Letters To My Son :: Of following rules and breaking them

My dear son,

Two weeks ago we took you to Singapore for your birthday celebrations. This year you turned five. Your father and I had made a pact that once you’re five – and in our understanding old enough to adjust well to traveling abroad – we will gift you a vacation on your every birthday. I don’t know if we’d be able to keep up with this pact in the years to come, but I am glad we could at least start.

You wanted to meet Optimus Prime (the character from Transformers series). And hence we zeroed in on Universal Studios Singapore. On the day we visited USS you were so happy and so excited. Seeing you run around there, with that wide grin was such a treat. Just what we had hoped for when we planned this whole thing.

The Meet-and-Greet with Optimus Prime was planned for 1 p.m. We went and queued up, bubbling with excitement. That day was unusually crowded at USS, owing to a holiday in all public schools’. But even with the long queue, we were hopeful we would get to meet the character that you’d traveled so far to meet.

But you didn’t.

Just as we were about to get our chance, the lady manning the post closed the exhibit. The guest right before us got to go in but we didn’t. You were too shocked to react or even cry. I tried explaining to her that we’d been waiting in the line, under the sun, for over an hour. And that we were leaving Singapore the next day so we wouldn’t get another chance. But she didn’t relent. I guess it is a part of her job to be immune to such requests. You came so close to shaking hands with Prime. You were literally two feet away from him. I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t let us go. Just then two families behind us broke through the barricade and went ahead to meet Prime, ignoring the crew’s instructions to stand back. You almost turned that way and ran behind them too, but instead, you looked at me. I nodded in a ‘no’. You pleaded. I still didn’t allow you. And that is when you started to cry.

Some moments happen too quickly and yet our minds are able to capture them frame-by-frame. Because that is how big, how pivotal those moments are. This was one of those moments.

I don’t believe you’ve ever given me the look you gave me in that moment.  A look that, I am afraid, you would give me many more times in the future. A look that tore my heart asunder, because it seemed to say that you wished I was like that other mom who let her son go in through the barricade. And to be honest; when you cried that day, after missing out on the very thing you traveled that far for, a part of me wished I was that other mom too.

But here’s why I didn’t let you go. Years from now, when you would be all grown up, it wouldn’t really matter to you that you didn’t get to meet Optimus Prime that day. As big as that heartbreak seemed to you at that moment, you won’t even remember it. In fact, it’s been only two weeks and you’ve already almost forgotten about that incident.

But what you wouldn’t forget, hopefully, is how it is not okay to cross a line even when the others are doing it. And how you are a better person for exercising that restraint. Hopefully, you would also remember the lesson that sometimes we travel great distances for some things, and even with the best of efforts, still lose out on them after coming painfully close. But that doesn’t change the fact that we still have a great journey to look back upon. And just one disappointment can not and should not, take away the joy of our entire journey.

We had a great vacation. You had a lot of fun. You brought back a lot of presents and hopefully great memories. I am proud of you for how quickly you forgave me for that day at USS. You were back in my arms in a few minutes. And I hope you’d forgive me the same way in the future when I would stop you from doing many other things your peers might be doing. The world has enough of the people who would break through the barricade because they think the rules don’t apply to them. Let’s not add to that number.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not mean to make you a conformist at the cost of your freedom. You know I’m too free-spirited myself, to ever let that happen.

But should you chose to break through a barrier, I want it to be for something that truly matters, something that is really worth it. Because then, my child, you would not only be doing yourself but also others behind you a favor. And trust me, that day, I would nod in a ‘yes’. In fact, I will be right behind you, cheering you on.

But until then, my son, let’s stay in line.

Love now and always,

Your mother.

Letters to my son :: Happy Birthday, my love.

My dear son,

Today you turn five. And my heart swells with pride looking at the spirited and kind soul you are becoming with each day.

I don't have much to give you on your birthday. Except words. And some learning that my life's experiences have imprinted on me. I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to call it wisdom. As parents we want to be considered wise in the eyes of our children. But sometimes, looking at you, I realise you're wise too, in your own way. Your life is taking care of that, bringing to you your own set of experiences.

Like yesterday, when we went to the beach. I saw you writing your name on the sand. And just as you'd be done writing it, the waves would come and wash it away. First you were baffled, then frustrated, and finally angry. It broke my heart and I wanted to help you. But I also wanted to see what you do next. And then I noticed that with every attempt you moved further up the slope of the beach, writing your name bigger and bolder every time. Until you had reached far enough for the waves to wash it. You stood there, looking at the waves, victorious and happy.

And that is why I have no wisdom to offer you. Because I can see you earning your own. But my gift to you is this. Whenever in life you need to be reminded of that day on the beach and the wisdom it brought you, I would be right there.

Life is like that too. Sometimes it will come at you as formidable as waves, and wash away what you have built with all your love and dedication.

It will break your heart. But please know that that's life's way of pushing you to strive harder. Because it knows you have it in you. That you will keep moving up the slope until you're high enough for the waves to reach you. And also, I hope you learn not to hold it against the waves. Because while they ruin your effort, they also provide you with a clean slate to start afresh with.

And as long as you have a clean slate and a spirit to never give up, all will be fine.

So keep at it my son, never give up. Because there is only as high as the waves can go.

Happy Birthday, my boy!

Love,
Your Mother.

Letters To My Son :: Strength – Courage

 

My dear son,

Growing up, I had a friend, a few years older than me. She lived three houses down from ours. We were thick as thieves.

She was crazy about animals; had two dogs and three cats of her own. Besides those, she looked after at least a dozen stray ones every day. She fed them, nursed them back to health if they were sick, and even took them to a doctor when the need arose. She wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian and start a shelter for stray animals. You should have seen her when she was with her dogs and cats. It was like she was home. She was happy; no more the recluse she usually was when with humans. She was a single child; and I suppose, to her, they were the siblings she never had.

A few years later, we moved away from there. That was a world very different from yours, my son; a world before emails, Facebook and even mobile phones. In that world, once you lost touch with a friend or a loved one, you had to count on the benevolence of fate to get you back together again. Fate did get us back together, almost two decades later, at a social gathering. But it wasn’t quite the reunion I had always imagined it would be; because although I was there, she wasn’t. Not the girl I knew, anyway. Instead, I met a woman well into her thirties; still trying begrudgingly to fit into a life she had been handed. She was a chartered accountant now; someone had to keep her father’s practice going, you see. The practice incidentally, wasn’t doing very well since her father passed away, four years ago. It wasn’t like she wasn’t trying, but her heart had just never been in numbers. The stress of it all was starting to show in her marriage too, she said. To cheer her up I asked her how many dogs and cats she had now. None, she said. Her husband cannot stand the mess.

Ever since that day, whenever I come across a stray animal in need of a shelter, I cannot help but wonder – do we really need someone to do our taxes, more that those animals’ need to be cared for?

I often wonder if her parents ever truly understood what they took away from her, in the name of giving her a ‘more stable’ career. A veterinarian is hardly even a doctor, they had said to her. And surely she could not go on wasting all her money on food and medicines for stray animals all her life? She must forget all this as a childhood hobby and move on, she was told.

Move on, she did. Towards a life she doesn’t recognize as her own. Towards a future which is as bleak as her present. Towards a life which is now, only broken shards of what it could have been. It hurts me to even think whether the memories of her past – her happy time with her cats and dogs – are a source of warm comfort for her or a burning pain.

I wish she had fought for her dreams. I don’t know why she didn’t. I just know that many of us don’t. Perhaps because it can be very tiring. It wears one out, eventually; to bear the constant friction of the world sandpapering you into their approved version. So they just give up. But one has to wonder, if living a vanquished life like my friend is now is any easier.

The thing is, when it comes to life, nothing’s easy really. But having made the choices oneself, instead of having them dictated to you, only makes life’s difficulties worth it.

So go on, my son. Be what you’d like to be, what makes you happy. I wish for you, all the strength you will need. And then some more; to resist becoming what they would try to make you into.

 

Love, now and forever

Your Mother.

 

 

 

 

Letters To My Son :: Family – Strangers

 

My dear son,

 

Affiliation, as I have come to realize, is an odd concept. So comforting in the security it offers; and yet at the same time, so suffocating in the boundaries it creates.

From the moment we are born we are affiliated. To someone. To some things. To some place. To social constructs, we don’t know even understand. To ideologies, we have been handed down. I cannot, and will not, rule out the luxury of having that affiliation, especially during our formative years. It certainly makes things easier. To carve an identity for ourselves is a heavy burden to bear. And we need to be strong enough first before we undertake such an endeavor. But every man must undertake it, nevertheless. And the fact that so few bother to anymore, is I feel how the world has landed up where it has; a sorry state which keeps getting bleaker with every day’s news headline.

Everywhere I look, unfathomable rifts seem to be splitting our world wide open; with the few bridges that we have left being burned away fast and few bothering to build new ones. The smoke from those fires is fogging everyone’s views and judgments. Blinded, they are running amok; running into each other, knocking someone down or being knocked down in the process. Starting up fights they never meant to. Suddenly everyone’s at war. Everywhere. With everyone else.

A lot of this can find its roots in the ill-defined concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them’; and the notion that all that relates to ‘us’ is good and venerable, and all that relates to ‘them’ is bad and hate-worthy. Factionalism, to a certain extent, is expected when the world is as large as ours is. And so it has always existed – on political lines, on religious lines, on linguistic lines, even about things that were meant to serve as pure entertainment, like which sports team is better and who is the real Bollywood superstar. But what’s gripping our world, currently, isn’t just some mild variant of factionalism. This is something far graver, far scarier. This is people forming cliques based on issues ranging from the most prejudiced to the most inane; and calling everyone else whose thinking is not in tandem with theirs, wrong. It is an epidemic of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”; permeating to the smallest of issues one can think of.

The world is increasingly becoming binary. Definitions are being so tightly compartmentalized, that if you’re not ‘this’, then you must be ‘that’. You will be told that there are no in-betweens; there are no on-the-fences. That there are no atheists and agnostics in the existential matters of the world anymore. One simply must pick a side and fight for it. All these tactics are nothing but a way for them to build the walls around you, to make sure you never peer over to the other side.

So the best thing that you can do for yourself, my son, is to not to let them build these walls. They will try. Oh yes, they will. Brick by brick, word by word, prejudice by prejudice; they will try to ingrain in you how you are different from ‘them’. We eat this and they eat that. We live here and they, over there. We believe in this and they, in that. Knock down every single brick as soon as they put it up, before the cement sets in for eternity. Always keep looking over the wall; familiarize yourself with ‘their’ world as much as yours. Familiarization doesn’t always breed contempt. Au contraire, in this day and age it breeds comfort and empathy. And that’s what we need. To be comfortable with whoever is different from us and learn to empathize with what we do not yet fully understand.

Remember, affiliation with one, doesn’t need to become the reason of alienation with another. ‘Family’ can be a very flexible concept, if you let it be. And ‘stranger’ is just a powerless word; a bubble you can burst away with a touch of a hand.

So, reach out. Understand. Feel. And bond.

That is how you will make a real family. That is how you can make sure that no one is a stranger. And when no one is a stranger and everyone is family, wouldn’t all the fighting finally stop?

 

Love, now and always

Your Mother.

 

Letters To My Son :: The Prelude

I remember the day I held my son, now almost four, for the very first time. Amongst the usual deluge of emotions that inundate a new mother, I remember feeling something very peculiar which I doubt ever told anyone about. I looked at him and wondered when he would be old enough to talk to me. Not just start speaking; utter words like Maa, Baba or the other usual cute garble infants start with. But really talk. Have a conversation. Share his opinions. Tell me how he really feels about things.

For some reasons, I just couldn’t wait for him to grow old enough to do that.

That planted a plot in my head. And almost a year of caffeine-fuelled long nights later, it had turned into a whole novel.

While my upcoming novel #InTheLightOfDarkness has many themes running through it, the central tension of the story stems from the fact that a mother is unable to find the opportunity and the courage to tell her son the things she had always wanted to; things she should have told him, a long time ago. Things she needed to tell him, in order to mend all that was broken between them.

It got me thinking. Do we ever find the opportunity or the courage, or even for that matter the time to tell our children all that we intend to? Hold the deep, laissez faire conversations which we want to? I’m not referring to the customary talks about the usual array of hand-me-down knowledge – how to choose a career, which of their friends we may not approve of and why, how to invest their money or do their taxes, which relatives to always call and keep in touch with, or more importantly which ones to avoid, how to regularly test doodhwaala’s milk for adulterants and where to find free parking in Connaught Place on a busy weekend.

But the kind of stuff that really matters. Stuff we wished someone would have told us about, when we were growing up. So that we did not have to spend a lifetime trying to figure it out.

How to know right from wrong; based on our conscience, and not what others think. How to know success from failure, based on how it makes us feel inside. How to follow our passion and not feel guilty about it. How to a live a life that is rich, honorable and free of regrets.

I realized that there are many conversations like that, which I would want to hold with my child, some day. I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, wait for that day to arrive. Certainly not without documenting the ideas, lest they get lost in the daily humdrum of life, like the way let’s face it, most of our thoughts and ideas do.

Hence, came along, the #LettersToMySon series.

I hope you enjoy reading them. I hope they strike a chord somewhere. And most importantly, I hope they make my son glad that I wrote them, someday.

Letters To My Son :: Real Stories

 

 

My dear son,

What can a mother who is a writer tell you, other than stories?

Although this happened a while back; I remember it like it was just a blink ago.

I was working on a story while the maid sat nearby, chopping vegetables for dinner. I was writing a scene where a family is settling down to dinner. They are struggling with a recent and terrible financial crisis, and coming face to face with a paucity of any kind for the first time.  The head of the family realizes that there is hardly anything to eat that day except for some boiled rice. He asks his wife to bring some pickles to eat the rice with.

I explained the scene to the maid and in the most inoffensive manner possible, tried to ask her which pickle did she think they were likely to have; i.e. which one of them was the cheapest to buy. That kind of detail was important to the sequence because it would lead to an argument in my fictional family, which revealed a lot of other facts about them. Anyhow, I offered her a choice between chilies, lemon, and mango; in my opinion the contenders for the cheapest pickle tag. She looked at me blankly as though I had posed a calculus problem. I, in an effort to simplify her problem and mine, asked her which one her family mostly buys or eats, thinking I could just go with that choice. She just shrugged nonchalantly. None. The answer was ‘none’. I asked her why? She said they could not afford it. I argued that I was under the impression that it is the cheapest thing to buy; at least lemon and chilies pickle, considering how cheap those are. She said, as true as that might be; oil and spices, which is what makes a good pickle, are not.

That shut me right up.

I struggled to find the source of that idea in my head. Why did I ever think that way? I searched through the recesses of my mind and came across references, casually and frequently made, which may have led to that misapprehension. My grandmother often used to say, “Achaar se roti khaate hain, par fashion dekho,” in reference to people she thought dressed beyond their means. (Literal translation: “They eat their meals with pickles because they have no money, and yet look at the way they splurge on fashion”). The following dialogue and a grainy, sepia colored vision of a movie I had seen a long time ago, too jumped to attention, “Achaar se roti kha lenge par haraam ke pakwaan nahi.” (We would much rather eat our meals with pickles than eating the delicacies bought with dishonestly-earned money).  On the whole, I surmised, this was an impression that has been built into my head over the years, through the echoes of how one particular stratum of society saw, and talked, about the other.

I remember feeling so dejected after that conversation with the maid, that I abandoned first that scene and then the story, altogether. What I was put off with really, was my ignorance of the reality and yet my over-confidence in thinking that I could pull off a realistic story like that. In thinking that I could deliberate on and bring to others’ attention to deliberate on, the trials and tribulations of a life I had never led and only understood very little of, and quite a bit of it wrongly, based on hearsay. How pompous and foolish was that idea? I remember not writing anything for a very long time after that.

I was reminded of an excerpt from Motorcycle Diaries; where Guevara writes about coming across some poor kids wearing slippers made of tires. It had made me feel the same way as the conversation with the maid. How would people like us, who are fast blurring the line between luxuries and necessities, understand the lives of those who do not even have the bare essentials? Is that kind of an assimilation of someone else’s reality, on the far end of the economic continuum from you, even possible?

Stories are meant to entertain, of course. But they – some of them at least – are also meant to enlighten. Awaken. Start a conversation. And hopefully, bring a change. It is not easy to write these stories, though. First of all because, as the anecdote above suggests, a lot of us may not know what the realities of those whom we intend to write about, are. We only think we do. And we are too complicit in our illusions. Besides, because once we do find out; we are either too bummed out or too under-confident to write about them. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that these stories need to be told. More than the others. More than ever.

I hope those are the stories I write. I hope those are the stories we all write. Until a time, when there are no more stories like these left to be told.

Not all of them need to be written with a pen, though. There are people who have created far stronger and impactful narratives of social change with their actions.

So, choose the medium you want. But do not ignore the stories that deserve to be told.

 

Love, now and forever

Your Mother.