri utho” in my mother’s voice, asking me to wake up. The next few words would usually be, “utho beta time hogaya”, which translates to “wake up child, it’s time”. Having to wake up that early in the morning is a nightmare for every teenager who would stay awake until midnight. Three minutes more in bed translated to three hours of happiness. But since I had a school bus to catch, eventually I had to give up and break the sticky, loving contact between my back and my bed.
My mom would then hand me the cup of milk she had heated up for me—plain hot milk with a nasty surprise of dates at the bottom that were to be consumed when I had finished the milk. Drinking milk that hot would be an ordeal for my throat and would take fifteen minutes of precious time during which I would picture pleasurable fantasies of being asleep. Usually, if the milk was a little bit less hot and I could manage to drink it in twelve minutes or so, the rest of those three minutes would be spent in my blanket. In those three minutes, I would have the best sleep of the entire day.
After that, it would be time to wake up for good. Get off the bed, go to the bathroom, change into my school uniform. During the winter, the school uniform would have around four extra layers. Normally this would have meant waking up ten minutes earlier than usual, but fortunately my school bus arrived fifteen minutes late in that season and so I would be able to wake up at 5:35 AM instead.
In the background, while I would be readying myself to go to school, my mom would be listening to bhajans or devotional songs on the radio and making the food that I would take to school. With the tabla and sweet melodies forming the background in my ears and the serene darkness of dawn forming the background in my eyes, I would go about everything calmly and quietly and so would my mom. We were both there, near each other, quiet but together in a comforting sense of home.
When I would walk out to near the dining table, wearing my school uniform and carrying my backpack, the food on the table would greet me. My meal was in a box, cooling down before the box would be shut and kept in my backpack. My mother would leave the kitchen and walk up to me, ready to comb my hair and braid it tightly so it lasts for the entire day. When I was younger, she would also untangle my hair for me, but when I reached high school the pain I would feel and the effort she had to do for it conspired to teach me the art of untangling. So, in high school, I would untangle the hair first and then my mom would braid it. Each time she did so, she would tell me to learn it and do it myself (something I have not done to this day).
With everything ready, it would be time to wear my shoes (after dusting them a little to avoid my mom’s scolding). We would usually leave in a hurry, owing to my three minutes of extra sleep. The walk to the bus stop started with climbing down the usually dirty staircase of Nagin Lake Apartments, a place where none of us wanted to live but to which both of us were used to. In the little parking area under the buildings, we would see every day the car that had been there since the beginning of time, standing there in an old and dusty way. In the time since we moved to that place when I was ten to when I graduated, I saw that car every day. Each day I would think, who would leave a car, just like that?
The length of the walk would vary—the initial part was three minutes up until we reached the gates of our apartment complex. Then, depending on how busy the road was, we would either cross it, or take the overly lengthy and unnecessarily curvy bridge that was built over the road. It’s extreme length and the time it would take to cross it caused us and many other people to cross the busy road for a long time, until more accidents started to happen and threw more and more people and careful stray dogs onto the long, tiring bridge.
This long ordeal—with or without a stray dog—would eventually lead to us greeting the bus stop. It was time to wait for the school bus, say goodbye, and go to school. The magic of the morning would slowly be lifted as reality would seep in and the sky would turn the bright white of day, the bright white of rationality.
