Baghban III

I dont understand my relation with relationships. Relationships are very fragile - they are not for people who have a really hard head. And one perhaps takes a life time to learn how to handle them. Sometimes i feel i am too critical about relations - i don't respect relations. The consequences of such an attitude is that i take a lot of liberties to do things which i assume can not be questioned. But such is not the case in real life. Especially when you take moral stances.

I don't know what it is to be a mother? Mother for some one else is just a relation, but being a mother is describing the relation itself. It does not remain a relation then. It is not about two bodies then. Why would one body care so selflessly for another body? Not only physically, but mentally too? What is it to be mentally and physically so? Often I question my familiarity with my mother. I don't think I know her enough. I think i take her so much for granted!

One of the fallacies that my family (in the sense of men vs women) falls into is to compare physical activities of both these genders. I have myself been very critical of this - is physically, a man stronger than a woman? does it affect in the work that we do? My friend Neha (Parkar) always maintained that women are physically weaker than men. I always refuted. Physical strength, i assumed, comes from the mind. But i think a mother is more about the mind, than physical. She goes beyond the physical to achieve something that does not even an achievement. Actually I am not even able to express in words how disgusted I am to understand how I know my relationships.

Can one imagine mothers behaving tit for tat? Can anyone image getting hurt back when you hurt your mother? Sometimes, I have told her things that I didn't ought to, and found no way of expressing my guilt. As children in our kind of social setup, we are never taught to express to parents (its the fear-respect relationship we are brought up in). But we don't even have the courage to say sorry for something wrong that we did to our parents. Once, I came home frustrated, and just passed her a comment - and immediately i realised how wrong it was. It took me an entire night to write a sorry note, which i kept in her room near her pillow to express my guilt. I don't know if she read it, i don't know if she skipped it, but the next morning, things were better for me. But what I am surprised about is that how timid we (children of our generation in our family) are to articulate communication to our parents.

The truth is that we do feel about them, but can not express. We are not equipped with the language in which to express. We never appreciate her for a tasty meal she makes, but we do make a point when a pinch of salt is more in the dal. She takes it courageously. I don't know how. But that does not mean we do not appreciate when she makes an excellent recipe. We are just not taught to appreciate her. The question here is - should you be taught this? who should teach you this?

I suspect sometimes if this is a western thought - in convent schools, (where my nephews study), they communicate to their mothers much effectively. They are taught to say things to their parents. The schools take a lot of efforts for parent-child activities. There is a lot more glib communication between them. We never had such interactions. During our time, it was only the Open house day when the teacher would tell the parent about the ward. That was the kind of relationship that was strengthened between the parent and the ward - a highly institutional, instructional and now i feel utterly stupid.

When once, my principal wrongly called my parent (mother) to meet for some of my wrongly represented activity, I felt so embarrassed, and I cried in front of 40 people in my class after my mother left. It was purely because of the kind of societal values that i was brought up in - of holding parents' nose high. What made me cry was my misrepresentation of the 'institutional' or ideal image that i mentioned before.

Once when I could not finish my Hindi paper (and left questions worth 7 marks), I entered home crying, and my mother consoled me so beautifully, that I felt even more confident for the coming exams. It was my mother who used to train me in Hindi, and I was one of the best students in hindi, which again made me remind of the "institutional" image we "must" represent. Although I managed to get 2nd highest in spite of leaving 7 marks, i now wonder what must have made my mother completely ignore the 7 marks (institutional instruction) and cajole me at that instance... how could she remain out of it...the institutional way in which we were supposed to be brought up in?

I remain with these questions, investigating where does the gap lie, what is the problem, why this gap, it makes me uncomfortable to think of myself as inconsiderate...i hope i am able to manage some middle path for myself.