Life
in my twenties was a a sad parody of the lifestyles of some of my financially
better-off contemporaries, whose access to deep filial pockets and a
predisposition to snobbery led me to possess a similar sense of entitlement,
without the means to fulfil the trappings of privilege. If that seems an
oxymoron to some of you — how can you parody privilege
without possessing it? — you needed to grow up in
urban India in the early oughties to understand the deep economic divisions
that a decade of liberalization spawned, allowing business owners to finally
come out of the shadows of the license raj and openly flaunt their
inherited wealth to an erstwhile judgemental society that was conditioned to
feel a collective embarrassment at even a modest self-promotion.
For those of
us who were the children of salaried professionals and government employees,
the suddenly lavish possibilities of life such as air-conditioned cars and
resort stays at vacation spots that did not have living relatives and their
houses within sniffing distance, was a kind of an adorned dream-scape featuring
buxom young women in smoky nightclubs and beach/farm-houses that were only a
fast, intoxicated joyride away. It was difficult to reconcile this vision with
the mundane industriousness expected of one by staunchly middle-class families;
a clearly articulated expectation of adequate achievement at school and
college, and then at careers that were judged better based on their potential
for longevity, than those that had an overly optimistic accumulation of zeroes
after the first number in the salary projections on an offer letter.
And so it
went, from one house party to another where entry was gained with a modicum of
effort and some humiliating grovelling, to a deep disillusionment with said
effort and humiliating grovelling, to a dark personal revolt at everything and
everyone considered mediocre and staid, to a drug addiction that I barely
escaped.
Many jobs
followed and sometimes overlapped with what I preferred to consider an
alternative lifestyle, whose cornerstones were epic expeditions to far-flung
destinations that were desirable for both the opportunities they afforded one
for personal insight, and the bragging rights that were allowed you after, as a
survivor from journeys that mere regular folks balked at. A career was always
elusive, with the evolutionary life-cycle of each job characterized by a new
convert’s zeal and enthusiasm that earned one immediate praise and plaudit,
followed by a gradual boredom and disaffection encouraged by a vague idea of a
greater calling, and finally ending with a personal collapse and the leaving
under a cloud.
My mother then
died. For a family such as ours that was held together by the tenuous bonds of
an over-stated loyalty to a clannish idea of the world that none of its members
truly believed, in a pseudo-matriarchal culture that had standardized a highly
refined practice of emotional blackmail and public shaming at a hint of
ingratitude to one’s elders, it was a particularly devastating loss: a space-time
divide between what was considered normal and all-pervasive and then, over a
month of surreptitious visits to an emergency room where a mass of flesh lay in
an apparently lifeless coma, was not.
The emotional
collapse of an individual is easily described. It is most often accompanied by
a poignant visual image that alludes to a desperate flailing on the surface of
a mass of water by a fast sinking human being, or a descent into dishevelment
from what was once an attractive physical visage. The collective emotional
collapse of a family because of a death of one of its members is a beast of a
thing to be a part of: it is almost impossible to distance yourself from the
pain of personal loss whilst staying mindful of the devastation the event has
caused the others, all the while recalibrating interactions and alliances and
emotional bonds with the survivors whose relationships with you was based on
the fact that the person just passed would always be around to moderate them.
In these
circumstances, when I felt the burning eyes of my devastated family upon me,
desperate to put off their own soul-searching, and seeing through my so far
inconsequential life, wondering if I was going to be financially tethered to
them forever, in a collective effort at focusing on the practical aspects of
life which is the last refuge of every kind of denier, I met my future wife
just as I was turning thirty.
In
contemporary pop-culture, it is fashionable to view the coming together of two
individuals as the product of an act of considered choice as a result of
physical and intellectual compatibility and faith in a fulfilling future to come that promises each the full benefits of the potential success
of the both. Most relationships don’t begin that way, of course, and the idea
that someone is on the rebound or emotionally too frail to begin a relationship
always presupposes that individuals act and react responsibly with respect to the
motivations and considerations of other individuals. Cases of separation during
pregnancy, prolonged domestic violence, marital rape, and abandonment, give the
lie to this idea and are tragically laid bare all too often by a perfunctory
look at the exigencies of the legal system in any country that caters for family law. To produce individuals of sound mind and body who enter into
relationships fully aware of their rights and responsibilities is the utopian
ideal of any social system, and the evidence that reality most often falls
short is painfully all around us; amongst our neighbours, friends, and families.
I wasn't
thinking of any of this when I met my future wife. I was only aware that I
needed her company immediately.
It has been
five years since we were married: a time that has given us a beautiful
daughter, led us to a fraught and evolving immigration to a country that seems
as though it will always be foreign to us, and allowed us to develop a verbose
common vocabulary that occasionally devours our individual strength of
character, but that always leaves us feeling that we didn't hold back from saying
what was needed to be said at the time. I grow more grateful everyday that I
found her when I did.
