Self-portrait

My son at four, told me, “You are humint,” and I guess that’s as good a place to start as any. Early on in my life, I often wished I was a dog, but that nobility was never mine. The last of three siblings, I was born a girl. Happily for me, parental expectations of our education and employment were gender neutral. As usual, the devil was in the details.

I was told “to be a lady,” and succeeded in spurts, with flouncy dresses, white shoes, manners and so on, all of which palled beside trees to climb, jamuns (Jambolan Plum) to gather and enjoy with purple stains decorating hands and face and spotting my dress. By senior school I was climbing through the window to class and decided with relief that I am no lady. Literally, a lady is one who kneads bread. Definitely not me.

My sister had dolls with golden hair and bluest eyes — alien to our brown selves, yet desirable — I had a boy doll, unimaginatively named Tom (curiously, these are called ‘Tom Dolls’). Her dolls’ hair was brushed and styled, Tom had moulded plastic waves for hair and was savaged with, once a missing arm and then iodine on his forehead, as I played ‘Nurse.’ In short, I escaped from one stereotype to fit another. At best, a tomboy with a shelf life, a sort of ‘little woman’ in waiting.

My earliest role models, my parents, were conventional with gender-typical roles; but the one thing they shared was middle class ambition. So it was that my mother pushed me to pursue post-graduate studies and my father promised to support me as long as I wanted to study, even after he retired. Their greatest gift to me was reading. In the days before Gameboy, Pokemon Go and Xbox there were board games and books. We were let loose in book shops and limited Army libraries and I read voraciously, if undiscerningly, as parental supervision was nil.

There was one other thing about growing up in out-of-the-way Indian towns — when I had run wild in large, open spaces by day, I had to amuse myself at dusk, mostly play by myself. Solitude was often a spur to introspection and endowed me with enormous inner resilience. I am not afraid to be alone and I quite like myself. It’s like I am my own therapy. In the way of conventional families, obedience was prized above curiosity. It made for little meaningful conversation, more seriously, it threw me upon my own limited resources.

Roman Catholic rites of passage were comfortably celebrated with no one quite able to explain what is ‘the age of reason,’ or why inter-faith unions were subject to signing over notional offspring to the Catholic Church. And of course, no one addressed onset of puberty, or God forbid, boyfriends, leave alone sex. The Bible was right and so was Darwin, women were equals of men, but wives needed to respect and obey their husbands. These were the vague shibboleths that I instinctively struggled against.

Social convention is not much improvement. Unless a woman is phenomenally successful, or outstanding in some way, she is docketed purely as she relates to others — daughter, wife, mother and so on. But aren’t these just different hats (or straitjackets) we wear? A mediocre man, on the other hand, is called a banker or a plumber, not a son-in-law, except maybe for Jared Kushner. In my community WhatsApp group, women still introduce themselves as homemaker and mother. Sure, these are life-affirming roles, but is it who you are or just a reductionist image of you?

One foggy November morning, some forty years ago, I accompanied my father to an Armistice Day ceremony. He pointed out a short, smart figure in khaki. It was Kiran Bedi, India’s first woman police officer who stormed a male chauvinist bastion with vigour and style. Through college, I followed her career with interest. In 1982, when she was in charge of traffic for the ninth Asian Games in Delhi, she brought order on the roads in her inimitable style. She snuck up, on offenders with headlights on high-beam, siren suddenly going whoop, whoop, whoop, pulled out a can of black paint and splashed a drippy semicircle on the headlights. No more high-beam. Illegally parked cars, were towed and fined without fear or favour, including then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi’s government-issue white Ambassador. The Press named the fearless crusader Crane Bedi, male colleagues called her publicity hungry and I cheered her on.

So, the question for me is, do you have to be an outlier to be your own woman? As any man can tell you, it’s all in your head. Publicly acknowledged success is sweet, but it’s another form of approval. Society programmes us to seek external validation, from the prideful, “My wife bakes the best brownies,” to the triumphant, “My daughter is in Stanford.” Constantly performing for approval can atrophy self-affirmation. This is also true of the converse, criticism. I know I am breaking out of the approval-criticism cycle, not because I don’t make mistakes, but because I am figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. Isn’t that what life is for?

In 1984, I fulfilled my parents’ and my expectations and went to work. Slowly their pride at seeing my name roll in end credits was replaced by a sniffiness at the hours I worked, a television company was no place for a ‘girl’ to work. Still, maybe I would redeem myself with a good marriage?

In my generation, we still believed in marriage. My success is limited in that area, so I can’t comment, presumably there are happily married couples out there, not counting the ones who stay unhappily married to maintain status quo. At most, we fought to marry our partner of choice and then again to divorce, rather than stay in an unhappy relationship. Social and sexual mores are changing now, millennials and especially women, are pushing back against age-old discrimination: my body, my right. More power to them.

I see my life as a three-part tragi-comedy and now that Part Three is upon me, what I once dreaded has a curious appeal — solitude, reflection and letting go, relationships particularly. I like this explanation by Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett, “But your own experience is rarely a guide to your brain’s inner workings. Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.”¹ It is key to resilience, to facing challenges every step of life’s way.

Just the other day someone asked my father, ‘Does your daughter work?’ His reply, without a hint of irony, “No, she looks after the house and her son.” He’s not wrong, just reductive and it makes me glad I can define myself. Human beings have tremendous capacity to hurt and to be hurt, it follows, so do I. This is why every human relationship is at best, bitter-sweet, at worst, toxic, or in my experience, carries the seed of its destruction within itself. For, we are all children of darkness. As I wait for death, cheerful nihilist that I am, I reflect on who I really am: I am a person of quiet pursuits, best reflected in the eyes of my dog and stray cats.

Reference:

1. Your Brain Is Not for Thinking, Lisa Feldman Barrett (Dr. Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist), The New York Times, Nov 23, 2020