My mother and her lipstick

Men say, “Women are complicated. Life is simpler than even attempting to understand them.” However, on the contrary I believe there is a possible solution to this generalised conceived notion. 

Maybe, it involves the art of observing little details, particularly tiny simple objects towards which they get inevitably attached to. The source of this belief lies in an old memory of mine. 

I have a memory from approximately 12 years back, when I was around 12 years old. This memory is about a family trip around the Himalayan beauties of North Bengal, India. Although the memory of the entire trip is vague, the details are particularly attached to one night during the journey from one hill station to another. The  mountainous roads used to be narrower and less developed, leaving almost 5 inch gap between the wheels of the car and the edge of the road. If not for skilled Nepali drivers, one could almost consider a trip like that as a grand suicide mission. I was too young to hold any concepts of ‘skill’ or ‘driver’ in my mind, thus the trip was some kind of apparently family suicide mission for me, but for that one night I had eliminated the word ‘apparently’ from my dictionary. Therefore, it was really a staged majestic aesthetic style of suicide amidst the dark, wild night, where divine powers intervened with a guided support of fascinating murder weapons of all kind that included thunder, lightning, heavy downpour and dense fog, each of which attempted in a competitive manner to make their presence strongly felt. 

The lonely tiny jeep was stacked with 10 humans, among whom our tiny family of 3 occupied the front seat beside the skilled Nepali driver. I wondered why my father chose the front seat for us, but then it occurred to me that he secretly enjoyed any opportunity where he could make an extravagant display of his leadership skills. In this case, he was leading the rest towards death, maybe that was his feeling. The driver sitting right beside us somehow felt that he must put up an expression of confidence, as he grew aware that all of us were aware of the situation and the fact that the turns of the road were invisible. There was indeed no choice but to depend completely on the intuitive faculty of the driver’s mind, as he steered the jeep randomly through the curvy narrow, very narrow roads. If the next turn and his intuition were not coherent, death will not even bother knocking on our doors but blow us up directly. The road seemed to have millions of such turns that filled our minds with questions - right or left? life or death? I so much wished to become a buddhist monk then and there, that could help me with some middle path, instead of panicking and stressing for a 7 hours journey. I thought tourism meant relaxing and enjoying, but my family seemed to have some other meaning behind the word ‘tourism’. However, things became worse. 

There a sudden loud and deafening sound. Our jeep came to a sudden stop. The driver got out for sometime to check what’s ahead. He came back with a pretentious calm expression. “The journey will be a little delayed. There has been a landslide”, he said. “How long till we are stuck here?”, asked a lady from the middle seat. “I am not sure but maybe an hour”, replied the driver. So, there we were, stuck at an altitude of more than 10,000 ft, waiting for a successful completion of the group suicide mission. If life wasn’t worth living, one could always die simply. However, this group of individuals were determined for a dramatic death for a worthless life. Any kind of psychoanalysis and reasoning in this case would be a futile effort, for it was a matter of common sense then that humans are indeed irrational beings and the one to refute such a claim would be another irrational being. Thus, the reason of argumentation here is analogous to the reasoning behind such an attempt of such a journey. Therefore, there we were stuck at the mercy of nature’s sense of timing. It was at this moment, when the jeep was filled with the stink of human sweat in extreme cold weather, humans extending their irrationalism through expressions of stress and anxiety for an irrational cause, that I found a unique kind of a behaviour from a fellow passenger. This passenger is my mother. Suddenly, I found her engaged in the activity of searching something in her bag. Assuming she might be needing water under such circumstances, I offered her a bottle of water that was lying near me. She refused. After a while, I find her taking out her lipstick box. A moment later, she engages herself completely and peacefully in the act of applying a wine coloured lipstick on her dried up lips. Now, this wasn’t irrationalism. There was something very special and more to this act under those circumstances. This wasn’t rational also. She seemed to have found some kind of buddhist enlightenment, some kind of middle path. I wondered: Is that an anxiety reduction act? Is that a way of distraction from the very present reality by creating another more powerful present? or does she simply want to look good before dying? I couldn’t find an answer then, but maybe that was one of the particular reasons for my strong memory of that night. 

The wait for death on that night now appears to me as ‘Waiting for Godot’. We managed to survive through the night, through the incredible thrilling journey and the innumerable adrenaline rushes for every single turn that could decide our very next moment. I am still alive, so is my family, so you already know we survived it. However, this story was precisely about my mother and her lipstick. So the previous statements were just an elaboration for the purpose of enough emphasis on the relation between women, tiny simple objects and terrible, terrible circumstances. 

Last week, my mother had an interview for the position of a school principle. She is usually an anxious woman with a continuity of stress situations appearing and disappearing in her mind. This interview was very important for her as she liked to live independently from her own earning and she could not manage to think of any alternative financial solution, in case this interview failed. The thought that there still lies a possibility that she may not get the job almost gave her panic attacks. As a gesture of support I was waiting with her near the reception. After 15 mins, it will again be a question of survival (although less intense than the above mentioned and elaborated suicide mission). Suddenly, my mother starts sweating heavily and I realise that she wasn’t having an almost panic attack, she was indeed having a complete panic attack. The man behind the reception noticed her fainting, which led him to rush towards my mother with a bottle of cold water. Under those circumstances any patient will accept water. Under any extreme situation, water helps to every extent possible as a supporting ailment. Ridiculously, my mother refuses to drink water. In my entire life, I have seen people having panic attacks but I have never seen a single soul refusing to drink water under those circumstances. 

Something more ridiculous crossed my mind at that moment. I do not know how or from where the thought came, but I found myself opening her bag and taking out her lipstick box, which I consequently offered her. I have no justification for this act but the results were not less weird. She did accept the lipstick box and in her half conscious state, she applied it on her dried lips. After this accomplishment, she asked for the bottle of water. The man, who had previously rushed towards her to offer the kind gesture of help and support, now stood shocked, with a loss of expression on his face. 

Finally he managed to utter some words, “I always found women complicated. I have not even dared to make any attempts to understand them. However, you do seem to be exceptionally talented in understanding women.”

Therefore, I have come to a certain conclusion gained from an observed knowledge of life experiences. The particular problem of understanding women lies in the problem of understanding itself. Humans, as irrational beings can hardly be understood from the point of view of reason and rationalism. Consequently, as women are humans too, the same applies to them. Thus, the only approach towards understanding them could be just a careful observation of tiny simple objects that they are peculiarly attached to and the things that they may particular need at certain times under certain circumstances, which is of course different for every women. The knowledge derived from this understanding could be a possible solution for every man who wants to keep his woman happy, for this knowledge is in itself a kind of understanding too, but again if a man is double dating, he must be careful to not confuse the objects each of the women are connected to, for that may again lead to a kind of misunderstanding as well as further complications, consequently leading his thoughts to the old conceived notion that ‘women are complicated’.