Skip to main content

Bleeding Wounds

The arrival, stay and departure of S is on my mind. I could have done it differently and there were many chances to recover but I did not use any of them. I just wanted him to know I had not sought his presence in my home and felt imposed upon. Yet, I have been his shoes two decades ago - a very different phase of life but much of what he is dealing with at sixty I did back then. A life upended by the implosion of a marriage, no financial safety net and a future with responsibilities looming ahead. J was less than a year old back then and his daughter is in her 20s but very far from being settled. S has responsibility for her even as he can barely fend for himself. Notwithstanding, I could not summon any compassion for his cause. Desperate people need lifelines - maybe the short stay at my home was one of such myriad lifelines he depends on. 

I came to realize that my outrage was borne out his lack of candor and manners. When I was in his shoes, I was at my most vulnerable - my cards were on the table, everyone knew exactly how desperate my situation was and how hard I was trying to climb out my hole. There were no secrets and no filters. If ever there was a time in my life I experienced being devoid of any and all ego, that was it. Very random people offered assistance in the form of connections and introductions to help me land on my feet. I made myself useful in non-monetary ways to my hosts (and it might have not been enough) because that was all I could do. I did not strut around like S like the world owes him, did not overcompensate for my failures with bad attitude. S chose to treat the host who had cooked him meals as if it were maid service doing the job she was paid by him to do. At V's I offered to cook any meal they would let me because I could offer free labor and I was desperate to do so to pay off my debt atleast some. 

I needed to to see some humility in S because my time as V's was the most humiliating experience of my life. My upset with S was borne from the fact that he did show a shred of appreciation for the favor he wrested from us by duplicity. By getting a free ride, he had opened up my twenty year old wounds to the point of raw, hurting and bleeding. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more