Alaknanda SenguptaAfter having spent a few years in college as a young woman in the nineties, indulging in idiotic, inexplicable pursuits more outside than inside the classroom, the day dawned when the world started asking the question about what one would be doing for the rest of one’s life. My brother was well on his way to engineer-hood, but I had not given this much thought. Indian women in large numbers, at least in the bigger cities, would move into mainstream careers, shoulder to shoulder with men, and I would be part of this change, but it wasn’t exactly keeping me up at night. I had just thought I would drift along where life took me. I did see some dreams of a plush office with indoor plants, but I never gave much thought to what I would actually do there. In some deep, organic way, I felt pulled away from all the grand things the world expected me to do. Had not my mother and her mother and her mother before her spent their lives nurturing their families? By the time I was a teenager, I had proved to be much better at this than at Math and Science, which everyone said were the only things worth knowing if one wanted a real career. I had episodes of throwing up when my poor Math tuition teacher visited the house in a last-ditch attempt to make me pass the tenth-grade board exams. Chemical equations and the laws of Physics I understood even less than Math, if such a thing was possible.
I could always read English novels and then become a teacher which seemed more like a punishment than a career. (Years later, a different kind of teaching would claim me, and I would become a Special Educator.) I thought I would do better at being my mother’s paternal grandmother, who had run a house in Daltongunj in Bihar, looking after the families of her seven children when they visited (not all at the same time, presumably!) for the summer holidays. She cooked, she cleaned, she supervised the delivery of babies at home, she maintained a first-aid corner on a set of shelves covered with a clean, white drape.
My mother loved her for always presenting each of her eighteen grandchildren their special favourite dried-fruit or pickle or home-made mouth freshener in little jars just for them. I wished I had been born a hundred years before and could make a career out of cooking and caring for my family and setting large glass jars of pickling vegetables out in the winter sunlight, and to hell with women’s lib. And no need even to travel back in time a hundred years. My mother has spent her life building a home for us. She was always there to feed us, my older brother and me, see that we finished our Bournvita with milk, help us with homework and put us to bed. She played with us, read to us, and helped us with our art and craft projects. Unforgettably, she once read the entire Mystery of the Missing Man by Enid Blyton aloud to us. She was in charge of looking after my paternal grandmother through years and years of ill health. (Much later, I would supervise the care of my own parents-in-law through years of ill health and dementia. Difficult years that would call for advanced housekeeping and crazy multi-tasking.) My mother waited a few decades to find the time to hone her own talents in writing. She now has four books in her name, all translations from Bengali to English, published by Harper Element, V and S Publishers, Niyogi Books and Rupa Publications.
So when careers and offices peered enticingly out of the horizon after college, it seemed a bit of a mirage – something did not add up and I could not take it very seriously. I knew even then that it was not in me to handle both a career and a family like a superwoman with ten arms. Surely one could not run a household and work in an office at one and the same time? Willy-nilly, I drifted along with life, studied Psychology and then Computer Management and then got married and had a baby all in a quick and crazy zig-zag-zoom of life choices.
Wherever I went, I was asked what I did. I was a full-time stay-at-home mom, and cared for my parents-in-law as well, but I guess that was not enough for the universe. I was a grown woman in a big city who did not do anything. And truth be told, I was bored to the gills myself. The excitement of having half a dozen grandchildren descending on one for the duration of the summer was something that belonged in the past. Mothering a single child could be quiet, even lonely. And so started my double life. I realised that my husband could have one life which was outside the house, and his innocent attempts at cooking or other domestic chores were performed by choice and small errors were giggled at by the family or even indulged, but that I must achieve domestic efficiency every minute of every day – it was not a choice for me! And so, I realised that I must live both inside and outside the house. Part-time work became my practice, and two different threads took on my life. Sometimes the two ran in parallel, as if strangers to each other. Sometimes, they intertwined playfully. Sometimes one took over all the space and suffocated the other. And sometimes, they dashed into each other and made many-hued patterns like in a kaleidoscope, coming close and drifting apart and mixing their energies and turning into strange but beautiful new colours and patterns…
First written with friends in the Ochre Sky community.
