Category Archives: relationships

You may not *need* a man – but what if you *want* one?

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Over and over, women are being asked to choose careers and not ‘choose men’. To pursue careers and not ‘pursue men’. In effect, society is telling women that they must not ask for, want or need to be loved by a person of the opposite sex. 

It is strange indeed, to urge a human being to deny their very human need of love and companionship and physical intimacy, and replace it with a career instead. It is stranger to think that the need for achievement is a replacement of the need for love and belonging. 

In the picture below, which carries a small excerpt from my book The Reluctant Mother, I have mentioned the Pyramid of Needs given by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. The other picture shows the actual Pyramid or Heirarchy of Needs as described by him. The need for love and belonging is *separate* from the need for achievement. And the need for love and belonging comes lower down in the pyramid, making it more basic than the need for achievement. And yet, *both* these needs are UNDENIABLE parts of human existence, and one cannot be a replacement for the other. 

The need for love, affection and belonging is so basic that it is among the first needs of the infant- to be loved and cared for. The need for achievement and independence starts making itself felt at a young age, when the child wants to do things by himself/herself, to feel a sense of accomplishment.  Adult needs are but an extension of these childhood needs. 

Love gets expanded to include sexual fulfilment after puberty, but no matter how much modern life may try to separate sex and love, in the end most people want to have a stable intimate relationship with someone they *love*. That is what we all *ideally* want- regardless of whether we are men or women. We don’t want an endless string of casual relationships all our life. In the end, most of us want a person with whom we can feel comfortable and safe and loved. 

Traditional society kept forcing women to choose love over achievement, thereby denying that the need for achievement is a HUMAN need – not a male need. Men, however, did not have to sacrifice dreams to have love- they could have it all. 

Modern society now, is telling women to choose achievement over love- but men are not being told to pursue careers instead of pursuing women- they are pursuing both. Men still get to have it all. 

So how has modernity changed anything for women? It has merely replaced one lopsided ideology with another. It has merely replaced one form of sacrifice with another. It changes nothing. It still allows men to have it all and keeps asking women to choose ONE. 

Yes, it is absolutely essential to teach girls that their *survival* does not depend upon a man. That their *self-esteem* does not depend upon a man. That their *self-worth* does not depend upon a man. But don’t tell a girl that if she wants a man to love her and cherish her, she is ‘oppressed’ and ‘backward.’ It is a very *human* need to want love. 

And this also brings us to the very core of the issue- why are so many women rejecting the idea of love in the first place? Why are so many women disillusioned with love? 

Because men have not been taught to be *WORTHY* of a woman’s love. Men have not been told that they need to *earn* a woman’s love. 

When a man is physically or emotionally abusive, society shrugs and says ‘men will be men.’ When a man cheats on his partner, society shrugs and says ‘men will be men.’ When a man is controlling and dominating towards his partner, or when a man is irresponsible and does not carry out his share of responsibilities, it’s the same – men will be men. Whatever terrible things men do in their relationships, they are excused with the help of a sweeping generalisation – men will be men. 

In effect what we are telling women is that the very *definition* of a man is someone who is abusive, unfaithful, cruel, heartless and controlling. Or irresponsible and uncaring.  

Why, for heaven’s sake, would a woman want such a creature in her life? If women are then being asked to not want men, it is essentially a call to not keep an abusive, unfaithful, controlling – or irresponsible- person in their lives. 

As long as we keep condoning unpardonable behaviour by men, as long as we keep saying ‘men will be men’, we are contributing to a society in which relationship structures will be devalued and dismantled. 

What we *need* is to change the definition of what it means to be a Man.

When Masculinity gets identified as kindness, gentleness, compassion, love and shouldering equal responsibility, when a man being soft-hearted, polite and respectful towards a woman gets defined as the pinnacle of manliness, when a man sharing home responsibilities and parenting responsibilities equally is not considered an anomaly, when we can see a man deeply and faithfully in love and say that *this* is what it means to be a man, only then we will be able to create a culture in which *both* men and women can rise to the stage of self- actualization- in which *both* men and women can have their needs fulfilled- and nobody has to sacrifice their need for love to fulfil their need for achievement- nor will anybody have to sacrifice their need for achievement to fulfil their need for love. 

In an *ideal* world, choosing a man and choosing a career would not be two contradictory options for women. That is the kind of world I want to see. 

And I have forgiven you, too

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Being able to forgive your parents. It’s a strange notion, is it not? Especially in a culture where parents are hailed as gods. 
But so many of us carry hurts, pains, and grudges against our parents, for what they did or did not do. We will not say them out loud because we are expected to love and worship them. Perhaps we will not accept this even to ourselves, for that would make you us ungrateful offspring. In the same way that any expression of ‘reluctance’ on the part of the mother makes her an ungrateful woman. 
And yet, strange though it may sound, it is possible to love someone while having a hundred complaints against them. It is possible for someone to love you, and still hurt you badly. In the end, everyone is human. Parents are humans who are doing the best they can- and yet, and yet, there is a lot to forgive your parents for. 
For not understanding you. For not giving you the space to open up to them. For being emotionally distant. For being controlling. For constantly comparing you to others. For constantly exercising authority, for trying to make you what they wanted you to be without understanding what you wanted to be. For not understanding your dreams and ambitions.
Oh yes, there is quite a lot, sometimes, to forgive your parents for. 
And when that happens, when you are able to forgive them, you liberate yourself from the bonds of generational oppression. 
When we acknowledge the mistakes of our parents, we are able to prevent ourselves from replicating those mistakes with our own children. And we are able to see ourselves as humans, not gods. Very often, traditional parents suffer from the God Complex: the idea that the parent is always right. That as a mother or father, I can never do anything wrong. No, that’s not true. We all stumble, we all fail. The important thing is to learn and evolve. 
By accepting the fallibility of our parents, we accept our own fallibility as parents, too. And once we have done that, we can ask forgiveness from our own children. For everything that we did that hurt them, for everything that we did not do when we should have. That is how we learn to do better. 
I learnt this first from you, our mother. That a parent can say sorry, that a parent can say thank you. That a parent can learn from her children, and that a parent can be wrong as well. You did not present yourself as the mother who was always right, and if you realised you were not, you openly accepted it. From you we learnt that there is no shame in accepting our mistakes and that the elder can learn from the younger as well. 
My son seems to have learnt this instinctively – perhaps children learn by watching, or perhaps all children have that instinct until it is crushed out of them.  Little H came to me one day, after we had a little tiff, and said: Mummy aapne mujhe maaf kar diya? 
Mummy, have you forgiven me? 
I chuckled and nodded, I had forgotten by then what I was angry with him for.  
And then with sweet innocence he said the thing that gave me pause: Maine bhi aap ko maaf kar diya. I have forgiven you, too. 
What a lovely boy you are, dearest H. You may not know it yet, but your heart is filled with wisdom. May you find it in that heart to forgive the mistakes of your parents, and may you never pass them on to the ones that you care for. 

The Book is here !

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Do you remember this: Waiting for the Story? The story is here !

Your book is finally available – The Reluctant Mother: A Story No One Wants To Tell.

Yes, I said ‘your’ book. It’s not a typo. This book, in fact, belongs to all of you. You are the ones who witnessed the journey of this blog, walked along with me, listened to me spell out my deepest fears and stayed with me in my moments of despair. You heard me out patiently, and encouraged me and came back for more. You showered this blog with attention and care.

In particular, fellow blogger Kathi Ostrom sparked the idea for this book, by telling me right at the beginning- many years ago- that this story needed to take the form of a book. It is truly heartening, is it not, to witness a small act of kindness turning into a huge gift? Thank you, Kathi, for your little kindness that became a huge gift for me. And thank you, all of you, who kept coming back to this blog, cheering me on. This book has totally been possible because of you all.

Here is what the book’s back cover says:

The Reluctant Mother is a book of rage.

Rage at being alone in your pain, having your conflict belittled, and your struggles trivialised. It is the story of a young woman who seeks to find herself in a world that constantly tries to define her and who she should be.

It is the memoir of an anti-mother. The woman who doesn’t fall in love with her baby at first sight but discovers love along the way.

This book is for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the idea of ‘ideal’ motherhood. Be it a woman or a man, one way of confronting trauma is to know that you are not alone in it. To know that someone shares your story and understands your emotions and guilt that accompanies feeling anything other than ‘perfectly blissful’ about motherhood.

It is at once heartbreaking and poignant as it is hopeful and comforting. This is the story of one woman and yet the life of many. It reveals how tradition and modernity, faith and reason, pleasure and pain are all so intimately interwoven for women that their true sense of self is inevitably one of contradictions.

The book’s biggest strength lies in its rawness and honesty. Nothing but the truth stands here.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon India at this link https://amzn.to/3CnWUwn . The paperback will be available in bookstores in November, and the Kindle version will also be available soon after.

To my readers and fellow bloggers outside India, I must apologise for now, but the e-book will be available very soon, and the paperback may also be available in other countries in a short while.

Watch this space for further updates, and do subscribe to the mailing list to have posts delivered right into your mailbox. Remain up to date with the latest events!

Once again, heartfelt gratitude to you all, and I hope you enjoy the book as much as you enjoyed reading the blog.

Is the food only for the men?

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When S and I were newly married, we shared our rented apartment with an elderly lady who was the owner of that apartment. What had happened was that the lady was supposed to be leaving in a month or so to stay abroad with her children, but events unfolded such that we all ended up staying together for a much longer time.

It was a very interesting experience to live that way. She was a soft spoken, cultured and well-read lady, and having been a history teacher before her retirement, she regaled us with amazing stories from Indian History at dinnertime, when all three of us sat together at the dining table.

But as it often happens with most people of the previous generation, she too lived with the notion that food was mostly cooked for the pleasure of men. How did I find this out?

In the early days of my marriage, I was staying at home, before I re-joined my job a couple of months later. I used to do all the cooking and washing up myself, and for the first few days, auntie would say in the afternoons: oh, it’s just the two of us, we’ll have leftovers from last night.

Or she would say: Oh, cook all this elaborate stuff in the evening when S comes home.

After a few days, I wondered why the two of us were not worth cooking for, and only S was worth cooking for? So when she said to me that day, ‘oh we’ll have leftovers from last night, S won’t be here anyway’, I laughed and said to her: But auntie we are here! Why should food only be cooked for S? I want to cook for myself and for you as well!

And from then on, I cooked up good stuff for the two of us also. I think she was also trying to be kind to me, and not make me work too hard—trying to make it easy for me by saying that I didn’t need to cook for her. I understand that a lot of it came from a place of kindness wherein she didn’t want me to be exhausted cooking for her.

But I’ve seen this in plenty of Indian homes where the man is considered the primary consumer of food—the food is almost always meant first and foremost for the men.

And the meat—especially the meat! The men are expected to eat a lot of meat, and the women are supposed to not want meat so much. Perhaps it has to do with the belief that meat eating makes you aggressive and dominant- not to mention highly sexual.

Qualities that traditional society wishes to keep away from women.

Well, not this woman.

I love my chicken and my mutton, and am not ashamed of eating as much as I want. (Perhaps that might explain some of my aggression and other interesting qualities. But that’s another discussion.)

So one day, S and I were invited to dinner at an acquaintance’s house. They had cooked shaljam gosht which is practically our favourite meat dish.

Now, the thing is, sucking on mutton bones for bone marrow is considered a delicacy in our culture. So when we sat for dinner, the elderly gentleman asked his wife to ladle out the big bone to S.

“Bhaiyya ko do!” He instructed her. Give it to the young man!

I waited for her to ladle it out to S, while eyeing the other big bone in the curry for myself. But before I had the chance to actually get the bone for myself, the elderly gentleman again urged his wife:

“Doosri wali bhi do bhaiya ko!” Give the other bone, too, to the young man!

Well, really! Why should all the best portions be ladled out to ‘bhaiyya’! Why had he invited me, then? To watch while my husband ate?

Thankfully, however, his wife retorted with: “Arrey woh bhi to khayegi!” indicating me. “But she is eating too, isn’t she!” I cannot explain how happy her answer made me.

Food is not meant for men alone.

More evidence of this attitude can be found in villages, in large joint families, where it is always the women who do all the cooking from dawn to dusk, but are always the last to eat.

The food is served to all the men first, and when they have had their fill of all the freshest and best portions, the leftovers are eaten by the women. Often it happens that very little of the food is left, and the women either have to go back to the kitchen and cook some more, or end up eating only the little that is left. It is unfair and infuriating.

I was not brought up with this kind of attitude, and so became aware of it quite late in life. But then I never stayed in a villag, and neither of my grandparents lived in a village either. They were all town-dwellers who espoused respectful and fair attitudes towards women.

My father was a loving and respectful husband and he would never eat until mummy had joined us at the table. Even when we had guests over, the women ate together with the men.

My partner S and I never eat without each other – unless we are both busy with our professional work, in which case we eat whenever we find the time, without waiting for each other. But those instances are rare.

When we visit his parents in Aligarh, all of us eat together, and if there’s something to be brought in from the kitchen, it doesn’t always have to be the woman who goes and gets it. It could be S and his brothers too.

Sanchari Bhattacharya, a friend of mine, wrote a poignant post on Facebook, about how she knew the food preferences of every member of the family, but not of her mother-in-law. Neither her husband not her sister in law could tell her what their mother preferred to eat – because, like many women of the earlier generation, she proudly declared that she ‘could make do with anything.’

Women’s choices are all supposed to mould themselves to fit the men’s convenience. And so Sanchari’s mother in law never asked for anything for herself, taking pride in ‘adjusting’ to make everyone happy. But Sanchari, ever the determined, caring and empathic soul, persisted in questioning her mother in law about her favourite food.

The lady in question responded with this hard-hitting story:

“When a son came home from his big job abroad, he took the whole family out to a fancy restaurant. He asked everyone to order whatever they liked, no matter what the cost because he was now rich. Everyone but his mother placed an order. When asked, the mother said that she had no preferences, so she doesn’t really know what she should order. At this, the now NRI son jumps in and says, “Oh no worries. She’s MY mother, I know exactly what she likes. She likes tail pieces (lyaja) of fish. All my life, I’ve always seen her save the tail pieces for herself and give us the petties and gadas (bigger, more meaty, less boney pieces) beforehand. Someone get her a big tail piece, please. “

The mother smiles at the son and faintly remembers how, before she got married, she’d always get the big fish head. That probably tasted better, though she barely remembered it. She hadn’t even realized all this while, when her status had got demoted from the head of the fish to its tail in the span of these 30 years.”

Eventually, Sanchari found out her mother-in-law’s favourite- prawns – but this little story demonstrates perfectly how traditional societies erase women’s preferences and individuality, even in such ordinary, simple matters as food.

It reminded me of how I, too, needed to find out what my mother in law liked to eat- she never expressed a preference.

My own mother, however, was a different case altogether. She was an avowed vegetarian in a family of meat-eaters, so an extra dish was always prepared for her whenever meat was cooked.

I say an extra dish was ‘prepared’ for her because, with my father being a government officer, she hardly ever did the cooking – merely supervised the cooking, which was all done by male cooks, appointed by the government for officers’ households.

So I had a childhood where I saw men cooking inside my house all the time, while my mother supervised them and gave them instructions. We did not grow up with the idea that cooking is a ‘woman’s job.’

We also went out often to eat at fancy restaurants, and she loved South Indian cuisine- dosas, idlis and vadas- so my father always picked the restaurants that served these. Always mindful of her choice, of things that she liked and wanted.

Even after he passed away, my mother kept up her boundless energy and zest for life for the sake of her two little girls, and the three of us often went out to eat — where we always knew she would order dosa!

And not only do we know very well the preferences of our mother, we also know the food preferences of our mother’s mother. She, too, liked to cook for herself, and have food of her liking made by the khansama (male cook, again) in her youth. To this day, even at the age of 80, she eats her favourite foods with relish. And like me, she is an avid carnivore- loves her chicken and mutton, and loves feeding everyone chicken and mutton! In fact, my Nanna is at the opposite end of the spectrum – not only does she get food of her own choice prepared, she insists on feeding other family members the food of her choice! (Talk about dominance and aggression resulting from meat-eating, ha!)

In a nutshell then, I grew up in a family of bold, energetic ladies and caring, thoughtful gentlemen – so I never adopted the traditional docile attributes expected of women. And I remained vocal and insistent about my own food preferences.

It is ironic that even though traditional societies consider cooking as ‘a woman’s job’, the first right over the food is always supposed to belong to the men.

The good part is that attitudes have changed by and large in this generation — women are more vocal and open, and men are more considerate and loving. It is a change for the better. A sign of better things to come, a sign of more harmonious relationships and more fulfilling lives for everyone.

Because ‘the family that eats together, stays together.’

Are you chasing bliss?

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‘Every person on this planet can relate to wanting to chase bliss.’ Can you?

Last night I watched the movie Bliss (2021). It’s funny how, sometimes, some things that made no sense thus far, suddenly make sense to you in the most unexpected of places.

Before we proceed: spoiler alert. This post is full of spoilers about the movie, though this is not a review. It is an intensely personal experience reflected through the movie.

On the face of it, Bliss seems like a science fiction film. But it isn’t. It is actually a commentary on drug culture and the grip of drugs on the human brain—and an intense, deep reflection on human psychology anywhere in the world. In fact, the film wasn’t even trying to appear like science fiction, because science fiction makes an effort to convince the viewer of the world that it creates. This film, though, was clearly revealing to the viewer the mixed-up nature of its reality, the hazy nature of the ‘created’ world in it. It was giving signals all along, and yet was crafting a new ‘reality’ in a way that was very convincing.

Greg Witter is a man who is already neck-deep in troubled waters, when he meets a woman who claims to be his soulmate, who claims that the world they live in is all fake, including all the people in it (except for the both of them). And from then on, reality becomes difficult to decipher, as he keeps swinging between two ‘worlds’, not knowing which is real.

Close to the end of the movie, when everything is falling apart and descending into chaos, Greg’s grown-up daughter who has been consistently trying to reach out to him, looks at him, and says: ‘One of these days, you’re going to have to choose between these worlds. And maybe somehow, to you they’re both real. So just… just do what’s best for you, okay?”

Up until that moment, I’d been having flashes of déjà vu throughout the movie. But this was the statement that suddenly brought everything crashing down upon me. ‘One of these days, you’re going to have to choose between these worlds.’

And what if you make the wrong choice?

Watching Greg Witter discover the home he used to sketch over and over, the home he thought existed only in his imagination. Watching him suddenly come face to face with the woman whose face he used to sketch, the woman he thought existed only in his imagination. Watching him discover a new world, one that was incredibly, impossibly picture-perfect. A utopia.

It all landed so heavily on me, reminding me of the time when I had discovered something that I thought could not possibly exist, something that I had always considered a figment of my imagination.

When you find something like that, something that seems to materialize straight from your dreams, out of thin air, then the hold it has upon you is unshakeable. It becomes an addiction.

The movie Bliss is primarily about drug addiction. But addictions can be of various types. There are so many different ways a person can become addicted; so many different things one can be addicted to- particularly the addiction to one’s own dreams. And every addiction produces the same effect.

You. Just. Can’t. Let. It. Go.

Letting go of your illusions is the hardest thing to do, particularly when they appear so real. Particularly when they spread out before you a shimmering dream of everything that could be.
The possibilities!

An article on Medium explains so beautifully how this film goes deeper to explore the human longing for utopia- that unattainable ideal of how things are supposed to be. The possibilities of ‘if only’ and ‘what if’. The motifs of heaven, paradise, jannat- all of these are echoes of the human longing for perfection, for utopia.

The film’s story plays upon the insatiable human need for ‘more’. And that ‘more’, in our lives, may not necessarily be materialistic. It may be a need for more knowledge, deeper connection, a better world, more love, more recognition, more ‘you’.  The endless chasing of Bliss.

Greg’s amazement and wonder at the utopian ‘real’ world that he suddenly encounters hit home for me, hit so hard. That feeling of incredulity. Am I really going to get this? Is this really going to be mine? All these images in my head, all these crazy visions- am I really going to have them all fulfilled? Is this true? Is this real? How could it be? How could this be so perfect and still be real?

It can’t.

And that is the bitterest pill to swallow.

What is real can never be perfect. What is perfect can never be real.

In the end though, Greg makes the decision to stay back in the ‘imperfect’ world because in spite of everything else, it was still full of beauty, still full of moments of joy, still full of chances of redemption. And there was his daughter.

He makes the right choice.

And yet he leaves you wondering, what if he had had enough ‘blue crystals’ to cross over to the other side? What if he had chosen the other side? Since we know this is a film about drug addiction, we know what the right choice was. Yet you wonder what would have happened had he made the other choice? Could he have found his utopia?

What if you got the chance to make a different choice? Would it have been any better?

Here’s the thing, and that’s the point the film makes earlier on, through the ‘brain box’ experiment. Even in the utopian world, humans had begun to find things to complain about. They had begun to find out that everything does not always remain in a state of perfection. That life is messy, chaotic and unpredictable, and there will always be struggles, no matter how small those may be. There will always be something ‘missing’.

Matt Williams writes in his article on Medium: ‘It is a demonstration of how the human mind inherently questions reality, refuses the world as it is given, and seeks to construct something anew.’

‘Often unbeknownst to us, our brains are constantly comparing the real world to an infinite number of imagined alternatives, and therefore raising the bar of our expectations higher and higher each time we try to reach it.’

For so long I struggled to find answers to what it was that hit me with such force, knocking the wind out of me, turning me into a perpetually recovering ‘addict’. Why it became so excruciatingly difficult to accept what was real and what was not. I looked for answers everywhere, from books to religion to therapy. And all of them had their own particular ways of looking at the questions, their own unique answers.

Bliss opened up new perspectives and delivered new answers.

There will perhaps always be a void inside of us, a gap that we are forever trying to fill. That is what drives us to the point of insanity, to the point where we are unable to discern between the real and the unreal. That unfillable gap is the endless quest for the perfect world. The quest for utopia.

And yet, in that quest, we may discover things about ourselves, we may make other discoveries that ultimately lead us to uncharted spaces. To better places.

Such is the strange beauty of this imperfect, chaotic world.

Love In The Margins

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Untouched books are also
unloved.
See a child
how he scribbles
colours
and rubs?
That’s what love is like –
rough around the edges
and every so often
wears you out.

An unblemished book
is lonely, wan
displays no signs of
ever being held,
no lines in the margins
– exclamations, notations-
no marks of love,
of having had someone
crawl into it
long past midnight.

These wrinkles, my love,
and folds of skin,
these blemishes and 
signs of wearing out
are but dog ears 
on the pages of life-
marking the lines that
reverberate;
marking the most loved
parts of us.

Most people disapprove of writing inside books. I’m not one of them.

All the books I’ve ever loved are painted over with notations on various pages, thoughts that they triggered in me, my responses to the beauty or tragedy in them. The more loved a book is, the more scribbled over it will be. Many people consider this sacrilegious, they consider it a defilement of the sacred. For me, though, these are marks of love. Passionate love, if I may say so.

Many years ago, when I was around 18, I had English Literature as a subsidiary subject in my undergraduate class. We studied several short stories, one of which was Bernard Malamud’s The First Seven Years. I still remember that story, because at its core lay two people who fell in love with each other through their love for books. Miriam and Sobel hardly ever met, hardly ever spoke. They mostly exchanged books.  

Before I speak further about this story, I must add a disclaimer. I could go online and search for the story and be accurate about the details, but I will write from memory instead- the things that I remember and the feelings they evoked in me then.

Miriam is the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker, and Sobel is a Polish refugee, who finds work and sanctuary as an assistant in her father’s shop. Unknown to her father, they exchange books, and they converse only—mostly—through the notes and the lines that both of them scribble in the margins. They are not love notes or secret lines to each other- they are notations about the book, reflections on what was written. It is an intellectual, spiritual bond- a love borne out of a meeting of thoughts and ideas. A meeting of minds and not just hearts.

Every time I write a line in the margins of a book that I love, I remember Miriam and Sobel. I revel in the vicarious pleasure of a love that speaks through books. I wonder what it would be like, to be surrounded by a love like that.

But when I write in books, it is not for a lover to read. Who is it for, I wonder?

Perhaps a part of me hopes that my son would read my books someday, find his mother’s words and be delighted in that discovery, as I am now delighted when I find something that belonged to my parents in their youth. Or perhaps my son’s children will – assuming he decides to have children.

Being a person who for a very long time has struggled against motherhood, and asked myself whether I would really have chosen motherhood if this were a choice available to me, I find myself fearful of the fact that my son may not choose to have children. I hope it does not happen so. I hope he chooses to have them.

I know, now, that if life hadn’t gone hurtling at a dizzying pace for me, if I had had the choice of taking things slow and step by step, I would have chosen to have a child. Or children.

I see women around me who choose to have children well into their thirties, and I imagine that if I had role models around me, if I had these ideas around me, if I had the chance to wait till my thirties to become a mother, I would have perhaps been a calmer, saner, more prepared, more willing parent. I hope that my son and the woman he marries choose to be parents too- in their own time, at their own pace, with their own choice- for choices made consciously and wisely can be carried with a lot more joy.

And as I read one book after another, writing away into the margins, I wonder if these words will be read by generations after me. I wonder if they will even want to read the kind of books I like. Wonder if they will ever want to flip through these books. It is rather vain to assume that future generations will want to know you.

It is enough, I think, to write in a book, knowing that you have loved it, knowing that it has become a part of you, knowing that if no one else, at least you will come back to it. You will read the words of a past version of yourself, a person who no longer exists because she has grown and evolved into someone else, and perhaps you will read those words and smile, and say: Ah!

And then again, perhaps no one ever needs to read these words. Perhaps it is enough to have reflected and contemplated and written them down. Perhaps it is better that they remain like this, locked away in the book’s close embrace, fading away into a yellowed page, as the human existence fades into the yellowed pages of life.  

The scent of death, the sack of memories

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This is a picture of my parents, in times when our lives were still untouched by tragedy. 

When the scent of death hadn’t pervaded our lives and settled into the very bones of our bodies, never to be extricated from our veins and skin. Inhaled every day, settling into the lungs like a chain smoker’s X Ray. 

Every time my chronic allergic cough resurfaces, doctors are puzzled by my lung X-Rays. They look me up and down in astonishment and then ask, rather hesitantly, ‘Do you smoke?’  (Asking this of a woman in hijab seems strange enough in itself, you see.) 

No, doctor, I do not smoke. What you see inside my body is the residue of death. I have been smoking death since I was 9. 

You see, a young, untimely death isn’t something you ever grow out of. It isn’t something you ever put behind you. It’s a trick- wound. Appears healed on the outside, but no sooner does a sharp push or unconscious shove land on it that it starts bleeding instantaneously. 
The shove could be anything. A movie. A poem. A song. A separation. Another death. 

With every new death, the smoke billows afresh. Like a Cherokee’s smoke signal. Grief returning home to nest. 

We have felt death acutely in every waking moment of our lives. 

Lately, though, I realised that my mother had stopped speaking of my father. Where earlier not a day went by without a mention of him- your father this and your father that, now, she has a new interest. Allah. 
She’d been religious from the beginning, but this is something else altogether. It is what consumes her day in and day out, it is the only thing she wishes to talk about now. 
My father no longer occupies centrestage. After two decades of hanging his shirts and his ties in her cupboard, two decades of his nameplate hanging on our door right beside her own nameplate, two decades of every lunch and dinner conversation tinged by memories of him, I found her talking less and less about him, until the mentions all but disappeared.

I was hurt, to be honest, when I first sensed it. But by and by, I realised that this is what closure looks like. Perhaps this is what it is like to move on. And it ought to have happened a long time ago, really. For how long should one carry around the weight of grief? 

Some of us though, carry grief around in large, mysterious knapsacks.  Grief and wound and memory and longing. All bound together. 

As a child of 6 or 7, I loved watching a children’s programme on Doordarshan, whose jingle spoke about ‘Chunnu ka Baba’ with a huge ‘Potli’, a large sack, of stories.  The old Baba with a snow white beard always had a story to pull out of his potli.
When I was little, I used to imagine myself as Chunnu, the one who heard the stories.
Now that I have a child of my own, I feel more like the ‘Baba’. With my own little potli of stories; a potli of grief and shards of broken heart. 

Perhaps this is how some of us choose to live. With a jute sack of memories that oftentimes weighs us down. But we’d rather not abandon it. We’d sling it on our backs or hold it cuddled up in our arms, close to our heart. 
We’d rather carry the weight of memories as we puff on death and separation and incessant heartache, and let the fumes settle deep inside us, to be discovered by X Rays. 
Some of us make memories a way of life. Until we vanish into the ethers and turn into puffs of memory ourselves. 

Postscript: I wrote this piece almost 3 months ago. Last month though, when my sister got married, something happened. We watched her walk down dressed as a bride and all of us- her mother, her sister and her cousins- nearly all of us had tears in our eyes. I had them because it was overwhelming to see the kiddo whose diapers I had changed, grow up and get married. Our mother, when I later spoke to her about it, said this:

“I wept because I missed your father. He should have been here to see his little girl.”

Sigh.

The potli. Always the potli.

What’s your primary love language?

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I never thought I’d say this, but motherhood grows on you.

I have begun to realise, slowly, that I am so much more comfortable in the role of a young boy’s mother, than I ever was in the role of a toddler’s mother. 

I think it is because my primary mode of communication, and expression of love, is verbal. Words are my preferred channel. My primary method of bonding is intellectual exchange, which is obviously done through words. 
Physical touch comes a close second- I am a very physically expressive mother: kisses, cuddles, smothering hugs. But that is still second, and no substitute for the joy of words. 

Thus I find myself taking far more delight in the role of a mother now – now that my son can clearly express and converse with me, now that I can hear the thoughts that go through his remarkable brain and marvel at the fascinating intellect he possesses. 
I find myself relishing the role of the mother far more with the growing up of my child, as he develops more fully into a distinct human being with a mind of his own, contradicting me and adding to my thoughts with the freshness and depth of his own. 
It is a great delight to find my son thinking independently enough to contradict his mother – though it’s exhausting as hell, too! But I find myself bursting with pride when he adds a different dimension to my understanding of the world. Pride at the magnificent, compassionate and empathetic person he is turning out to be. 
It isn’t as though I didn’t enjoy being a mother to Little H when he was tiny. I distinctly remember what a bundle of joy he was, how he listened carefully and began speaking at the early age of 10 months, so that one could chuckle at the nearly grown-up sentences uttered by those tiny lips. 
How delightful and adorable he was when he tried to copy his father in every tiny thing: right down to how he lay on the bed while talking: lying on his side, propping an elbow under his head, and crossing one leg over another. We roared with laughter on watching 10 month old Little H lying on the bed in exactly this manner: complete with crossed legs and elbow propping up the head ! 
How marvelous it was to see his wonder and joy at the world, to see commonplace everyday objects with a child’s fascination- a child discovering the new world, a world that holds infinite delights for him. “And children’s faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup!” If you’ve ever seen a child with his mouth wide open in a joyous grin and his eyes sparkling with wonder, you’ll know exactly what this means.  And yet, I think I was so exhausted and worn out all the time, because he was such a bundle of energy and mischief, that I couldn’t really appreciate or enjoy it as much as I would have liked. 

Not being able to understand his needs, not being able to communicate my concerns with him was the most frustrating thing I ever experienced. Like constantly groping in the dark to find the light switch, and falling in the darkness and hurting yourself countless times in the process. 
And slowly, you learn where the light switch is- so you can find it even when it’s dark. 
Little H growing up enough to communicate properly- and understand his mother’s words properly – is the light that’s suddenly been switched on for me. 
We have finally reached a place where we can, to a largely comforting extent, understand each other. 

What an extraordinary amount of hard work it has been! 
But it’s a beautiful feeling for me, the Reluctant One, to find that I can finally enjoy motherhood, that I, too, can find it fulfilling, instead of constantly and exhaustingly struggling against it. 

I feel like ending this with a quote from the Quran. It is my favorite verse, and it is the verse I used to repeat most often when Little H was tumbling around in my belly.  It is also the verse I chanted over and over to myself when I was experiencing the most excruciating pain of my life: as Little H was being born. 

Fa Inna Ma’al Usrey Yusra. Inna Ma’al Usrey Yusra

Verily, with hardship comes ease. With hardship comes ease. 
It does, indeed.

The patterns of all our suffering

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Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning has been called a life-altering book. And yet, it did not seem so to me. I did not find it giving me something revelatory; I did not find it giving me something I had never thought of.

Instead, I found it unbelievably, utterly relatable. Close to my heart and, incredibly, strangely familiar.

I discovered, to my great surprise, that in spite of never having been imprisoned or sent to concentration camp, I was already acquainted with a significant portion of the suffering reflected in it.

It would of course be highly presumptuous of me, not to mention disrespectful, to compare my own puny suffering with that of the ones who experienced the horrors of Auschwitz. 

However, suffering is universal. The ‘types and patterns of suffering’ are universal.

There are wounds that are invisible to the naked eye, wounds whose pain is known only to the one that carries them. Suffering is immeasurable, and therefore, incomparable. There are no statistical tools available to measure and compare suffering – or we would perhaps have been boasting about that too: look how much thicker or heavier my suffering is, compared to yours.

But that is not so, and therefore, suffering can only be defined from the point of view of the person who experienced it. 

The fact that this book has sold over 12 million copies, and continues to sell after 7 decades of first being published, means only one thing: all of us, whether or not we have known the inside of concentration camps, have known suffering very deeply, intimately. Maybe not the same kind of suffering, but the very same patterns of suffering. 

Thus I found that I had gone through all of the stages of suffering described by Frankl, and could identify with them to an alarming level.

Curiously, every one of these stages of suffering made me think of my forthcoming book, The Reluctant Mother. It made me think of the three years recorded in my book: those three years when I became a person entirely different from who I had been so far. 

And that is one of the impacts of trauma upon the human mind and personality, as defined so lucidly by Frankl. Severe and chronic trauma often brings about personality changes in people, making them behave in unprecedented ways, changing them from who they were under non-traumatic circumstances. That is one of the first stages of suffering.

Then there is the moment when, arriving at the concentration camp, Frankl is stripped of everything that has ever belonged to him, including his clothes–including the manuscript of his life’s work that he hid away in those clothes. As Victor writes, he understood in that moment that he had to let go of and say goodbye to everything that had defined his entire life until that moment.

In life we sometimes face moments when we are forced to say goodbye to the dreams and ambitions we had nurtured thus far. And yet, Victor made it out of the camp. As did I make it out of my ‘camp’ and found that, after a significant period of time, life brought back my dreams and meanings to me- in newer, different forms. Just like it did for Victor.

With every word of the book, I found an echo of my own experience.

In particular, the third stage of suffering, in which you imagine freedom as a moment of great and overpowering joy, and yet, when freedom has been withheld for far too long, you lose the capacity to fully experience that joy when it does come.

As Victor wrote of the time they were liberated from the concentration camp:

We wanted to see the camp’s surroundings for the first time with the eyes of free men. “Freedom”—we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.’

‘We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly.’

How well have I known this! The numb void that appears when joy and hope have been dashed to the ground, repeatedly and for so long, that when they finally appear on the horizon, you find yourself unresponsive. Vacant. Blank.

I had suffered enough to be aware of these stages, though I am no psychoanalyst or logotherapist.  

At the end of my reading of Man’s Search For Meaning, I felt a great sense of peace—a sense of peace that is detached from joy, for it is possible for peace to be devoid of joy.

I felt a sense of understanding that suffering is, as Frankl says, an inevitable part of life. And that we survive only by finding meanings to it. Were it not for the meanings we seek and find in our suffering, life would often become unliveable. 

And yet, survival is not, ultimately, what brings meaning to life.

‘Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning?’ questioned Victor. ‘For if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately has no meaning at all.’

Importantly, though, Victor stresses over and over throughout the course of the book, that a person’s first response to suffering must always be to find ways to remove it. To find ways to alleviate it –whether it be the suffering of others, or his or her own self. There is no courage or glory in suffering needlessly when suffering can be removed.

However, finding meaning in suffering becomes imperative for all those kinds of circumstances that life throws at us, from which we find it impossible to escape, even after our best attempts. When we find ourselves bound inescapably to suffering. In those times, the only thing that pulls us across is the search for meaning.

That perhaps is how a person may arrive at a place of peace with all their suffering—not necessarily happy, but at peace, for all the meanings it imbues their life with. Suffering shows you how much there is to learn from life. 

This realisation made me feel a tad proud of myself, too, for I did, independently and through my own reflections, discover everything that Frankl speaks of in this book, which has brought meaning to the lives of millions of people for 7 decades now. 

Perhaps I can hope, with some vanity and some naivety, that my book will also give hope and bring meaning to some people, especially since it speaks of the truths that are most often silenced. 

Perhaps that shall be the ultimate meaning of all my suffering.

You made this dream come true!

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In my last post, I wrote about how the dream and desire of having my book published saved me and motivated me to have faith in the future. Have faith in life.

That dream is going to be a reality. Very, very soon.

My book, The Reluctant Mother: A Story No One Wants To Tell is being published by Hay House, which as you all know is a reputed international publisher.

So today, I am here to thank you all – every single one of you from the blogging community, and readers from outside the community- for staying by my side on this journey, for sharing my joys and sorrows, for reading and commenting here and letting me know that I wasn’t alone.

First and foremost, I want to thank Kathi Ostrom Gowsell, who was the first person to suggest, way back in 2013, that this story should be given the form of a book. We may live on separate continents, and may have never met each other, but I feel connected to you in a very special way, Kathi. Thank you for being you !

Other bloggers- mothers and fathers- other writers and readers, you have all been such a huge part of my journey.

I cannot tell you all, how much it has meant to me over the years, to read your comments here, and to get private messages from so many of you, asking me to keep writing, telling me that I was brave to write the truth fearlessly, and telling me how much my voice resonated with you, for it spoke of the stories of your lives too.

There are no words to describe my gratitude for the love you have all showered me with- especially those of you who told me that I was your voice- for I was speaking of the truth reflected in your lives too, but you couldn’t speak out because of all the judgements and restrictions the world heaps upon us all. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the strength to speak this truth and take this dream to culmination.

The launch of the book has been delayed for a bit, owing to the pandemic, but do watch this space for the happy announcement, and I promise that you will be the first to see the cover as soon as it is launched !

Meanwhile, here is a picture of the first page of the book, of the final draft PDF version, and merely looking at the title on the page before me, fills me with gratitude and joy.

There is a word that I have taken from Paulo Coelho’s book, and quoted it in my own book. I shall just end this post with that word:

Maktub!

It is written.