Origin Story

You can know someone all your life and only begin to discover who they are more fully after they are gone. The stories seem to flow more easily, less self-consciously, without the moderating physical presence, perhaps more detailed in the awareness that they cannot be challenged and the memory can retain its sanctity. Today is my parents’ anniversary, 62 years since their marriage that rainy day in Secunderabad when the monsoon used to arrive without fail on the 10th day of June. The family legend has it that it poured so heavily on the 9th (the evening of the nichyathartham or engagement ceremony) that water entered the storage room, soaking the provisions for the next day’s big meal, causing my maternal grandmother to faint. That turbulence however did not seem to affect the tenor of the marriage which, by all accounts and my own experience, was characterized by a calmness that suggested a harmony of purpose and personality.  

Not that my parents are/were alike in all ways. That would have been boring. They were sufficiently different in ways that allowed us children to play to their individual weaknesses, counting on the fact that their combined strength would still keep all boats afloat. So my father would be the one I would go to for permissions and for forgiveness of transgressions, trusting that he would explain to my [more likely to be disapproving] mother and smooth things over. My mother would be the one I could depend on to take up for me when I was hurt while my father tried to explain the other side to me—something a teenager does not want to hear. 

But back to June 10, 1959. My father was 28 and a half, my mother, just 19. He was a lecturer in Osmania University while she was a student just entering the final year of her BA. He had been shouldering the primary responsibility of a large family that included 4 unmarried siblings, one of them a child of 6 years. My grandfather had passed away five years earlier, and he had been standing in since the age of 21. He had been forced to acquire the maturity of a father figure while she, the second last of seven children, was only just discovering her place in the world—a place that would now be defined by the roles she would have to play. The gulf of almost a decade between them would have to be bridged by something other than experience; possibly acceptance, openness, flexibility, even an unconditional commitment? 

My intention here is not to romanticize an experience that perhaps was not that out of the ordinary in many ways, for that generation. Yet the stories I hear from extended family, whenever the occasion arises, suggests that there was something out of the ordinary. And as I listen to those stories, which pop up unexpectedly (as one did today, on Facebook) on such days as anniversaries and birthdays, I wonder why we did not hear more of them while we were growing up. Why did I not get to ask the probing questions about how my parents felt, what it was like, what their fears and anxieties were, what were the storms raging beneath that calm? 

 

I try to excavate from those stories that admiring relatives spin (without the control of that moderating –live--presence) a deeper sense of the person from the parent I could never really know, and I realise it’s impossible. And this is despite the fact that we are/were a fairly communicative family—there was always conversation around the dining table (when we got one) and on the floor (when that was how we ate, served by my orthodox grandmother)—but there’s a way in which families can talk a lot and still not say very much. My father and I talked politics, social issues, culture, ethics...but we never talked about feelings. My mother and I talk about feelings—but almost never hers. 

The geography of our inner lives is for the most part hidden, revealed only in small slices, to very few people. We cover it with what goes for personal history—events, interactions, memories peopled with names and faces and what they said and did. 

 

We see our parents almost always only in relation to ourselves. What they did for/to/with us, and what they said or did not say at different points in our lives, how they made us feel. But rarely do we get to see them as people or, as a couple. 

 

In the kind of Indian household where I grew up, inner lives were not a subject of conversation, or even revelation. Some emotions could be legitimately displayed—anger at disobedience or transgression, grief over the loss (mostly of family; other relationships were less understood), or anxiety (over money or safety or health). The huge range of other feelings had no name, and therefore no space in our interactions. 

 

A recent episode of This American Life grief was described (and I'm paraphrasing badly here) as something you hold with you, tucked away in a pocket or in the folds of an old coat, rediscovered when you’re rummaging around absently. Grief is stoked by memory, but it’s also massaged by it. 

So when my mother told me this morning (of her 62nd anniversary, the 13th without my father), about the Facebook post, I went back to look at it, and found a nugget that I could add to that massaging memory. An older cousin, a contemporary of my father’s, talked about how they would ride their bicycles back to Begumpet from Nizam College, where Appa was a teacher and Anna a student: “sometimes in the midst of heavy rain and lightning.” 

And just like that, I’m given an image to hold, and maybe peer into to get a glimpse of the young man who would become my father, in his mid-twenties, pedaling along furiously in the rain, along bumpy roads, his loose bush-shirt flapping wet, laughing. 

 

But what was he thinking? How was he feeling? 

What your parents tell you about their feelings is framed and filtered so much by the social norms and expectations of the time. I know that my mother felt a little resentful about having to get married smack in the middle of her degree programme, but that was quickly managed by the fact that she didn’t have to discontinue her studies but was able to finish her degree (despite being seven months pregnant with me when she wrote her final exams). The “allowances” made by the family she had married into—in terms of pursuing a teaching career, the space to nurture her crafting interests—softened the edges of that resentment. But what were the conversations my parents had that made possible these allowances, that stopped personal desires from turning into discordant wedges in a joint family? What delicate dance of accommodation and assertion had to be performed to generate a context where those very memories that are now shared could be created? 

I can ask my mother, of course, but I sense a reluctance both in myself and possibly, in her, to talk about these things—feelings that had no name and space in the idea of what a home should be. And maybe that’s where I should leave it. 

For now, it’s enough to have experienced the calm of that relationship, and the fact that an anniversary brings good memories, for me, and for others. There’s really no need to know anything else.