Skip to main content

Feeling Foolish

A few weekends ago I suffered a crisis of moral compass in that I failed to live up to the principle of atithi devo bhava - an ideal I was raised on and had many opportunities to learn by observation in my own family. Guests were treated with kindness and respect, made to feel at home and when they left they knew they would be welcome back. It was how I was treated by the overwhelming majority of hosts I have spent time with in my life. It is also how I observed my parents conduct themselves. 

With that being my background, I don't have an excuse to fail at being the kind host I have come to expect as a norm -  behave like the exception. Yet, I failed quite resoundingly. The guest in question, S is a friend of a friend. We know of him more than we know him. That Friday, he texted us that he was visiting his daughter a few hundred miles north of us on his way down south to where he lived.

I assumed he would be driving but he was not - he was coming by bus. I also assumed that he was dropping by to say hello, rest a bit before resuming his journey. I was wrong there too. At first, he asked to stay overnight - and this was before we knew he lacked transportation. So we said yes. Upon arrival we find he will need a ride to whatever place is next and it was upto us to make it happen. It was unclear why the bus would no longer work. 

Even that would be okay, if S had any shred of grace or politeness - showed any appreciation for us making space in our lives to accommodate him. I went about cooking for him, giving up our weekend after having had a long week and a tough one to look forward to. Somewhere in the middle of his three night stay as it ended up being, I decided to completely ignore his presence in my house and carry on like he did not exist. It was the only way for me to reclaim some of the loss of control in the situation that I had stupidly got myself into. 

We promised ourselves this is the last time we would welcome S home for any duration of stay - mainly because I was so outraged at what I viewed as his connivance. All of those nights he was in our home, I slept deeply uneasy thinking about how I had failed my family, the values that I was raised on and become the very thing I had once found so abhorrent. 

Part of me wanted to reach out to to V for the events of 2003 at her house, where I was the unwelcome guest. I wanted to tell her I still do not understand what happened then but I also don't understand my own reaction to S. So in that sense there is something to share between us. 

Had I made V feel stupid in the same way as S had made me feel, had I shown some lack of grace and consideration given my pre-occupation with my life unraveling at speed of light. I must have done something unwittingly or not to trigger the high level of unease V had felt. I know that now that I have been in her shoes even if for a much shorter period of time. 

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