My family and other people

Last Tuesday my sister-in-law and I went for a walk with Reena (name changed), a neighbor down the street. Another neighbor D, who always smiles and stops to chat while walking his dog and whose colorful "kindness always" yard sign cheers with its message, had done something very peculiar just a week before. He and his wife P had invited about 25-30 neighbors to a backyard party and grilled burgers and hotdogs for everyone. (It was peculiar because, although we and our neighbors are social and have parties all the time, those are for our outside friends ...not locals!). As a result of D & P's unusual initiative, now when I walk down the tree-shaded street across from my house, I know a lot more about the people who live there and carry on an internal monologue about them - "there's Ross sitting on his porch, Reena must be busy cooking for her husband, I like the tall grasses Sherri and Karl have lining their yard". Even when I didn't get their name...

Some people say that getting R, my son with special needs, to graduate from high school was a mistake. Instead of a high school diploma, we should have pursued a completion cetificate. They have a point - I've sometimes wondered too. The thing is, if you get a diploma, the school district assumes you are fine and gives you no more support. Those with completion certificates have special programs available to them until they are 26. But then I remember how he had lost all motivation to go to school in tenth grade. He would sit in class and not do a thing. It was only when he suddenly made graduation (and a graduation party just like his sister's) a goal, that he set his mind to earning the credits. He needed a lot of handholding, but he did it. I remember the moment when we were standing in front of the graduation venue before the ceremony, "Graduation is permanent," he said brightly, "no one can take it away!" Even now, when he's at a loose end and back ...

About two decades ago, I inadvertently took part in a social experiment. I went back home to India with my baby son and little daughter to spend 6 months with my parents. K (my mother's current housekeeper) was hired from 8 am to 8 pm every day to help me take care of the children. So whenever I went on social visits, K came along to keep the children entertained and happy while I chatted with my hosts. Was K, an employee and a poor / lower class person, a visitor in their homes, merely my appendage (like my purse) and hence to be ignored, or a person to be accorded a degree of visitorship through careful calibration of her status? Different households had different answers to this delicate question. Since she was physically present, there had to be a response. "None of the above" was not a choice. In house A, they welcomed me warmly, offered me a comfortable armchair and I sat down. But I just couldn't relax ..because they didn't ask K to sit. If not an uph...

When I finally got my driving license after 3 tries, I wished I hadn't. The first time I went for my driving test in Ames, Iowa, it was with my friend S who had taught me how to drive. The road out of the motor vehicle office was narrow. I took off confidently down the middle. "Go back", said the angular and stern test taker after just a hundred yards or so, "this is a two way street and you are driving down the middle of it." In my defence, there were no markings on that road. Anyhow, that must be the fastest anyone has ever failed a driving test. The story was that there were two testers in that office, the mean one and the nice one. Everyone sympathized with my misfortune at having gotten the mean guy on my first outing at the DMV. It was the luck of the draw, there was nothing you could do about it. One person had tried to outsmart lady luck and had gone to the neighboring city of Nevada for his test. And who should be his tester that day, but the very ...

My family was the very definition of middle class - rich in education and culture, never going without basic needs; nevertheless, needing to watch our spending. My father was a doctor, the sort of person that is often rich, however, he chose to work in a low-paid job at a mission hospital and later, in a salaried position. So my mother always looked for bargains and made do with the second best choices. We knew a lot of poor people - they worked in our houses, did all the manual labour that had to be done. But their clothes were worn, their speech was unrefined, they didn't sit on our furniture or eat out of our dishes, they were simply not "like us". No one actually said it - but in reality, they were considered a lesser type of person. So there was no question of ever comparing ourselves to them! That's how prosperous, entitled people like ourselves were defined as "not rich", because, funnily enough, it was perfectly fine to compare ourselves to the peo...

G dadu was a sweet-faced gentleman - tall, thin, with a careworn appearance. They were our neighbours in the place where we rented an apartment when I was in high school. In a locality with large prosperous-looking two or three story houses, theirs stood out as an oddly-shaped (to maximize the area within the scrap of trapezoidal land) little single story building (two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen area) that housed G dadu, his wife, mother and two children. G dadu's job was not very higly paid but - my mother would point out while talking about how much he valued education - his children always had new books for school and he never skimped on school supplies. Soon after we met them, conversation revealed that G dadu was related to my mother - he was a distant uncle. So although he wasn't that much older than my mother and his daughter was just two years ahead of me at school, he became "dadu". In those days, dropping into a neighbour's house for an e...