The Uninspired Homebody

You know, being a homebody had its perks for different people in the literary world. Case in point: Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte. I think it has something to do with the name ‘Emily’. These women were cooped up in their homes. They had very little else to do besides daily chores and a few necessary visitations to the local parish and some relatives. Despite this, they led rich inner lives and wrote literature that can blow your mind away.

That’s another reason I blame my mum. Perhaps if I too had been named Emily, I might have turned out to be a great novelist or poet – I’d have SOMETHING to redeem my sorry, sedentary, homebody existence. But seeing how our nation has a knack for distorting perfectly respectable, simple names, I don’t know how I’d react to people referring to me as ‘Imlee’. Just imagine how I’d have been teased in middle school:

‘Imlee kee chatni,

Cheeni dali,

Phir bhi khatti

Imlee ki chatni!”

But to get back to Ms. Dickinson. She always wore white (she was probably as averse to clothes shopping as I am; complicated affair, that!) received guests reluctantly (ah! kindred spirit who lived too soon!) and towards the end of her life, didn’t even bother leaving her room. She sometimes spoke to her guests from behind her bedroom door, not even bothering to meet them face-to-face. How great would it be to receive spittle-challenged visitors who can’t keep their bodily fluids in their mouth when they talk at bay! They can spray your door while you yell at them from behind saying: “Waw? Waw you say? I can’t hear anything but slurping!” But I write no poetry and therefore have no skill to legitimize my impertinence.

And yet, and yet, hiding in her room, this is the kind of stuff she wrote:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And being, but an ear,
And I and Silence some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here.

Can you feel the passion? The anxiety? The drumbeat of the heart? She sat in her room and wrote the world, the rhythm of life and the knell of death. No wonder she had no time for tiresome visitors. There were muses enough to give her company!

Emily Bronte was a teacher and homebody just like me. She did household chores, walked the moors and then came up with Heathcliff, who said things like:

“You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me -then what right had you to leave me? .. misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

I re-read this and my heart is torn over and over again. And this comes from a woman who spent her time with sniveling snots and taught them Sunday school, only to return to arduous household chores. YET she wrote about a man who was elemental, passionate, turgid, earthy, wild and alive; a masterpiece who the muse introduced to the solitary Ms. Bronte while she walked along the moors. Perhaps he was the muse who wrestled with her as she struggled against the wind and passed the graveyard on the way back home.

Both these women were homebodies. They consorted with muses and they shook the world. Many critics say they wrote thus because they were homebodies.

And then there’s me. Little old me. Okay, yes, I’ve gained a few pounds, but I could still, technically, from one angle, be described as little.

Okay fine. There’s me.

I have no muse. I think my muse gave up on me a long time ago. I can imagine her (respectable, Shia, Syed homebodies like me do not receive male visitors in their bedrooms, even phantasmagoric ones, thank-you-very-much) begging me to get up and type something, whispering poems and stories while I just clean my ear with a cutip and complain of ‘that buzzing sound’ and spray the entire room with Mortein.

Oh well. Here’s to all the homebodies who didn’t turn out like Madams Emily. It’s okay. We still exist, even though the only thing we have to show for it is a sizeable behind.