Skip to main content

Small Perch

Meeting parents after a hiatus is an emotional roller-coaster for me. My paternal grandparents lived with their oldest son for as long as I remember, visiting their other kids on occasion. When my grand mother come to our home, it was an unremarkable event. She had a designated area where she liked her bed to be set up. It allowed her to be in the midst of activity and not alone in a bedroom. 

This spot between the kitchen and the living room is where she could always be found for the couple of months she was with us. When she returned, her things got put away and the space looked barren for a few weeks until my eyes grew accustomed to the emptiness. These visits happened on a rather fixed schedule and we saw her other times of the year in her primary residence - there was nothing notable about her arrivals or departures. 

At some point she passed away and that event was just as understated. The last time I heard my father reminiscence about her would be a couple of decades ago. I still think about her sometimes but my memories almost feel irrelevant as the extended family has long moved on. I am not sure what exactly I am clinging on to but it does bother me that she is not remembered more - maybe the irrelevance of people after their passing is more meaningful to me now than it was when I was younger.

My grandparents never became the center of gravity of anyone's existence but that has changed with my parents' generation it seems. It has to do with the shrinking size of the family. These parents have only one child, maybe two as opposed to eight or ten. I experience some of that same things my parents do when I see J after a while and can see that it is taxing for her. It would be nice to have the equivalent of my grand mother's perch between the kitchen and living room, in a figurative sense, to observe the flow of J's life. Maybe that's what my parents would like as well but just cannot have. 

Comments

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...

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...

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...