Family Life

sangeeta — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:49:57 +0000

Sushila Aunty was the talk of the family. She never married in the days when it was unfashionable to be single. Sushila Aunty is a doctor, and once I asked her, when she was in a mellow mood, why she remained unmarried. She looked at me strangely, as though I was being quaint, and said, “I didn’t have the time. There was too much else to do.”
I could appreciate that. A doctor’s life is a busy one. I know many male doctors who are single, particularly from the older generation, when doctors didn’t have secretaries and drivers and other menials to help them. They had to do their own dirty work, as well as look after patients, and there was never any time to devote to the family. Perfectly understandable. But not if one was a woman.
If one was a woman, one had a family, and one had a responsibility, not only to one’s own parents if there was no brother around, but also to one’s husband’s parents and grandparents, and nieces and nephews. And if one chose to have a career in spite of all that, well that was one’s own choice, perhaps a bad one, and nothing could be done about it. But one had to make sure that one didn’t let the family down by being absent from the dozens of ‘functions’ in a year that are part and parcel of married life.
Sushila Aunty chose to opt out of that situation in favour of pursuing her calling sincerely. She was free to find her own hobbies, one of which was trekking, something she did till she turned eighty. She also loved cooking, and maintained a well-appointed kitchen where she could conjure up exciting food from around the world. She entertained lavishly, and ensured that the conversation matched the excellent food. She was a great conversationalist, and had a delightful weakness for American pulp fiction. Judging by the procession of men in her life, she wasn’t wanting for male companionship of the romantic kind either.
And yet she was a curiosity. I envied her, but I know that other, more conservative women in the family pitied Sushila Aunty. She wasn’t married, you see.

Little Ole Me

sangeetamall — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:52:00 +0000

When I first gave CNMO to a critic to read (not a professional critic but a friend), she said she loved the bit with the children in it. They sounded so real, she said. It’s exactly the opposite, I’ve found. Children, for most of us, are ninety percent headache and only five percent joy. The other five percent is left in the realm of ambiguity. We would prefer to have our lives with them when they are babies, or when they are old enough to shoulder some of our burdens. It’s the in-between stage that is problematic. There are so many decisions to be made, from which character to play in the fancy dress competition to whether to invite members of the opposite sex to the sixteenth birthday party, decisions that have already been taken for oneself all those years ago, agonising that has already been iterated once before.
But the biggest decision that all parents obsess over is what their blue-eyed child should become when she grows up. Doctor? Engineer? Lawyer? And that’s when the so-called experience of our own decision-making when we were sixteen comes in handy. Look, I’m a doctor and see how well I’ve done! The right thing, therefore, is to become one yourself. Why? Coz I say so!
Nobody said parenting was easy. In fact, Huxley believed that it was such a hard thing that it shouldn’t be left amateurs at all. Appoint a set of professional parents and let them raise all children, who would then turn out to be ideal adults. But in the absence of such a utopia, the least we can do is to leave our kids alone, and let them turn into strangers, people who we admire on their own terms, not merely as our children.

Cloud 9 Minus One » career decisions

Family Life

Little Ole Me