Amazing women in my life - part 4

This story is about B .... she was born in erstwhile Bangladesh, eldest of three sisters. She grew up being educated in the village school and finished her Matriculate. The stories that I heard from her about those days, were full of her liveliness, her feeling one with nature, her writing poetries, her curiosity about people, life and the world in general. She loved teaching and did not really care about getting married.

But this was not to be ... being the eldest of three sisters and remaining unmarried and blocking the queue was not a conceivable idea for a girl some seventy five years ago. To top it, her father was not really a very efficient person who looked after the family well, hence the mother grew more and more anxious.

B was quite a plane jane to look at and she was dark. But one asset that she had was her hair, which went below her knee, long, black, thick, shiny, straight hair.

Being poor, her parents were worried about getting their daughters married off and in came a proposal from another family of the same community. The man was slightly older, very fair, could hardly speak Bengali, was a city bred and a practicing criminal lawyer. The only taint that he had was that his family had a kind of ill repute vis-a-vis marriages, etc and people were not very keen to send their daughters to this family.

However, B's parents could not say no to such a proposal as he seemed too good to be true. Besides, they had other two daughters waiting in line. Hence, to clear the line, B was married off much against her wishes and she gradually accepted her fate.

She came to Kolkata with her husband and discovered that while he earned a lot, he had almost zero savings and would spend his earnings with his friends drinking and playing cards, etc.

She decided to change the state of affairs ... it was not an easy task but she did not give up. To make matters worse, she became pregnant and slowly discovered to her horror that remaining pregnant was the order of the day as she often was forced into marital rape as per her account.

She tried to look after the children - all nine of them - as much as possible - she did not allow them to go astray, she did not leave them and went away with her mother which could have easily been done as her mother could not see her daughter's condition deteriorate any further.

Her days would pass trying to organise and keep her family together between her husband's psychological disturbances, to his erratic earnings and frequent non earning phases. She kept up feeding, clothing, educating all nine children and perhaps treated them a little too harshly lest they went astray. She succeeded, most of her children became well educated and became successful professionals in their own right.

Then slowly nature started taking its toll, gone was the free flowing, determined, life loving woman and was replaced by a angst ridden, neurotic person who lived either in the past regret or in the fear of the future. Her children for who she spent her youth, started turning away from her as they too could not deal with her anxiety, her neurosis of keeping some fights alive among her children, her paranoia about outsiders which prevented her children from brining any friends home or having any fun at home. She even prevented brothers and sisters playing with one another.

The time I got to know her, she was in her fifties, and obviously she did not take kindly to me as i was dating one of her sons and later married. My relationship with her remained tumultuous as she could never trust me with her well being, nor did she make any effort of providing me with any affection. While this made me feel angry and unhappy with her, I later realized that she did not have the wherewithal to trust anyone with her well being, not her husband, nor her children, nor her own sisters. Continuously dealing with anxiety and uncertainty had pushed her into such a corner, that coming back was very difficult.

I got to see her for about 15 years during my courtship and later days and there was these rare moments when I would get a glimpse of that teenager who loved to be one with nature, who would be curious like a child and who would want to write poems and show them around shyly and would dream about better days. Those were the days that I really loved her, though I never told her that as she would have never believed me and would have created a new drama from her paranoia.

I sometimes wondered, what would have happened had she received a different life where she could have steered the ship herself and made her life worthwhile. It was a pity to see a talented person filling her life with regrets and bitternes while there was a huge potential for her to be a great teacher, a poet and a philosopher.

B died suddenly, one afternoon in a heart attack, as though that was the last game that she played with others.

Connecting!

I will be out for the weekend and I realised how much am I going to miss my blog and my blogger friends.

If I look back at the last couple of months, I can see how many wonderful  and talented people I have met in the blogosphere.  People who write about varied subjects, people who are as different from me as cheese and chalk, people who have very similar interests in life as me, people who have known me differently and now also are my blog buddies and are co bloggers.  The experience has been extremely rich and rewarding.

There are so many blogs that I love reading and keep going back to get my fill every day;  some of which are:

http://myriadutopia.blogspot.com/ - for lovely and soulful poems

http://stuffnoonetoldme.blogspot.com/ - for great animation and humour

http://weblogbetter.com/ - a wonderfully written blog for tips and tricks hosted by warm and friendly Jean Sarauer.

http://www.everydaygyaan.com/ - for touching and inspiring posts hosted by a very compassionate Corinne.

http://bloggingwithoutablog.com/ - again a very well written helpful and friendly blog hosted by wonderful Barbara

http://cybernag.wordpress.com/ - for a humorous yet vibrant landscaping of a woman's life

http://eveslungs.blogspot.com/ - posts on varied subjects coming straight from the heart of a passionate person.

Many many other such ones are part of my blog roll that I visit every day to laugh, to think, to feel inspired, to feel touched, to act, to respond .... and everyday is a new experience.

I have received responses to my posting in many different ways, some helpful tips, some friendly pats,  some kind comments, some helpful critiques, silent but regular visitors ...  All these make me want to write more.

I have learnt from my friends about blog etiquette, about various techniques and tools that I can use, about what it means to be a blogger and why do we write and about passion, rigour, commitment and focus.  I am so grateful and appreciative of all my friends who comment, who visit and who teach me to be a better person and a blogger every day.

What about you?  how's your experience of connecting in the blogosphere?

Do we know who we are? Really?

"I seem to see my self from his eyes while i have always possessed the
intelligence and politics to know or perhaps i should say interpret
who i am as a woman. But this knowledge i cannot assimilate in me, the
experience is of being in ruin, ............ "

mail from a dear friend to me, in response to an anguished mail sent to her.

Says another vivacious, lively, intelligent, perceptive woman, to me, on her first meeting with me as a therapist:

" I am so sorry that I have cried.... I mean this is a first meeting with you and all that".

"Why the shame?" I ask her.

"shouldn't I be calm and composed and not really show my emotions at all? I mean isn't this what the world wants from me, from you, from all of us?" she responds, albeit a bit surprised that i am even asking her this question.

"well you are here to meet a therapist, and you are talking about your distress and while you share all that, you would feel emotional - most of all, this is not a social visit" I try to pose another exploration point.

She pauses for a while ... and then she talks about her aspiration of wanting to be someone who should take all the shit coming her way and not flinch, not react but remain calm.  and her "role model" is a person who actually looks down upon the whole world and their cousins, has cholesterol problem, not able to have a healthy conjugal life and so on.

when i point this out to her, she agrees quickly but is not really convinced about being who she is really.

As I look at two of these instances and many others including myself at times, I often wonder, do we really have an idea of who we really are?   Or has this "me" become an amalgamation of images and perceptions generated and received from people around us, images which have provided a temporary relief, images which have saved us from many embarrassing moments,  images which tell us who we "should" be and not who we "are"?

for many of us, the inner being is shrouded in shame for being too alive, too impulsive, too demanding, too verbose, too sensuous, too argumentative, too questioning, too much to take.

for some others, it may be that the inner being is held back lest others make fun of us, lest others take advantage of us, lest others desert us, lest others make us feel weak and so on and so forth?

so what is our stance of being who we are?  how do we experience ourselves internally?   What is our politics of who we are?

The world  of relationships is totally made of perception.  We never really see the other person as who he or she is, but what we perceive he or she is, through our unique and individual looking glass made up of our world view, our biases and our values.  In other words, it is humanly impossible to see the person as it is.  What we can gather are only the objective data about name, family name, degrees, work, education, etc but can never be objective about the person.  We look at the world through perception and it is always subjective.

So, in all these, how do we perceive us?  Do we look at ourselves through these looking glasses as well?  is there a difference between me perceiving myself and others perceiving me?  what happens when there is a difference?  Is there a struggle to say this is who I am?

When I look at myself, I see myself and I quote from a mail that I have written to a friend, below:


quote:
"like i was telling you the other day, i feel very masculine internally, so my first descriptors of myself always are that I am intelligent, tough, quick on my feet, analytical and highly action oriented.  the next level would be that i am sensuous (not the way a woman is described) i.e. my senses are strong, i hear keenly, i smell keenly, i see keenly and i am quite aware of touch of any kind.  i am also very intuitive and am aware of the bodily sensations that i experience.

all these are devoid of other people, i.e. I look at myself irrespective of how others see me as.

the trouble starts from now on - any other descriptors of me such as:

loving, gracious, accepting, rude, scary, generous, pretty, ugly, argumentative, petty, kind, irrational, intellectual, stubborn, giving, caring, loyal, sexy, unsexy (can't think of anything else at the moment that describes me) are all other people dependent.  If they see me like this then i am like this, otherwise, i don't see myself as scary, petty, rude, etc, etc."

unquote.


I wonder what is it for others?  do we even ask these questions or do we tell ourselves, oh well, I have no problem in declaring to the world who I am and if they can't take it, it is their problem?  Really?

or do we tell ourselves, actually I don't even want to know who I am as it is too much of a bother, or it is of no use.  Too much of intellectualisation.  Really?

I don't believe people actually like to imprison themselves in either of these two extremes, most of us perhaps live in the in between world.  what about you?

Amazing women in my life (part 3) - the story of J

J was born into a trading community in undivided Bengal.  She grew up with a unstable mother, a nervous father and five or six siblings.  As was the custom in her community, she was married off quite early to a man twelve years older to her in the same community.  Barely did she attain puberty, she was pregnant with a child and from this point on, her life took an altogether different turn.  Her mother and her husband both died suddenly in an attack of small pox, which those days was endemic; J flabbergasted by this turn of events, lost her mind and was locked up in a room probably under advice from the local medico. She gave birth to her daughter but could not look after the daughter due to her illness and her mother in law looked after the infant.

It is not known to me for how long J lived in that hazy, misty world of hers, for when she came to our house, she was nearly forty years old.  All these stories about her is her recollection of her past, which would be presented to me by her differently at different points of time; sometime with a bit of spice and sometimes in bitterness, in anger and in utter deep anguish.

But I could guess how she may have passed her time, what did it take for her to get out of that strange world of depression, part manic, part delusional world of hers.  She says when she felt better, she resumed her husband's money lending business to local traders, looked for a suitable match for her only daughter who was in her early teens and got her married off.  Since she came from a middle class family(not educated much but with enough money from trading in the joint family business), life should have sailed smoothly thereafter for her;  but it was not to be.  

One fine morning, her daughter's father in law (who was a small trader) disappeared leaving his family in debt and despair.  Her son-in-law took to drinking and drugs, her daughter came back to J with a little baby boy.  While J's brothers in laws were supportive to begin with, over time they started making their displeasure clear to J that her married daughter with a child were not welcome here, especially when her costs are being shared from the joint family kitty.  By this time, J's money lending business was usurped by J's mother in law and that left her with very little money of her own.

So, for the first time in her life, a housewife and totally unaccustomed to the big bad world outside, J decided to work to support her daughter and her grandson.  The only work that she could find was of domestic help, cooking, etc.  Her first job was in Bihar in a older gentleman's house and his joint family. J learnt to cook, to sweep, to swab, to do all household chores that she was not required to do back at home.

Three years passed, J settled down in her job and was able to maintain her daughter and her family who now had two kids.  But life had other plans for her.  Her toddler grand daughter passed away and her daughter became distraught, unstable and left home never to come back.  J decided to come back to kolkata to look after her grandson and take up the job of a domestic help here.  This is how she came to our family as we were looking for someone to cook and live with us as I was expecting my daughter.  I was working at that time and having someone at home to cook and look after the house was a necessity.

J entered our lives twenty six years ago and she is still around - I am so grateful that she is around although living with her is both a  trying as well as a comforting experience.

J is the pillar of strength and the source of irritation that I have always had around me.  Her being around meant my never having to worry about the safety and nurturance of my daughter, about the maintenance and upkeep of home, about taking care of my father, about our three pets and the rest of the household, i.e. me and my husband.  She knew exactly who needed what and what needed to be done when.  She ensured that the part timers were doing their job well and she had the best interest of the household at all points of time.

She made my life hell through her over demanding, over inquisitive and over dominating nature.  She had the answers to all questions asked, she offered advice to every problem that we ever faced irrespective of its personal or private nature, she wanted to take leave the minute she knew I had to attend some important meetings, she decided what was best for home and for my daughter whether I agreed or not and she constantly sniggered at my attempts to be a good mother by trying to read up on child rearing or seeking advise from others or trying out something new.  In other words, she filled all the voids for the "fault finding mother-in-law", the 'over nosy aunt", the "very critical aunt-in-law" and all the stereotypes that one can ever imagine.

In fact, if I were to write all the stories about J, it will fill up an entire book and will make good reading too I guess.  But my point of writing about J is to not make fun of her or to show her in a bad light, but to write about a complex and a very simple individual whose lust for life makes her fight against all odds, even if some  of them  are brought upon by her own anxiety, who offers a whole lot of love and affection to people she considers her own, who can be a pillar of support and whose life's motto is  "I will do my best for people i care about till I die, and they better love me for it, or else ..."  

I have not had too many supportive women in earlier part of my life and during my married days, had very little support from my in laws in all sense.  While I could manage not receiving emotional or any other kind of support from them during my marriage, managing home and a child without any help was very difficult.  This was the time when J turned out to be my biggest support and strength.  She was always there with me especially when I was confused, afraid, distraught about being a new mother, about being a 'bad' person in my fragile relationship with my husband, about being a 'anxious employee' in my marketing job, high work pressure, late nights and frequent travel and tours.  She would stay up the night if needed and in the morning would take charge of the kitchen without murmuring a single protest.  It was as though I could always depend on her and she showered us with her love, affection, attention and her demands.  One small example of this is that J comes from a Vaishnavite faith; the family i married to were christians and naturally the food habits were very different.  J's family did not touch even onions, and at our home, beef and pork were much loved.  Since our daughter loved meat, J decided to cook whatever she wanted even it meant that she had to do penance every time she went back home.  J did not do this because she wanted to show off how great she was but because our daughter loved them, and her wishes ruled J's world.

I don't how much else can I write about J; she is nearly 70 years old and she still works.  I have offered her to sit at home and get a pension from me but she chooses to work for my ex-husband as it still offers her a place that she can call her second home.  Her life has not become better despite her hard work all these years, building a house for her grandson, getting him married off, taking care of his family and his two kids  with her hard earned money.  Her grandson has turned out to be like his father, an alcoholic and a waster.   While my heart bleeds for J, I also know how much is she responsible for not letting her grandson become a man on his own, how much she spoilt him, how much control she had of his life and when predictably he has given up,  she feels angry, helpless and sad both for herself and for him.

I keep telling her I am there for her, and she knows it too, but I can never replace what her heart's desire was; to have a home of her own, to be owned up by her own people, to be looked after  and respected by them in a peaceful and stable set up where she could call the shots but need not  be the bread earner. 

In all of these twenty six years, J has become an integral part of our lives much to the chagrin of many of my relatives who thought I was giving more important to a servant as compared to them.  But to me, J was and still is part of the family despite her over dominance and her annoying self.   She in many ways is my only relative or a family member who has taught me how to make a family, she taught me how to unabashedly own others, how to shower love and affection with all its associate irritants, and how to expect the same things in return and to not feel ashamed because you want them.  She taught me what it means to claim space, to make people belong to you even when they were not one's own, how to belong with a passion and with a commitment that only a home maker can do and how to make a brick and mortar house into a space called home.  

Amazing women in my life - part 2

Today I am going to tell you the story of my cousin  Neelu.  She was born in early 1930s in Rangoon, Burma.  Her parents later settled down in Kolkata and Neelu was largely brought up by her mother.

Neelu's childhood was not very pleasant, she grew up watching her parents fight;  mother struggling to make two ends meet but at the same time trying to give her the best of education and comfort that she could provide. Neelu went to a convent school and had many friends.  She was a gregarious and  lively person, who loved to live!  She loved food, she loved outings, she loved the good things in life, she loved gossiping, she loved meddling in other people's lives, she loved helping others, she loved cooking and most of all, she loved being appreciated, recognised and loved.

In no time Neelu fell in love with a young musician who also happened to be the landlord's son.  Needless to say their union was not looked upon kindly by both sets of parents - to boot, the two families belonged to two sides of Bengal who were  diametrically opposite to each other in their culture, in dialect, in food habits, in their beliefs and values and more importantly in the way they treated their women.

Neelu being the passionate person that she was, followed her heart and married the man of her dreams and they lived in the same house as before, i.e. she continued to live with her parents and her husband moved in with them.  This was not taken very kindly by her in-laws.  However, the husband also being the independent kind, did not join the family business and instead went on to becoming a professional musician and soon became quite famous in Kolkata.

When I came into Neelu's life, she was in her early thirties and I was three years old.  It was her mother K who brought me up.

My earliest recollection of Neelu is warm and fuzzy.  She was this busy big sister who was much older to me, was glamourous and went to work every day.  She had expensive tastes in sarees, jewelleries, perfumes and in make up. Her sarees ranged from gorgeous cotton hand-looms, to fine silks to sophisticated chiffons and such other materials.  She used to import Max Factor make up for herself and to me her make box was a treasure trove of  many hued lipsticks, eye liners and many other unknown lotions and potions.  Every time she would open that black and yellow striped box, I would try and get a whiff of the wonderful odour of the contents of the box.  To me they seemed like a magic box, and she was the magician who created magic with them.  And, she had shoes with heels, the stilettos that I lusted most after the most.  Since we were forbidden to wear her heels lest we fall down, all my experimentation used to be when she was away at work.  During one such time, I also fell down and cracked open my skull, but that is another story!

In that household, apart from me, there was another small girl who had the same status, i.e.  part orphan  as me.  Her name was Tini and she was Neelu's sister-in-law's daughter.  Her mother too passed away suddenly leaving Tini and her other siblings.  In Neelu's eyes, both Tini and I were like to two little kittens who would be pampered or scolded depending on whatever mood she was in.  Intrinsically Neelu was a very generous and affectionate person and whenever she was in the mood, she would offer gifts with both hands to most people.  I remember she used to take Tini and me to a big departmental store in kolkata and send me to the book store while she would wonder off to the jewelry or the saree counters.  I would explore the book racks, bury my nose in the new books to smell th em and then pick up one or two that Neelu would buy for me.  oh, how I loved to smell the new books!

Neelu would do many other things for the two of us; she would use her slightly old silk saree to make dresses for me and for Tini.  She would cut our hair at home and experiment with new styles on us.  She would design our dresses.  The  part that I liked the most was when if we requested her to give us a makeover, she would open her make up box and work on our faces.  I felt like a little princess with my made up eyes and lips and would insist on not washing my face even when it was time to sleep.

As days progressed, Neelu's life started changing.  She had a baby and the baby needed special care for a while, and at the same time Neelu's health started deteriorating.  This was where her mother took charge of looking after the baby, so that Neelu could continue with her work and manage her own life space.

Neelu's married life started developing chinks soon after their child was born.  As she got busy with her work, baby and other paraphernalia of life, her husband got busy with his booming career as well as his female fan club.  Neelu started putting on weight, started having frequent mood swings, had an early hysterectomy and  started relying more and more on her cooking skills to win over her husband's heart.  In all of these, she forgot to look after herself.

During this time, I observed her losing her sense of aliveness and becoming more bitter and more critical of herself and of the entire world.  Her gift of the gab did not help much as it became more of a weapon to lash at people rather than relate to them.  On other hand, her mother was being looked up to as the agony aunt for the whole world and their cousins, and this obvious comparison did not go down well with Neelu.

There is not much to write about the rest of her life as it went downhill rapidly from there, not so much in terms of financial stability as they were very well off, but from her sense of well being with herself.  Her marriage continued but the joy went out of it.  Neelu's only son did not give her much joy either as he turned out to be quite similar to his father, uncaring and insensitive.  Her huge sense of pride never allowed her to share her pain with anyone else and may be that was why she never really found it easy to allow anyone to get too close to her.   Hence she would offer generously but would never ask for help.

Neelu passed away suddenly, one day prior to 9/11, but not a single day goes by when I don't think of her and her passion and zest for life.  She was a kind of woman who was born to live life in its fullness, with vigour, courage,  kindness, passion, possessiveness, envy,  jealousy, generosity,  etc along with the attendant liabilities.  My sense of "joie de vivre" came mostly from her, watching her embrace life in all its positives and negatives with a "never say die' attitude.

Amazing women in my life - part 1 (continued)

As I was saying in the last post that I came into K's life when I was three and she was over fifty years old.  When I look back I think it was a big liability and responsibility for someone who was not young, had ill health, was not financially self sufficient and was dependent on her daughter and son-in-law.   I think K was a kind of woman who acted without any fear of consequence and took criticism with a pinch of salt - for her it was something that had to be done and since no one else was doing it, she would take it up without hesitation.

But the story here is not so much about  K and me, but of K herself.  As I was growing up in that  household, I was also learning to be invisible and to be an acute observer of the goings on around the place.  The person I  observed most was K and the world around her.

K was a hard working person, but more than hard work, she had this amazing ability to pull all the suffering people towards her.  Whenever people felt sad, unhappy, troubled, confused, angry, helpless and victimised, they would seek out K and pour their hearts out to her.  K would listen to them patiently,  offer them her advice or a kind word or just a patient ear, sometimes she would confront them, sometimes she would help them with cash or in kind and sometimes she would just simply hold their hands and cry with them.  She was this  kind and helpful "Chhordi"(middle sister)/"Ma"/"Pishima"(aunt)  to the whole world;  be it to her brothers and sisters, to her nieces and nephews, to her husband's brothers and sisters, to the  dhobi,  the grocer, the neighbourhood rickshaw pullers, the newspaper vendor from Bihar, the annual  shawl seller from Srinagar, the neighbours or friends of friends who had heard about her from someone else.  So much so that even many years after my mother's death, my mother's brothers and sisters kept coming to her to pour their heart out whenever they were in any kind of distress - the absence of their sister did not impact this relationship at all.

K was not a very patient woman; she had asthma, she was short tempered and she was also highly opinionated.  This side of her was more visible to us, people who shared the intimate space with her.  I used to receive an extra special dose of her impatience in terms of the frequent scolding and physical punishment.  At some time I think I got used to this routine but it also taught me to make myself invisible as much as I could and it made it easier for me to observe her without being noticed.

Apart from looking after the household, K's major preoccupation was two fold - one was playing solitaire with her pack of cards and the second was knitting. She could finish making a pullover or a cardigan in four days' time.  Her knitting was so legendary that people from many places would come to learn knitting from her or to learn new designs. My most prominent recollection of her is K sitting on one side of her sprawling double bed either knitting away or playing solitaire and the visitor(s) sitting on the other side, pouring their hearts out to her.

K was also an avid reader; she would keep all the contemporary Bengali magazines and newspapers and would read them in the morning with a cup of tea. Her day used to start early at about four a.m, she would have a bath, start cooking and finish by 8.30 a.m to have the second bath of the day.  Then after seeing her daughter off to work, she would settle down with another cup of tea and her stack of newspapers and magazines and read every article, every story, every poem in them meticulously.  Once in three or four months, she would donate all her magazines to a local library.

She used to treat the domestic help as people whose rights was more than equal as compared to the rest of the household, i.e. our routine was subject to the convenience of the domestic help, e.g. we had to have our baths on time and have lunch on time so that they could have their baths and lunches on time.  We were strictly instructed to address everyone either as elder sister or elder brother and no name calling or disrespectful behaviour was ever allowed. Anybody disobeying that rule was in for  strong disapproval and a dressing down from her. Her simple logic was that these people have left home to come and work here and hence they were entitled to more privileges than us.

The tragedy in K's life was that while on one hand, she was the pillar of strength for people in the larger context, her relationships with her husband, her daughter and her son-in-law were at best tense.   I still remember the day when a woman in her thirties came to see K in a summer afternoon.  I was standing besides K, holding her saree pallu and peering at the stranger woman who was slowing unfolding the tale of betrayal to her.  It seemed that K's husband had married this woman or was living with her and that he had stopped visiting her and paying her any money.  She needed money for survival and hence she came to K to seek help or to look for her "husband".  K listened to the story with a stony expression, handed the woman some money, closed the door and headed straight towards the bathroom.  When she emerged, we were all horrified to see her dressed as a widow; she had taken all signs of marriage off herself.  She then calmly declared to the family that from that day, she did not have any husband and that no one should ever try to talk to her about the man in question as she did not know who he was anymore.

At that time for a woman to do this was shocking enough and more so for a woman in her fifties.  The family could not get over it.  The daughter was angry, enraged and sad; her son-in-law thought this was highly immoral and the rest of the relatives gaped in horror and shock. Neelu, her daughter and others tried very hard to change K's mind towards the husband but K remained unmoved.  This status did not change till the man in question died some 15 years later.  K never spoke to him and never saw his face again.

This stubbornness of K earned her a lot of animosity and resentment, specially from her daughter who could not understand her mother's decision of disowning her father.  This slowly deteriorated their relationship to the extent that mother and daughter did not often speak to each other, although they lived in the same house.

K was misunderstood and resented for her righteousness and her stubbornness from her immediate family members (even often from people who received help and support from her) and was loved and revered by people who were part of the distant family, friends and acquaintances.  

The other interesting thing about K was that I never ever saw her praying or doing puja or going to temples or anything remotely religious; but I experienced her as highly spiritual, conscientious, righteous, kind and courageous.  As though the world of religiosity had very little meaning or significance for her; for her, her world was literature, drama, poems, knitting, taking care of people, being fiercely protective of her own, offering help and support when it was most needed and standing her ground like a lioness without fear and most importantly, without shame.

K would often tell me that my only duty towards her was to stand on my own feet and make my father proud.  I knew I wanted her to be proud of me more than anyone else... K passed away suddenly when I was 20 years old, three months before my first job and my first major achievement.  This was one person who would have been happiest for the "ugly duckling" she picked up from nowhere, seeing her spread her wings and turning into a swan in her own right.

I miss you K, I miss you very much.

Amazing women in my life - part 1

When I was three years old, I lost my mother - unfortunately I would never know her.  However, what I heard about her from her husband, her brothers and sisters, her in laws and her friends, gave me a picture of the kind of woman she might have been.  The picture was one of a kind, warm and loving person who put others' interest before her and who at times and mostly in private was temperamental, passionate and strong.  This picture was not very helpful to me because people kept comparing me to her as I was growing up and I grew up listening to a continuous lament of "how could you turn out to be like this being her daughter"!  For the life of me, I could not manage the confusion, rage and frustrations that I felt being compared to a person who was not even around for me to even dialogue with  Being the only child, I did not even have siblings around to tell me otherwise.

The second most influential woman I had in my life was my Pishima (Father's elder sister - paternal aunt).  She decided to raise this 3 year old kid when she was in her early fifties, suffering from asthma and a nearly broken marriage.  To top it, she was also living with her daughter and son-in-law, who did not look very kindly upon her endeavour to help others.

As I look back today, I believe this is the single most influential factor in my life which has shaped me into whoever I am today, both positively and negatively.

My pishima was an extra ordinary woman.  Let's call her K.   She was born in the early 20th Century in Dhaka,  Bangladesh and was the 3rd born in a large family of eleven brothers and sisters.  K was very good in her studies, was a gold medalist from Dhaka University and also the apple of her fathers' eyes.  However, while studying there, K fell in love with a  young  man who was her elder brother's friend.  This young man was very good looking and to boot, was a brilliant and talented painter who studied in Shantiniketan.  She fell for him, hook line and sinker, and eloped with him to Rangoon (now Yangon, capita of Burma), thus breaking her father's heart forever and never saw him alive thereafter.

K and her husband S lived in Rangoon for about 3 years before moving back to Kolkata, India.  The relationship which started on a high note of passion and love, was on the wane and was giving way to bitterness and angst between the two of them.  Thus, while they remained married, K was bringing up the children by herself through hardship and struggle while S went on to look at greener pastures of life.  This is when their elder daughter died of Beriberi and K was left only with the younger daughter.

K brought this girl up, provided her with the best possible education within her means and the young girl, my cousin (lets call her Nilu) grew up and took the responsibility of looking after her parents. Meanwhile, she too fell in love with a young artist and got married.

I came into K's life after my mother died and when no one was willing to look after me lest I became a liability.  My father was too unsure of himself to feel confident about looking after a young child.

K decided to bring me up, and I was brought to her house to stay with her, her daughter and son in law.

(Thank you for reading thus far.  If you are interested, keep looking out for the next post, this is to be continued....)

Mothers and Daughters

My daughter is nearly 26 years old ... though to me she still is a pre-teenager, sometimes a baby and sometimes a grown woman.  One would say, what is new, all mothers would say the same thing about their daughters?  That's true, and I would not disagree!  The point of mentioning her age here is that I gave birth to her on my 26th birthday and if I look back, I certainly did not think of myself as a young person, nor did I have anyone doting on me like I dote on her.  This however, does not deter me from trying to control her life at times, albeit unsuccessfully and is met with grave resistance from the other side!

That said, there was an interesting mix of tele-con and txt that happened between us this evening. Since she lives in Delhi pursuing her higher studies, our connecting mediums are mostly the mobile phone and occasionally the internet and often the distance created by such mediums are difficult to manage, specially in awkward moments.   

Anyway, to come back to the point of discussion - She is supposed to submit her dissertation by a certain date this month and my understanding was that only after that can she come home.  Therefore, when I called her this evening to enquire the progress obviously due to my vested interest, she responded quite gallantly that she may not even finish the paper before she came and that she has organised herself accordingly.  My response to that one was one of "what are you saying, isn't this why you postponed your trip home? And now you would not even finish that, etc, etc"  I guess my tone of voice touched a higher pitch bordering on panic and irritation which said "how can you be so irresponsible?" without actually saying it!  My daughter responded exactly as expected, with counter irritation and annoyance and advised me to not think too much about things and that she would manage what belonged to her.  "Fair enough", I thought, but some small voices were still screaming inside my head, conjuring up images of my daughter standing in a school dress being scolded by her stern teachers for not finishing her homework on time (which actually never  happened during her school days - She was a straight A student), etc, etc.  I mumbled something about her dinner and then, there was silence ...absolute silence ...  neither of us had anything to say to each other ...  After a while, I mumbled some other inanities and disconnected the phone and started wondering what just happened.

After a while, I received a txt from her apologising for "snapping" at me and how she ought to learn to control her temper, etc and how much she loved me.  I felt very good that she wrote that but also felt a little guilty about making her feel bad about herself.  This was not the first time that things like this happened between us, but every time this happens, I ask myself what could I have done differently.  I am sure, she asks herself the same question every time.

The whole relationship between mothers and daughters are so very different from the relationship between fathers and daughters.  I am of course generalising here and  looking at my life history and comparing the two.  For me it is easier to compare as I grew up only with my father around and no mother, and in my daughter's case, her bonding has been stronger with me than her father especially since she stepped into her pre-teen period.  

I guess daughters find it difficult to move away from their mothers even in their moments of deep anguish as being members of the same gendered world may make it quite difficult to not empathise with the other.   As for mothers, apart from responsibility weighing heavy on their shoulders, both affection and anxiety mixed with "I know her more than she knows herself" would make it difficult to just let the daughter go on her own adventure of life.

If I look at my daughter, I think that she looks at me both as a hero for the courage, hard work, grit and competence as well as perhaps the only person who she believes would love her unconditionally no matter what, the only person with whom she finds a sense of "home".   On the other hand, I can also see how she at the same time looks at me with slight doubt, irritation and anxiety of "she just might lose her marbles if she is not all put together the way she ought to be".  And the swing of this pendulum is what makes our relationship very interesting. 

Therefore on one hand I try hard to be put together (and not be my "mad mad" self) and make things worse as she can be friends with the "mad mad" self only and not the "sane" mother and yet when we are friends, I am continuously wondering whether there is a line that we ought to draw and go back to being parent and child and I can never really figure that one out.  

We are great friends at one level, there are very few secrets between us, except may be what we intensely dislike about each other but that too comes out quite freely on our moments of anger and outbursts (we both have mastered the arts for that one).  On the other hand, there are moments when I need to put on my Mommy face and be there for her especially when she is intensely unhappy and tensed with herself.  

Having had almost zero experience of being mothered, I sometimes desperately search for a role model to emulate and at other times accept quite sagaciously to myself that I need to make this role and if I have not yet in 26 odd years, then I may never do it and why bother, etc, etc.  My daughter on the other hand, believes in post modern thoughts and being a thinker and a feminist, her logic is "you are what you are and there is no point of comparing oneself to any parameters since all parameters would stink of one dated politics or the other".  Fair enough ... I think, suitably chastised like a good student, this is where I learn from her.  But, but, but ..... what about her expectation of being mothered?  Am I being a good mother to her at all times when she needs me to be there?  Am I?   And  when I look at the good mommies around me who are trotting around like proud mother hens, talking about or fixing  marriages, buying jewelleries  and "securing" the future of their daughters, I seem to be like a crane sitting among proverbial swans wondering "how come those are not my priorities"?  The only priority I can think of is what would make her life meaningful and what would make her content and I seem to be going by whatever choices she is making for herself as of now.  Is that necessarily good or necessarily bad, or is there something in between?  I wish there was a mommy somewhere for me to answer all these complicated questions!

I know if my daughter reads this post, she will laugh and then will tell me "again you are thinking rubbish thoughts !!!"  But I guess I would never really know.  Does any mother ever know?  

do we really listen to others?

last night a dear friend stayed over ... in our chat many things floated in and out, relationships, man-woman, culture differences, kind of work we like to do, passion, being a maverick, death, life, love, parents .....

in one such chat, among many other things, my friend told me that she experiences me as someone who does not want to really listen when others tell her something positive about herself.  she also experiences me as someone who wants to hold on to a picture which is sepia coloured,  old, dog eared and tearing at the corner - worse, does not even look like her any more, but she insists that that is the only person that she recognises as herself, irrespective of what others are saying to her.

all of these rang true to my ear and i thought none of these are new and yet they are not causing any  distress as they do when i hear them from A.  As though receiving truth from someone in whom you have a high emotional stake is like taking bitter medicine and the responsibility of turning the medicine into sweet elixir or vanishing it into thin air lies with the other individual.

that set me thinking that when we are talking to people with whom we are very deeply involved, lovers, spouses, bosses, parents, friends, and whoever else - do we really listen?  I mean, do we have the emotional wherewithal to listen at that point of time when truth is being told, be it in a matter of fact way, or in anger or in resentment or in love ... do we really listen?  Or is it so that at the moment of listening, we are actually busy matching what is being said with the script that is running in our mind and feeling frustrated when it is not matching line per line?

I know i certainly do that most times.  Hmm,  well, i wonder whether this realisation will provide a little bit of peace to poor exasperated A? ha, ha, ha!!

of women and for women-domestic help - are we at war?

I have been living in a new building complex for a while now, about five months. This place has about 400 apartments and only about 40 families have moved in so far. Being a new place, naturally there is a scarcity of helping hands and all of us have been having a bit of trouble. the domestic help is hard to come by and even if one comes in, ends up asking for R.s 5000 for a part time job of 2 to 3 hours. People are settling down to Rs. 3000 to Rs. 4000 a month in front of such demands.

while this may sound like a crib club but i am not cribbing about the money -- my point here is that i do believe that the domestic help ought to be paid fairly and justly for their time, effort and for the emotional investments and that both for us and for them it is a up close and personal relationship. however, increasingly in many places what i witness is a relationship of mutual need with a underlying tonality of mistrust and resentment.

in my personal experience, both in Calcutta and in Bangalore (these are the only two cities i have lived so far), i have experienced domestic helps (all of them have been women for me) who are in dire financial needs. Some of them work because they have to earn money because the man in the house is an alcoholic/deserter/wife beater/waster/drifter - the children either studying or not working or if married, are still largely dependent on the mother for some sustainability. I have also experienced women who wishes to better their standard of living, to improve their living conditions and who is working alongside the husband/father/brother to generate the additional income.

when these women come to work, they come prepared to be treated as only a pair of hands and nothing else - and if by chance they are treated as something more than that, most feel overwhelmed, don't know how to receive and some even feel resentful about it.

when I look around me and talk to other middle class/upper middle class women, more often than not, i find many of us as apathetic and almost hostile to these women. some of us believe that these women are out to only extract and are to be treated as such. some believe that since we have to use their services, we may as well extract as much as we can, some of course believe that they should be treated well but only to the point so that they don't cross their boundaries. i do sense fear, resentment and anger from most women that i talk to.

I must also admit that this is not the only thing that i hear, i also hear from women about understanding them, helping them, working with them, etc, but rarely do i hear about a relatedness that comes from a connect between two women, irrespective of their social status.

i wonder whether some of these are legacies of our feudal heritage, our class consciousness, and whether there is something more to this than just the class and feudal system. May be there is our unexpressed anger about having to pay more than we believe they ought to be paid? is it the fear of being merged and being classless? Is it the fear of identification with these women which can evoke our own victim identity as women in our personal context?

I have both personally and professionally, come across many women in the middle and upper middle class whose victim hood is very similar to the stories that the other women tell, albeit the events unfold differently. the intrinsic processes of victim hood of a women and patriarchal social system is the same for both classes of women.

I believe some of the difficulties we are facing today vis-a-vis the domestic help issue is part of a struggle that we upper class women are afraid to touch - i.e. our own victim hood - that we face either personally or experience it on a daily basis through other women, in our social life, in the communities and in the world. the media brings it up close and personal at every moment, we face it at work, at home and even internally every time we feel shame and guilt because of who we are.

May be, if we were to own up our hidden shame and guilt about being the victim directly or indirectly, we could actually then identify with these women and regard them as part of our gendered community, who shares the same pathos, same sense of shame and guilt and same sense of helplessness, as also the same sense of resilience, same grit, same willingness to push through adversities, same sense of joy and the same emotional world . We would of course have our different ways of dealing with our victim hood in our lives but to acknowledge that at the core we are the same, may actually make us gain friends and compatriots rather than just a pair of hands, who we must be watchful about.

May be the other disconnect that some of us are facing is that it becomes difficult for us to accept that they too wish to upgrade the quality of their living process ... that they may also wish to work for that additional income, that they may also be aspirational just as much as we can be.

I also share and acknowledge that living in today's world, our identity is not just gendered, it is also impacted by our belonging system such as class, work place, community, language, educational history, etc, etc. and against this backdrop, comparison and identification with our domestic help seems distant and a bit impractical.

However, what i am trying to point out here is that when these people come to work at our home, don't we consciously or unconsciously expect them to treat our home as theirs, take care of it, look after its inhabitants and be respectful to it? to put it simply, we are expecting them to invest emotionally in our context, and i believe that most of them do. What they do at our home is in a way replacing the woman of the house (in a traditional sense) become her substitute; and doing that without any emotional involvement day in and day out, is a very tough job.

The question i am asking us, is what emotional investment apart from offering them help and aid, are we willing to make? What kind of relatedness are we building if we are not willing or not aware of this possibility of an emotional connect? do we even believe that it is necessary?

As for these women, perhaps for them to claim a little more space in our emotional world and simultaneously to allow us to be part of theirs, would be a first step.

the day we connect with them not just as employers and employees but as people of the same gendered community who share similar stories of love, longing, passion, desire, happiness and sadness, we may actually start liking ourselves better through their eyes and vice versa.

disconnecting - Loss and fear of it

Death ...



such an ominous word. most are scared of it, it is unknown, full of fantasy and visions. so much has been written, talked about, discoursed with ....



i have been with this word for a while. ever since my divorce proceedings started actually.



Divorce, as per dictionary meaning is



-to separate; cut off

-a judicial declaration dissolving a marriage in whole or in part

-total separation; disunion

-to break the marriage contract between oneself and (one's spouse)



synonyms are dissociate, divide, disconnect, split, disjoin ....



i experienced "real" death for the first time in my divorce proceedings. I have experienced many many physical death before but the experience of what death actually feels like was like a bullet that gets lodged.

It was not simply dissolving the marriage between two people. I was initiating the processing of discontinuing the history of 30 years between two people that was held in a certain way. the disjointing of relationships tween them, around them, in the immediate family, the extended familial structure, the social circle, everything.



it was to put a full stop to something that has been in process .... for many years ....

yes, separating from someone or something is like a death experience. although people remain, the places remain, the memories remain, but not the relationship. Not the way each individual held it in his/her mind.

Sometimes i think for me at least, fear of death, is really fear of separation. fear of divorce, this time from life, from aliveness, from all senses .... unto who knows where.

and strangely enough, i am not really scared of my death, but of death of dear ones.

Death, i feel will take them away for ever, never to come back and they will then just fade into memory, sepia coloured ones.

and i have experienced death many times in my life, through death of near and dear ones, starting at age 3, but never been so anxious about it before.

what does it mean to disjoint from the other? are we ever joined?

and in all these, life, the pulsating life, kicking, alive, screaming, is perhaps slipping through the moments ... tick tock tick tock .....

i am alive, and so are the others, right at this moment. celebrate this moment!

I went through what i had written earlier and then some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fell into place. had a chat with A in the morning and some more pieces fell into place. rather than talking about me, let me write about the phenomena that i saw as a process.

just like the picture, compassion is possibly held in most of our mind as something that always flows downwards. for example, i never really felt compassionate towards my father or any adults for that matter in my young days as i believed (and realised that i still do), that as an adult, you must always be responsible for your acts of omission and commission and therefore if you make a mistake or be "weak", you must pay a price for it. however, when it comes to compassion flowing downwards, it is often showered on younger people, juniors in status, people in lower social strata compared to us, to the "under dog" and of course to our children.

in fact, i have written exactly that in last blog. i have very "righteously" how we as parents (and of course as adults) must be resposible for our acts of omission and commissions, etc, etc.

it is perhaps a phenomena for a lot of people out there, for who, compassion flowing upwards would be experinced as "sucking upto the powers that be" or at best, it would be sympathy tinged with hidden contempt or criticism. whereas for the "under dogs" (and children are often so to us), compassion is quite free flowing and is experienced as a virtue.

this brings me to the "critical self" that is continuously demanding more from us and practically offering nothing. And when we are the grips of the "critical self" we offer our children the same that we offer ourselves, i.e. criticality (which inevitably turns into lack of faith in them) or we offer solutions. Perhaps, in the relationship between parents and children, what is most important is compassion, from them to us and from us to them without any strings attached.

Yet it is such a difficult task to be compassionate without being helpful or advisory or patronising towards them. Similarly it is so difficult to accept our follies and our slip ups as parents as though we are God!

conversations

have you ever noticed that when conversations become staccato or has an underlying sharp edge to it, it may have some unspoken criticisms or disappointments or anxieties holding fort in the back ground for the conversationalists.

it often happens between me and my daughter ... many times memories of my conversations with my father gets brought back when i converse with her. i have not yet figured out what the edgy ness on my part is all about. i only remember i held my father in deep criticism most of the time and took it for granted that he never really understood me. and do i dare to think the same about me and my daughter? i am not sure!

perhaps it is the burden of being a parent - and perhaps with children we find it difficult to be "me" or to be an individual on our own right and often get reduced to being a "parent" and a "parent" alone.

and when you are only a "parent" , who are talking to? your "child" and that is when, my friend, you are doomed for ever.

that day i was talking to a feminist and she was quoting another, and the quote was :"once you become pregnant, you remain pregnant for ever". i.e. you never really feel free to be yourself in your role as a parent.

the ones who dare to be, are usually condemned. i am not sure i am ready to be condemned. in any case there are enough condemnations of varying degrees doing their rounds for me and for every other parents all over the place.

well, i sound crabby and whinny. i am not feeling like that. I am simply facing up to reality and accepting it as it comes.

If we wish to be ourselves, we will have to hold us accountable for our actions, acts of omission and commissions and we have to accept our off springs as individuals who just happened to have come to this world through us. we have to accept that they may not like us, may not want to be with us, that their sense of 'home' may not lie with us any more, and, they may love or like other people more than "us".

and the toughest thing to do, is to accept that in order to be ourselves, we can not longer hide behind "all my actions are in their best interests" as this creates bitterness and criticisms towards our off springs which we find (I certainly do) difficult to express.

therefore, what do we do when parenting seems to be a lifelong tag being permanently attached? well, i guess, to just grow up (or grow old!) and accept that every individual has to find an agent in order to descend to this world just as we did through our parents.

And, live our own lives.

and that is one of the problems of being a "Parent". you take it for granted that you are not supposed to have a separate life apart from your offspring. At best, your life should weave around them, be accommodating, infrastructural, accepting and space providing, but never, never, without them.

how do you live YOUR life without having to choose being a parent or not being one?

after a long time

I was working with an organisation last week who are in the process of bringing in internal changes in attitude, development of people, leadership roles and new paradigms in the organisation. They are in the areas of advocacy for change and bringing in social awareness, specific to young people.

While i was working with them i noticed their extremely high level of commitment towards the organisation and what they believed in and yet, their difficulty in working with each other as one voice. what was bogging them down was not their personal interests or need for personal gain, but i hypothesise was their clash of personal isms. this may become clear if i were to write about a triangle that i saw was at work within this group.

This is the triangle of three types of isms, (the credit for this frame goes to my colleague Ashok Malhotra who coined it), namely romanticism i.e. i wish my world was like this, idealism i.e. this is the way the world should be and pragmatism i.e. this is the way the world is. what i find intriguing that in the effort to act on one's conviction, one arm of this triangle is almost always the loser.

If pragmatism is joined with idealism, then we have strategic planning, defined boundaries, way forwards, new directions, etc. However, more often than not, the romanticism has to bid adieu from this. for in the search for pragmatism, romanticism inevitably brings in ambiguity and lack of clarity. for romantics dreams of wishes and desires, a bit like Lennon's song "imagine". They dream and wish for things and scenarios that have not happened yet and probably sounds no plausible in the current context. This often destabilises the way forward, and even dislocates the people from the path. and yet, without romanticism, most plans and visions become dry and lifeless.

when romanticism and idealism join hands, strong winds of change takes birth. urgency to change things, need to bring in changes in the current stagnant, unwholesome context becomes strong and may even breed impatience and intolerance. if this is not tempered with pragmatism, perhaps all voices can not be heard and often the ground reality sufferes.

in this group, collectively romanticism and idealism have joined hands and they are all for bringing in changes both in themselves and the context in which they work in. but simple pragmatism like living with one another's limitations was something they were finding quite difficult to deal with. every limitation had to be dealt with and sorted out, every difference must be sorted out so that amiability returns as though feelings like displeasure, dislike, impatience do not contribute to any productivity at all.

i have seen this in my personal life as well. I find it very difficult to live with displeasure, dislike, impatience, irritability towards people with whom i share intimate relationships and who i love very much. it seems as though i am betraying the other person along with myself. as though i signed some invisible contract to always remain loving towards the other.

in time i have discovered that while this orientation makes my life stressful, it makes the other's life more suffocating and artificial. in this way, there is almost no scope for growth for either of us nor is there any scope for the relationship to grow. evolution stops and what remains are empty shells of yesterday, which often leaves me with regret and longing/yearning for something that does not exist any more.

i still struggle with it, but find it much easier to look at it in the face and don't feel afraid that it makes me look ugly, uncaring and insensitive. it also makes me look 'real' to myself.

when two people start feeling bitter towards each other, any interaction between them can be so tiring, so loathsome and so depleting. one or both start feeling mean, enraged, cruel and punishing towards each other. such emptiness...

If i were to look back in my childhood, bitterness has been a constant companion in my surrounding ... it has accompanied most people in their lives through their daily chores, mundane conversation, feelings towards each other.

little moments of relief came when i heard a tinkling of laughter from someone when she laughed at little nothing, when i walked on the afternoon-empty corridor imagining that i was actually walking on the sky as it reflected on the mirror held in my hand, when baritone voices came through the ancient radio kept in the corner of the big hall carrying the emotions of a lover unwittingly leaving his lady love, on the Friday night weekly radio play .... those moments were like magic windows that opened and closed if only for a few seconds .. those windows made life seemed good and even cheerful.

I can still see those summer afternoons when the strong tropical sun beating down on the 60's Calcutta roads, melting it ever so slightly, tired hand cart rickshaw pullers wiping their sweat with the little piece of cloth kept on their shoulder, a thirsty crow cawing away somewhere behind the neem leaves, housewives are just about to retire to their lazy afternoon naps, the radio is broadcasting "anurodher ashor" (songs as requested) and the mellifluous voices of Manna Dey, Sandya Mukhopadhyay, Lata Mangeshkar and others filling up the hot and humid air; those were my afternoons ... to sit there and watch the world carrying on doing its own thing. as i watched, the afternoon ever so slowly turned on its side, yawned, opened its eye and turned into evening, who more often than not, looked like a pretty slim teenager who had just learnt to wear her saree. the sky will be full of slightly pinkish clouds, the breeze from the river will start flirting with everyone on the road, the flower vendor will choke our nostrils with heavy scented jasmines ... the kulfi malai (Indian version of homemade ice creme) vendor will stop exactly on the spot where he knows greedy eyes await his return every evening.

then came the night ... i did not like nights for a very long time ... it meant darkness, it meant waiting for dad to return home late, it meant encounter with millions and zillions of cockroaches in the toilet, it meant 'no light' ... i hated 'no light'. silence was not someone i welcomed ... it only meant waiting for the morning to arrive.

it also reminded me of all the bitterness that i saw around myself the whole day. bitterness came back to remind me that it was there and will not go away in a hurry.