LIFE WITH MOM # 2

In the last post I stopped at lamenting on the status of today’s aged. In my Mom I see a person from the old world who, as I have already written, is one of those who cared for their in-laws, in that, they respected them, accepted living with their idiosyncrasies. In turn when it was time for them to live their own old age all they’ve got is a world where they are not welcome as live-in aged family members! Daughter’s-in-law find very ingenious methods to avoid living with their MILs of which, one is: throwing away money if necessary so that the old find ways and means of living by themselves, the other of course is to get them into some old age home. In the process they (DILs and the nincompoop sons) forget the fact that what the old fellows need is not perhaps money, or even the security of company, but the coziness of a home which they can call their own.

Let’s take a hard look at how good my mom’s own acceptance of her in-laws was. In the very beginning of my father’s family- that is my grandfather, grandmother and uncles when they moved to Hyderabad from their ancestral home in Kerala - lived as a huge joint family. Even the married couples like my father and mother initially, and my eldest uncle and his wife (my aunt) and my aunt (father’s sister) and her husband (my uncle) who had got married in a mutual exchange agreement, apparently to save marriage expenses as well as “groom finding” expenses and efforts that are the wont of Indian society, lived under one roof as a joint family. We had no business interests or great property that we could call our own, which would have made joint family living a natural choice. Perhaps for this reason, slowly and within a period of three to four years at best, the family split into nuclear families, the parting couples citing various reasons for living away from the main family. Later couples in the old family home found newer and newer excuses to split. My grandfather and grandmother were forced to increasingly gravitate towards living with the yet-unmarried sons.

My grandfather and grand mother had four sons-my father being the eldest- and three daughters. Two of the daughters had been married long before my grandfather’s family had left Varkala, the ancestral village. My mom moved out first to take care of our education in an English medium school. So, that was her ruse, for my grandfather had earlier put me in a Telugu medium government school as was his belief and affordability. She opted to stay away in a rather small dwelling receiving regular payouts from my father, employed away from city in a way-side railway station, where a decent education for me would not have been possible. After this gingerly experiment of living separately, there was one more coming together of all the original family members, in another large family home-a rented accommodation about four kilometers from the first joint family dwelling- also a rented accommodation referred to as John Buneen (Bunyan?) House- a chawl like place in Old Nallakunta. The next to move out to Kozhikode [Calicut in those days], after about a year of marriage, was my eldest uncle. At that time we were in another house belonging to one Sh.N.S.Natarajan. I still remember the day my uncle was seen off from Hyderabad R.S. On that day, my mother had got hurt by slipping on mossy floor near the well in the yard. With just the first aid given in grandma’s remedies’ style- bandage tied around the head with just some turmeric powder stuffed into the wound - my mom had joined the rest of the members of the family, to see my uncle and aunt chug off with their eight-month old son Sekhar, whose legs hadn’t developed the strength to let him get up and stand. He used to drag himself all over the house, yet he was a cheerful child. I remember my school friend appreciating the child’s cheerfulness.

To cut a long story short, my grandfather oversaw the splitting of the family couple by couple until they found themselves staying with my last unmarried uncle at BHEL Township in RC Puram. By this time Grandpa and Grandma had been staying in turn with the different nuclear families off and on. They would move in with my uncle’s family at Chikkadapalli, or stay with us at New Nallakunta. Sometimes Grandma and Grandpa would stay separately with different families. I do not remember what went in my grandma and grandpa’s minds as they moved from place to place. May be they enjoyed the frequent change as a welcome condition, that also helped beat boredom of being with one family and one set of problems for long, or whether they secretly, cursed their fate. Now, that was something they might not have wished for, nor even dreamed of. Well, then they had to make that compromise. By the early seventies there was no joint family. All of us- the four brothers and three-sisters family of my grandfather were nuclear families now, with some of those families electing to even move to other cities so that even by some quirk of fate a return to joint family living should become a possibility. But all of the sons respected their parents and the DILs were not averse to having the parents-in-law even it was for small periods of time like three months or six months at a stretch.

Time has rolled by and my Mom and Dad had become old, and we had grown up found jobs and married. The DILs came. I was already working in Bangalore away from our Hyderabad home. So our life started straight away as a nuclear family. My brother had also married and set up home in Pune. My parents tried living with us for short periods of time. Cultural differences between the father’s generation and his sons’ and DILs created quite a few misunderstandings and frequently my parents retreated to their abode, perhaps a trifle dissatisfied even though they were not complaining. Their disagreements with our living styles were the chief reason for their often opting to stay by themselves in the paternal home in Hyderabad.

“We will continue to stay as man and wife, alone. When we age sufficiently and are unable to take care of ourselves please take us to your places and give us our much needed and well-deserved rest form the cares of life.”, my father told finally after finding the old style living of parent and sons’ families together has to be but a distant dream. He cannot recreate the old world joint-family system once again. He had always fervently hoped for it perhaps even in his day, but has seen it cracking. In the present age instead of cracks appearing there were homes formed away right at the beginning.