Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother

about the author

Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer, and York University professor. Among her publications are eight collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998–2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter Sport: Poems (2010); the critically acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Latvian. She is also the editor of several anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2001, The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World, and The Exile Book of Canadian Sports Stories. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games and the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as the Roger’s Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Time Out London recently dubbed her Canada’s coolest poet. For more information, visit priscilauppal.ca.

For my surrogate mothers

and for evenings at home with popcorn and two videos

main menu

OPENING CREDITS:

Blade Runner

ONE

Maid in Manhattan

TWO

The Big Blue

THREE

Mommie Dearest

FOUR

Ladyhawke

FIVE

God Is Brazilian (Dues É Brasileiro)

SIX

Stella Dallas

SEVEN

Freaky Friday

EIGHT

Throw Momma from the Train

NINE

Alien Resurrection/Happy Easter, Felice Pasqua

TEN

The Myth of Fingerprints

ELEVEN

The Purple Rose of Cairo

END CREDITS

Bye Bye Brasil

EPILOGUE

Blade Runner, The Director’s Cut

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Red Carpet

Movie Credits

lobby cards

Photograph from My Mother’s Website of

Herself, Jit, and Me (circa 1976)

The Day I Arrive: My Mother and Me in Front of a Bookstore

My Mother and Me at the Italian Restaurant

Mother at the Breakfast Table in São Paulo

Museum of Precious Stones

Soares

Encontro e Desencontro

Postcard of Guilt

Postcard of Essential Questions

Family at Airport upon Arrival in Brasilia

My Grandmother Therezinha at the Church of Dom Bosco

Uncle Fernando at the University of Brasilia

The Painting of Mother Goddess

and Her Two Children

The Women of the Family—(left to right) Fernanda,

Victoria, Therezinha, Priscila, Theresa

My Brother’s Wedding Day: (left to right) Chris,

Priscila, Avtar, Jit, Jennifer

opening credits

blade runner

Holden (Interviewer): They’re just questions, Leon. . . . It’s a test designed to provoke an emotional response. . . . Describe, in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

Leon Kowalski (Replicant): My mother?

Holden: Yeah.

Leon Kowalski: Let me tell you about my mother.

(Leon shoots Holden.)

Ihave always avoided talking about my mother. Mostly because when people ask What did your mother say? or What does your mother do for a living? or When will I meet your mother? they assume I have one. And not only that I have one, but also that answers to these questions about my mother will be quick, clear, and simple. And yet, who has a simple relationship with one’s mother, even if that mother did raise you and support you and is still an integral part of your life? Nevertheless, when people innocently ask about my mother, they don’t realize they are unlatching a gate to a house I have kept closed for years. It’s not fit for living in. There’s no one hiding out in the attic or rotting in the basement, no bones buried under the floorboards or secret wills tucked into pantry tiles; in fact, quite the opposite. The house is empty, swept clean, sanitized. No furniture, no gardens, not even a box of baking soda in the fridge. And I like it that way. I can acknowledge the address ( yes, yes, I used to live there, a long time ago now ), when necessary, but keep on moving. No upkeep required. It wasn’t always this easy. The house used to call out to me sometimes—a reverse break and enter, forcing its way into my imagination to rummage about. But I didn’t know what the burglars were looking for. And I didn’t expect to find myself, later on, knocking at the door.

I hated being the girl in school without a mother. Growing up in Ottawa in the 1980s, I didn’t encounter a single other schoolmate without a mother. Some had two mothers—remarriage or adoption. Some had alcoholic or depressed mothers. Some had mothers with rare diseases who revolved in and out of hospital. But all had mothers. I didn’t even know anyone, at that point, with a dead mother, a special brand of martyr enabling motherhood, however faulty, to glow enshrined in eternal love. Fairy tales thrive on this notion, which is why all stepmothers are evil; no new woman can possibly compare to the idealized dead mother. The daughter is left unprotected, vulnerable to the trickery of witches and trolls. She must either find a new saviour—fairy godmother or brave prince—or learn to outwit her enemies. I didn’t know it at the time, but growing up, my main test would be to figure out which fate was going to befall me. And I had no role models. No one I knew had a runaway mother: a mother who had abandoned her family without a trace, and without securing a new mother for the children before disappearing off the map. It wasn’t a story you could tell quickly, clearly, or simply to people who wanted to know why your mother didn’t materialize on parent-teacher interview day, or at Girl Guides camp, or why no one ever picked you up from basketball practice or a birthday party. Of course, after an appropriate time spent at a given school or as part of any club or organization, teachers, coaches, administrators, parents, and schoolmates would eventually discover I was the girl without a mother, a discovery I both loathed and that brought some relief. I didn’t need to avoid the topic any longer. Others would now gladly avoid it for me. No one wants to remind the motherless girl that she’s motherless. Motherlessness in my situation was far too closely equated with lovelessness. To be this young and this loveless was pitiful. I knew it, and so did the adults. Kids my own age just thought I was weird.

But I still avoided talking about my mother. What was there to say? I couldn’t describe in single words the good things I remembered about her. I couldn’t remember good things. The bulk of my memories of her had packed up and left inside her luggage and were lost on the other side of the planet. I used to imagine this faceless woman picking up the memories and holding them to her chest. Like I imagined a mother would. And if I remembered bad things, I tried to shoo them away like wasps at a picnic. What was the point of remembering if it only stung? What could I say about my mother? Her name: Theresa. Her place of birth: Rio de Janeiro. Her favourite movie: no clue.

Not that I didn’t have a father. I did. And still do. But to talk about my father opened up another set of difficult, sometimes embarrassing, questions. My father, Avtar Uppal, an Indian immigrant, was once an up-and-comer, a tall-dark-and-handsome intelligent civil servant, a junior project manager for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), responsible for overseeing the building of infrastructure projects on eight Caribbean commonwealth islands, until, on January 13, 1977 (a Friday the 13 no less), he swallowed contaminated water during a sailboat accident in Antigua. That water mercilessly attacked his immune system in the form of transverse myelitis (a neurological disorder caused by an inflammatory process of the spinal cord): within forty-eight hours my strong, ambitious father was a quadriplegic. He was thirty-seven with two children, a boy and a girl, Amerjit and Priscila, ages three and two. At the time, my mother was basically a middle-class housewife living in a three-bedroom bungalow with an outdoor swimming pool. Overnight, she was cruelly cast in a new role: no longer the beaming wife in a the-sky’s-the-limit immigrant mixed-race love story, but the suffering heroine of a tragic family melodrama, required to attend to the relentless needs of an invalid day and night.

I’m not sure when I became conscious of the fact that my mother deserved some pity for her situation. Probably not as a child, since I likely accepted my father’s condition and everything it entailed—hoists in and out of bed and into a wheelchair, elaborate pill boxes, a washroom commode, wooden ramps, and a shaky grey platform attached to electric pulleys that served as an elevator—as a normal part of our lives, and my mother’s stress and subsequent violent mood swings as irritating factors that kept her from playing dolls or board games with me. Like most children, my love for my mother probably existed without me even trying because she was my mother and I wanted her attention, approval, comfort, hugs, kisses, gifts, bedtime stories. I probably thought she was a good mother, maybe the best mommy in the whole world, because she was mine. I’m sure I never thought too hard about how difficult it must have been to be married to a disabled man, to try to keep up a decent lifestyle on a small pension and with skyrocketing health care costs (my father’s income took as big a blow as his body), to find oneself still a young woman but now one forced to say goodbye to sex and travel and to accept a life of constant emotional suffering. She disappeared shortly after my eighth birthday, so I hadn’t yet developed such intellectual complexity. But later on, as an adolescent and young teenager, as I became a caregiver for the man my mother found impossible to withstand, amidst all my own anger and resentment, I did feel something akin to pity for her.

But I always felt more sorry for my father. Even when my mother lived with us. His medically adjusted motorized bed with the steel guardrails and the triangle hoist was a source of constant sorrow but also of reliability. While my overwhelmed mother busied herself around us, cooking separate meals to account for my father’s new low-calorie diet, sewing clothes and cutting endless grocery and drugstore coupons, flying into fits of tears and glass-shattering screams, my father would quiz me on my times tables or sing silly nursery rhymes with me. Eventually, my mother couldn’t stand it anymore (I use the expression purposefully). The charmed life of happy domesticity and bourgeois luxury she had once imagined for herself banged futilely against wheelchairs and suppositories and spitting tubs. As I said, eventually I ended up feeling sorry for her. Part of me still does. As Hardev Dange, the quadriplegic protagonist of my novel To Whom It May Concern, explains to his daughter Birendra before her wedding, In sickness and in health might slip eloquently off the tongue as poetry, but is not an easy vow to keep. Marriage is a written contract, but also a contract of the imagination. . . . In sickness and in health. Hardev asks, Who can imagine this? Really imagine it? Very few. For my mother, the contract was an impossible one to fulfill. The voyage of my father’s life had reached an impassable border. His passport had been stamped: sickness. Health would no longer issue him a visa.

In late November 1982, my mother fled, draining all the money from the bank accounts, including the small savings my brother and I had painstakingly deposited in our silver piggy banks. She was thirty-six years old; we were eight and nine. She had purchased three plane tickets for Brazil. One afternoon she tried to pull my bony brother into a beige car I didn’t recognize. As his lanky limbs writhed in her grip, I screamed with all the lung power I could muster until she let him go. My brother and I whipped open the screen and front doors and tore inside the house and upstairs, latching ourselves onto my father’s bed like animals to tree branches in a storm. Afraid (of what exactly, I didn’t know—of tomorrow, the future, the realization that if my mother had been able to shove my brother inside the car we might have been split apart forever), we locked the front and back doors. But there was no need for locks. She didn’t want in. She wanted out. And she was already gone.

My father needed help. On all kinds of medication and requiring continuous support to manage basic daily tasks such as shaving, using the toilet, bathing, cooking soup for lunch, he was not equipped to raise young children on his own. As we clung anxiously to his bed, watching episodes of Happy Days and The Facts of Life, then falling asleep exhausted against his steel guardrail (I still find rectangular medical rails—stomach pressed to metal, a hand or elbow peeking out—strangely reassuring), my father made phone calls. The next afternoon, a tall man with a warm brown face and mild speech, an uncle I’d met only once before, arrived in a tiny red Toyota, quickly and efficiently piled us all in, folding my father into the front seat like a dress shirt and the two of us in the back like shoe boxes, and drove us over the border. We made no fuss, as if we knew our lives were now placed in other people’s hands and we needed to be able to say goodbye, not just to the idea of a mother but to all the things we associated with home. Although I was only in grade three, I was to sing the lead in the Christmas choir pageant, which included not one but two solos I had been practising nonstop for weeks. I had prepared a presentation on monarch butterflies, including dozens of specimens painstakingly copied and coloured-in from our Encyclopedia Britannica. My brother must have had hockey practice, a science quiz, a friend’s birthday party at the McDonald’s caboose. But we didn’t tell our teachers we were leaving. We didn’t have the chance to tell a single friend. Within twenty-four hours, our Ottawa house, 2134 Erinbrook Crescent, once painfully alive with wounds and despair and skinny energetic siblings playing in the basement with trains, battling at Ping-Pong or belting out The Wizard of Oz records, blinked into emptiness as we filed into place on the highway, our own form of purgatory, awaiting our fate.

That night, after the clouds became blacker and the traffic lights fuzzier, we checked into a roadside motel with worn brown carpets and curtains, and a funny odour like moist towels. My unfamiliar uncle, whose skin smelled of sweet spice, wheeled my father into the room, unzipped a beige luggage bag, and handed my brother and me two packages wrapped in glossy red Christmas paper.

An early present, he offered, his white teeth, like my father’s, a sharp contrast to his dark brown skin. You’ve had a hard day.

He was probably right, but I honestly don’t remember it being a hard day. We had no idea where we were going or for how long, but we packed very little—my brother and I an army-green canvas backpack each with T-shirts and underwear, colouring and puzzle books—mine with a plush lamb toy as well as a pink skipping rope for pit stops. Plus: a day off from school! What a rarity! Usually only gifted on blisteringly cold snow days. We sang along to Top 40 pop music the whole ride: Toni Basil’s Mickey, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, Billy Idol’s White Wedding. Like a vacation, although I’d never been on vacation. New York? I had never been to New York. I wanted to see the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to taste a New York hotdog, like I’d seen on television cop shows. We’re off to New York!

Cool! my brother exclaimed, punching his left hand into the pocket of the baseball glove, beaming a buck-toothed smile. This uncle knew he was left-handed. A real soft brown leather Wilson baseball glove!

For me: Barbie. A real Barbie, with silky blond hair and blue eyes and a frilly white sundress. Not a fake plastic copy with rough broom hair you could buy for $1.99 at Boot’s Pharmacy or Dominion. What was happening was something from the movies, like Miracle on 34th Street or Cinderella. Our family couldn’t afford name-brand baseball gloves or Barbie dolls. We played with these things at our friends’ houses, but they remained in other bedrooms and play bins, on greener lawns. I now knew something was very, very wrong. I stared at my new blond playmate and I didn’t want to give her back, but I did want some sort of explanation. Like my mother, she already seemed unreal, a plastic substitute for something essential we were being deprived. Why were these two small childish dreams coming true? What larger dream had disappeared into that anonymous beige car?

Dreams are resilient. Like down-and-out street fighters, or single moms challenging the legal system. Dreams are also dangerous. My mother’s heart was stuffed to the brim with dreams, and after my father’s accident she watched them poke out like pillow feathers and fly away. I can’t claim to know the specific content of her dreams, but I do know she was a passionate and visceral dreamer. Everyone in my family is. My father dreamed big dreams too. Eight Caribbean islands: Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, Montserrat, Dominica. A three-bedroom house with a green yard lined with pines and a large maple tree in front for his kids to climb and swing from, vegetable gardens and strawberry bushes, and, of course, a swimming pool. Plans for a farm in the country where, for a hobby, he might breed German shepherds or border collies. And I know he still carries those dreams with him. My father is the most resilient person I’ve ever met. I just don’t know if he still recognizes himself in those dreams, of if they belong to another time and place, like old film reels of a young man who had travelled the world before coming to Canada as part of his job on British Airways, who had swept the Brazilian military attaché’s daughter off her feet and into a sari to marry him, who had stood beside prime ministers to christen airports and power plants. A young man who little resembles the distressed and balding man, legs shaking uncontrollably in his wheelchair, white linen with blue stripes draped over his lap supporting a tray he uses as a surface to sign cheques and write out lists of medical supplies and doctor’s appointments. My father avoids talking about his dreams. He’d rather talk NHL hockey scores, health care cuts, or Dirty Harry movies. Not dreams. And certainly not about my mother.

Neither will my brother. He pretends she is dead. That fantasy suits his own dream life. My brother is practical, and confronting an unchangeable past is simply impractical. It interferes with his enjoyment and quality of life. The lie places my mother not on the other side of the world eating and sleeping but on another plane of existence without movement or substance, no possibility of interaction. He’s thrown his fistful of dirt on the coffin. His memories have run like hell, no intention of returning. I wish I were able to believe she were dead.

Tell me about your mother.

Tell me about your mother.

Tell me about your mother.

Writers’ psyches are a tad perverse. Ever since I was eighteen and had started writing seriously at university, I entertained the idea of embarking on a trip to find my runaway mother, and to write a book about the journey even if I didn’t find her (and for some reason I actually believed I wouldn’t—as if she were an elusive fairy-tale villain who lived under a mystic bridge or a sci-fi monster hibernating in a cave on another planet, and not a flesh-and-blood human being who predictably ran back to the land of her birth and to the nest of her immediate family). I’ve always been fascinated by how we mourn people and places that still exist, are still very much alive but are dead or unattainable to us. When someone disappears, we create and re-create that person in our imaginations, shaping them to suit what we think of ourselves at this particular stage in our lives, a specific time and place in our personal history. To come up face to face against the real person—whose face will never appear to you as you envisioned it—is to come up against and interrogate your own imagination and discover through cross-examination how true or how false you’ve been to this person, to the past, and to yourself. The ramifications are serious, no matter how elusive. Perhaps, more truthfully, I hoped I wouldn’t actually find her and force her to become real once again. Who you imagine others to be reflects on who you imagine yourself to be.

Exposed as inhuman because he has no mother, the replicant in Blade Runner resorts to brutal violence. That uncomfortable opening scene always makes me laugh. And I laugh even harder since I’ve discovered Blade Runner is my mother’s all-time favourite movie. She’s seen it over a hundred times. In the theatre. I’m pleased that her favourite movie is, I think, a great movie, a cinematic classic, the epitome of sci-fi, which I know is snobbish on my part, but I can’t help it. At least in this, my mother has good taste.

Directed by Ridley Scott in 1982 and set in future Los Angeles, in the year 2019, the film is a dizzying spectrum of industrial waste, neon strip clubs, smoke-filled interrogation rooms, eerie toy-filled hotel suites, and advanced biological labs. Through a tough-talking, alcoholic hit man, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and a tragically beautiful disillusioned android, Rachael (played by Sean Young), the film exposes a dirty, greedy, racist, and irresponsible civilization imploding. (Sound familiar?) It is also a movie about exile and homelessness, suffering and survival, and the horror and vitality of dreams. It doesn’t escape me any longer that the seductive porcelain replicant, who wants to rewrite her fate and that of her lover Roy (played by Rutger Hauer) as doomed machines programmed to live only a few years, the role that star-rocketed Daryl Hannah’s career, is named Priscilla. Secretly, I’ve imagined, it’s one of the reasons my mother watches that movie over and over again. Does my mother envision her daughter as a weary traveller wandering through alleyways and Dumpsters masquerading as a mannequin, hoping for a longer lease on life, hoping for a future? I certainly must not live in this world to her. I must be jumping from one devastated planet to another.

What I find most interesting about Blade Runner’s human-machine-mixed society is how fake memories serve the androids to convince them they’re human. The pain of discovering that the memories are false is too much for some of the disillusioned to bear. Probably the most heartbreaking scene in an otherwise thrilling disaster movie occurs when the impeccably groomed and controlled Rachael, off-kilter at the suggestion that she is a replicant, thrusts forward a photograph of a dark-haired woman she believes to be her mother as irrefutable evidence of her human biology. Deckard proves the photograph is a fake. Rachael has no mother, no family, no human blood. The most pressing question at the end of the film is: Does Deckard know that he too is likely inhuman? Yet being inhuman doesn’t stop them from suffering, loving, hating, caring, running, or dreaming.

What does it mean to have a mother? Is it the necessary condition of humanity? If you don’t have a mother (or have no contact with her), what is the value of your invented memories or projections of this person over the years? Does this change how you suffer, love, hate, care, run, or dream? Does it change how the humans with mothers interact with you? Like Rachael, I have sometimes insisted to skeptics my story is a human one after all. Like Rachael, I have sometimes gone home with tears in my eyes and a hopelessly ineffectual photograph shoved in my pocket.

I found my mother by accident on the internet on a sunny September afternoon in 2002. I wasn’t looking for her. I was