The transition from staying in a joint family to
living in a nuclear family is often not as simple and joyous for children, as
it is for adults. I have tried to put on paper an incident from my life (as much as I could recollect) when I didn’t return home from school one day, much to the panic and dismay of my mother.
“Mali-kaka, take me to the old home, mom
said so.” I lied through my teeth, just when he was about to take a left turn
and change directions. He must have been tired or gullible or careless,
probably a bit of each to give in to my demand without a counter question. Or
maybe he loved me enough to sense the desperation.
‘Mali’ is a hindi word for gardener and
‘kaka’ is uncle. Till date, I do not know his real name; we called him
‘Mali-kaka’ as longed as he lived. And by profession, he was a gardener indeed!
Paddling kids to and fro from school was his overtime, a hard way of earning
those extra bucks, considering that he was built thinner than one his 6th
grade rider.
He hailed from a remote village in Bengal
and like many others, came looking for work to the city as a young adult. Ours
was a government colony consisting of bungalows for senior officials. His
polite demeanor and hard working attitude soon earned him the up keeping of
lush green gardens of all the bungalows and he could be seen all day in the
community, going from one yard to another always carrying a tool or a plant.
Few years later, one of the residents
offered him some money to drop and pick up their son from the neighboring
school and since then, he could be spotted on his bicycle at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.
with a couple of kids taking a ride as he paddled away furiously, making a
couple of rounds. Parents trusted him and kids like me saw him in and out of
the house long before they started going to school.
Up until last month, he used to drop me in
front of the red brick bungalow along with the other 2 kids of the adjoining
houses. Grandma would be standing at the door, waiting for me. I would jump off
the small seat fitted on the center rod of the bicycle and rush into her
arms. Many years later, when I mentioned
it, Mom said it wasn’t only grandma, she also stood at the door a little behind
grandma, but I never saw her. It was as if I was content to be in grandma’s
arms and had no need to look any further.
When we moved and left the extended family
behind, a lot of things other than just my address changed. They say, children
are highly adaptable and that they have superior abilities to welcome change. I
guess, I just wasn’t one of those blessed children.
From a huge bungalow and a big joint family
of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, we moved half a mile away into a
modest but an adequate accommodation for our family of three, Mom, Dad and me.
For the adults in question, it is perhaps a very natural phenomenon that
happens in the course of time; staying in the joint family and slowly moving
out to reside in their own space just like the birds who fly out of the nests
to find their place in the sky. When I was a kid, for some adults, it never
happened, and for those who got the opportunity, it was probably after a decade
or two of communal living. For them, the changeover to being a nuclear family
brought freedom, privacy and perhaps more happiness. But if you asked the kids,
they would beg to differ, I would.
The change in homes hit me hard. The very
first day, it felt strange going to school from a different route. When
Mali-kaka came to pick me up last, I felt singled out. The other kids rode the
bicycle from the same old place and by the time he tinkled the small bell of
his bicycle in front of our new home, my favorite seat was already occupied.
More than the going part, it was the coming back part I dreaded. The
familiarity and comfort of going back home via the same road and ending the
ride with all the kids were missing now. I would be the first one to be dropped
off and the others would keep on with their chatter and giggles, assured that
Mali-kaka had nowhere to go once he dropped them. He would go to his small room
constructed at the farthest end of one of the bungalows, take rest and resume
with his gardening duties by the time the kids came out to play in the evening.
And more than anything, I missed my grandma
at the door. Every late afternoon when I returned from school, the ladies in
the house had their tea, sitting around the kitchen in a circle. I would sit
next to grandma and she would keep a separate saucer for me besides her tea
cup. She would then pour tea from the cup into two saucers, raise one of them
to my lips for me to drink the tea and once I was done, she would drink hers
from the other saucer. I was allowed two saucers of tea, while she had
three. It was only after this tea
routine that I changed out of my school uniform and did anything else like
having a snack or sit at the desk to finish the homework for that day.
The first few days in the new home, I felt
miserable but kept it to myself. I thought, if I felt so lonely, the grownups
who had stayed together with each other longer than me, would conclusively
figure out this wasn’t working out. But when neither of them showed any signs
of reconsideration or gloom, I voiced my misery by whining. But of course, nobody took me seriously. They
acknowledged it, even talked about it with neighbors and visitors, “Yes, it is
hard on the kids; she misses her old home and her cousins.” But that’s about
it. It wasn’t an issue that needed to be addressed or taken care of. It was an
expected emotion, a child’s reaction of feeling separated, a memory that would
fade away with time, they assumed.
When nobody came to my rescue, I decided to
help myself. “Mali-kaka, take me to the old home, mom said so.” I lied through
my teeth, on the way back from school this Monday. And as my heart stopped a
beat in anticipation, he turned the bicycle in the desired direction. Thank
god, it was the 80s’ and so written permission notes or emails or submission of
prior-pick up plans from school weren’t a norm.
Grandma was surprised to see me at the door
and happily so, I could see. She had questions for me, but she put them on
hold, I think. Now, grandma or ‘Jiji’ as I called her really wasn’t my grandma.
She was my aunt, my dad’s oldest brother’s wife. But since my uncle and she had
raised my Dad since he was 10 years old, they had been automatically bestowed
the status of being my grandparents. Not that it mattered to either of us, they
had a special place for me in their hearts and I adored them.
I sat down in the kitchen and got ready for
a sip from the saucer like the afternoons before we moved out. My other aunt
who still lived there, was quick to ask
if my mother knew about this adventure. I refused to raise my eyes and kept
drinking away from the saucer making a sound that may have sounded like a yes
or no, depending on what you wanted the other person to hear. The subsequent
portion of tea was already in the saucer and on its way to reach me when the
bell rang a couple of times, loud and impatient.
Somebody opened the door and even today, the
rest of that afternoon is a blur except for this one sequence of events. My
mother stormed inside the kitchen, put the saucer down, slapped me directly
across the face on my right cheek and dragged me out of the house, into the
waiting Auto Rickshaw. She was shaking with rage and fear (which I NOW know,
after being a mother). At that moment, she looked like the meanest mom in this
world to me and I even told her so in between sobs.
Strict instructions were given to Mali-kaka,
that day on and so none of my future attempts to return to where I thought I
belonged were successful.
Today, my daughter is the same age as when I
ran away to ‘home’ from school. And when I reflect on that particular incident
etched in my memory forever, I see it in newer light. I smile at the sweet
innocence of childhood when I thought going back the same road from school
would take me to the same place and time forever again. I feel the warmth of
grandma’s arms around me and the joyous surprise in her eyes on seeing me at
the door, even today, thousands of miles away. I shudder at the mere thought of
my daughter not arriving back home from school at the scheduled time. I wince
at the horror of what could have been had Mali-kaka not been as trustworthy and
I feel guilty about putting Mom through so much panic and stress that day. I
wish I could take back my words for calling her the meanest Mom in the world
and thankful that she doesn’t remember it today, I don’t know if I could myself
be as forgiving as a mother. And I hope my daughter never attempts to do what I
did back then, because she is definitely going to get into more trouble than
just one tight slap.
This also appeared in :
