A friend who happened to be my mil
My mother-in-law passed away and I am glad. She had been reduced to a body on a bed with no control over any bodily function. Her mind was active and lucid enough to realize the depth of her helplessness. She had stopped repeating the familiar sentiments she had uttered for years, even while struggling with mobility and depression brought on by her confined existence: "Don't worry about me, I'm fine", "As long as you all are doing well, I'm doing well." All that was left was a bitter resentment at still being chained to existence. The last time we spoke on a video call, she looked me in the eye and said very clearly, "Is this a life? You tell me." She is finally free. (At least I sincerely hope she is. My worst nightmare is that I will die and find myself waking up in some other existence.)
The first time I met her she asked me whether I knew how to sew and a question about longitudes and time zones. She was doing some mending for her daughter at that time (later she also used to find things to mend in our house and after she left I would find things that had been fixed). She looked down at her needle with an expression of quiet sorrow (or so it seemed) as she spoke to me. A girl from a different caste and not Sylheti was probably not what she had in mind as a bride for her treasured son. She adjusted pretty quickly to the idea though, and consciously, reasoning that if she wanted her son to be happy she needed to have a good relationship with her daughter-in-law. (Someone once said to her "you have a good daughter-in-law" to which she replied "yes and I'm a good mother-in-law too".) It seems like a simple piece of reasoning, one that should be easy to act on. But since 99.9% of mothers who are strongly attached to their sons fail to do so, I must say that it was quite an achievement. Maybe she was able to because, behind her very emotional, religious / superstitious, traditional exterior (totally unlike me), there was an essential detachment that mirrored mine. Maybe it was that detachment and a shared love for books and poems (and therefore things more spiritual than material) that made it possible for us to be friends despite our fundamental differences.
I got glimpses of her extraordinary (for a superstitious person) self-awareness / detachment / objectivity on many different occasions. Mitali once said to her, "Mashi, you are an educated person, you used to be a headmistress, how can you belive that having sons is better than having daughters?" "We are brain-washed you know" she replied, "we will take a beating and still say 'the king of Hirak is god'" (আমরা মার খেয়েও বলবো হীরকের রাজা ভগবান). Mitali was dumbfounded by that totally unanswerable reply. I once heard my mil explaining hinduism to a young American guy. She told him all about various gods and goddesses and what they symbolized and then added, "All this is imagination. But very beautiful imagination". Even her childlike excitement about many things (opening the garage door with a remote switch, staying in a motel, looking through the window for an approaching hurricane, eating ice cream with great concentration) was, I feel, linked to this sense that the world is a huge playground where we are all playing parts and pretending - but the play is only fun if you give yourself totally to the make-believe. She and her brother from Canada performed many pujas in our house on various occasions. Each time, their joyous involvement in setting up the images, preparing the fruits etc. reminded me of nothing else so much as two children happily at play.
It was not just reading that brought us together and cemented our friendship. My mother-in-law was easy to be around - not fixated on anything, never wanting to have things done in a particular way, casually accepting of our choices (very unlike my own mother). She had the rare quality of never saying "I told you so", although on more than one occasion Partha or I made a wrong decision against her counsel. She was kind to everybody, not just her own family and friends and very egalitarian in her outlook, easily making friends with neighbours who had far less education than she did. She would feed and take care of whoever came to her house with equal warmth, no matter their status (not a given in class conscious Indian society).
It's not like we were a mutual admiration sociey, my mil and I. Her regressive beliefs about religion and gender (however endearingly portrayed above) had real life consequences and they bothered me. I argued with her a lot about them. She didn't get offended. Confoundingly, she even appeared to enjoy the sparring. She for her part (I think) looked down on me a little bit (with good reason) for not being much of a worker. She herself was a dynamo of energy - sewing, cooking, reading, writing, clearing leaves outside in the fall, filling airtight containers with perfectly crisp and beautifully formed munchies. In this mild mutual disdain I guess we were even.
But in another way we were not. Whenever I needed her, she was there. She came when both my children were born and cheerfully washed baby clothes, cooked all the meals, rocked the babies to sleep, sewed curtains and cute baby outfits, only getting time to herself (to read and write) after everyone else had gone to bed. But when she needed me, I was nowhere to be found. She loved writing letters and wrote to me often...only to finally stop when there were no replies (I was too caught up, probably needlessly and counterproductively, in the challenges of my life to have the mental energy to write). When I visited Kolkata I only stayed with her for a few days, saving the lion's share of my vacation for my parents. It saddened her I know. Once, when I had already been in Kolkata for a few days and hadn't yet visited her, she said, "I have a heart too you know." Most of all, when she was confined to her room and then bedridden for years, she could have really used some company, someone to chat with, share poems or stories with, but I showed up by her bedside for a grand total of maybe six days every annual or biennial visit. It's not so much that I failed in my filial duty - my mother-in-law was lucky to have at least one child taking care of her with great tenderness during her last years - but more that I let lapse the friendship we had shared. It would be silly, however, to bemoan that fact. It's just a natural consequence of a larger brutal truth - leaving the land of your birth to make your home as far away across the world as possible is, at it's essence, abandonment of everyone and everything that belongs to that land.
Instead of ending on a note of pointless and sham regret for all the time I did not spend with my mil, maybe I will recall the sincere joy that she greeted me with every time that I did show up. Last year I sat by her bedside and read several poems aloud from her copy of Sanchayita, including a very long favourite poem (the love of which I inherited from my mother) - পুরস্কার. This is a poem that I have failed to read to anybody else in its entirety. Every time a prospective conscript sees the length of the poem, he or she finds some excuse to wiggle out of listening. Last year, finally finding a captive listener who was bedbound and unable to escape, I started reading the poem and read the entire twenty four pages from beginning to end. Luckily (for her), my listener thoroughly enjoyed the journey across the expanse of the poem, joining me with exclamations and remembered phrases through the humor, the word play, the pathos, the sweetness...we were companions for a time, traveling in amity through the rhythms of a poem, through life...everyone should be so lucky, I am grateful.
The first time I met her she asked me whether I knew how to sew and a question about longitudes and time zones. She was doing some mending for her daughter at that time (later she also used to find things to mend in our house and after she left I would find things that had been fixed). She looked down at her needle with an expression of quiet sorrow (or so it seemed) as she spoke to me. A girl from a different caste and not Sylheti was probably not what she had in mind as a bride for her treasured son. She adjusted pretty quickly to the idea though, and consciously, reasoning that if she wanted her son to be happy she needed to have a good relationship with her daughter-in-law. (Someone once said to her "you have a good daughter-in-law" to which she replied "yes and I'm a good mother-in-law too".) It seems like a simple piece of reasoning, one that should be easy to act on. But since 99.9% of mothers who are strongly attached to their sons fail to do so, I must say that it was quite an achievement. Maybe she was able to because, behind her very emotional, religious / superstitious, traditional exterior (totally unlike me), there was an essential detachment that mirrored mine. Maybe it was that detachment and a shared love for books and poems (and therefore things more spiritual than material) that made it possible for us to be friends despite our fundamental differences.
I got glimpses of her extraordinary (for a superstitious person) self-awareness / detachment / objectivity on many different occasions. Mitali once said to her, "Mashi, you are an educated person, you used to be a headmistress, how can you belive that having sons is better than having daughters?" "We are brain-washed you know" she replied, "we will take a beating and still say 'the king of Hirak is god'" (আমরা মার খেয়েও বলবো হীরকের রাজা ভগবান). Mitali was dumbfounded by that totally unanswerable reply. I once heard my mil explaining hinduism to a young American guy. She told him all about various gods and goddesses and what they symbolized and then added, "All this is imagination. But very beautiful imagination". Even her childlike excitement about many things (opening the garage door with a remote switch, staying in a motel, looking through the window for an approaching hurricane, eating ice cream with great concentration) was, I feel, linked to this sense that the world is a huge playground where we are all playing parts and pretending - but the play is only fun if you give yourself totally to the make-believe. She and her brother from Canada performed many pujas in our house on various occasions. Each time, their joyous involvement in setting up the images, preparing the fruits etc. reminded me of nothing else so much as two children happily at play.
It was not just reading that brought us together and cemented our friendship. My mother-in-law was easy to be around - not fixated on anything, never wanting to have things done in a particular way, casually accepting of our choices (very unlike my own mother). She had the rare quality of never saying "I told you so", although on more than one occasion Partha or I made a wrong decision against her counsel. She was kind to everybody, not just her own family and friends and very egalitarian in her outlook, easily making friends with neighbours who had far less education than she did. She would feed and take care of whoever came to her house with equal warmth, no matter their status (not a given in class conscious Indian society).
It's not like we were a mutual admiration sociey, my mil and I. Her regressive beliefs about religion and gender (however endearingly portrayed above) had real life consequences and they bothered me. I argued with her a lot about them. She didn't get offended. Confoundingly, she even appeared to enjoy the sparring. She for her part (I think) looked down on me a little bit (with good reason) for not being much of a worker. She herself was a dynamo of energy - sewing, cooking, reading, writing, clearing leaves outside in the fall, filling airtight containers with perfectly crisp and beautifully formed munchies. In this mild mutual disdain I guess we were even.
But in another way we were not. Whenever I needed her, she was there. She came when both my children were born and cheerfully washed baby clothes, cooked all the meals, rocked the babies to sleep, sewed curtains and cute baby outfits, only getting time to herself (to read and write) after everyone else had gone to bed. But when she needed me, I was nowhere to be found. She loved writing letters and wrote to me often...only to finally stop when there were no replies (I was too caught up, probably needlessly and counterproductively, in the challenges of my life to have the mental energy to write). When I visited Kolkata I only stayed with her for a few days, saving the lion's share of my vacation for my parents. It saddened her I know. Once, when I had already been in Kolkata for a few days and hadn't yet visited her, she said, "I have a heart too you know." Most of all, when she was confined to her room and then bedridden for years, she could have really used some company, someone to chat with, share poems or stories with, but I showed up by her bedside for a grand total of maybe six days every annual or biennial visit. It's not so much that I failed in my filial duty - my mother-in-law was lucky to have at least one child taking care of her with great tenderness during her last years - but more that I let lapse the friendship we had shared. It would be silly, however, to bemoan that fact. It's just a natural consequence of a larger brutal truth - leaving the land of your birth to make your home as far away across the world as possible is, at it's essence, abandonment of everyone and everything that belongs to that land.
Instead of ending on a note of pointless and sham regret for all the time I did not spend with my mil, maybe I will recall the sincere joy that she greeted me with every time that I did show up. Last year I sat by her bedside and read several poems aloud from her copy of Sanchayita, including a very long favourite poem (the love of which I inherited from my mother) - পুরস্কার. This is a poem that I have failed to read to anybody else in its entirety. Every time a prospective conscript sees the length of the poem, he or she finds some excuse to wiggle out of listening. Last year, finally finding a captive listener who was bedbound and unable to escape, I started reading the poem and read the entire twenty four pages from beginning to end. Luckily (for her), my listener thoroughly enjoyed the journey across the expanse of the poem, joining me with exclamations and remembered phrases through the humor, the word play, the pathos, the sweetness...we were companions for a time, traveling in amity through the rhythms of a poem, through life...everyone should be so lucky, I am grateful.
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