My family and other people

Green, green, green, then a sudden glorious red. Or a burst of sunshine through the branches turning yellow to gold. Visions like these have blessed my recent walks. I don't stray far - no driving up north or to the local park - I just step out the door and keep walking, past the "Road Ends" sign. That's where the enchanting walk begins. On our side, front yards are bare naked green lawns with a straggly tree or two...but once you slip past the "Road ends" warning, through the narrow gap in the barrier, you can see that sign-posters lied. Not only does the road not end, it becomes so much more beautiful, lined by tall maples, oaks, cottonwoods and conifers, summer home to blue jays, chickadees, robins, cedar waxwings, sparrows, goldfinches, nuthatches, cardinals (courtesy Merlin app). Now, as the year winds down, it's quiet with mostly just chirping crickets and the crunch of dry leaves. Just as I loved the joyful choral accompaniment to my walks in ...

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...

Our college hostel dining hall in India was called the mess, a term that is probably only used in the army in America. When I first started eating there, I liked the food more or less. ("Don't tell anyone that you like hostel food!" my mom would say, "people will think your mother is a terrible cook.") Other than the vegetarian curries (every one an unidentifiable blob) the thought of which took away my hunger at dinner time, everything else was passable. Lunch would have a decent fish, meat or egg curry along with a blob. For tea, we had 2 samosas and a sweet for the longest time - not exciting but acceptable. Only in our fifth and final year, more substantial and appetizing fare such as alu paratha, chana-bhatura and dosa was introduced for tea. My most favourite meal by far, though, was breakfast with toast and eggs. We would line up with our eggs (and chopped onions, tomatoes etc. if we wanted them) in the kitchen while the only male cook fried, scrambled ...

Aunty J was our upstairs neighbour in the apartment building I lived in during high school. She was about a decade younger than my mother and would often come to her for advice and consolation, speaking in her broken Bengali. "Mrs. D was so rude to me. She said that I was tipke (stingy) and didn't feed my kids well, that's why they are so skinny." "The word is kipte amma, not tipke", her son, with his superior Bengali knowledge, would interject. "Be quiet, aunty knows what I mean!" Aunty J was the sweetest neighbour I ever had. Once I fell fast asleep after school and my mother, who had been shopping, came back and knocked and knocked and couldn't wake me up. A neighbourhood kid had to climb up to our balcony to make sure I was okay. Aunty J was in tears, she was so worried. The time I got into trouble with other neighbours by attempting humorous writing at the expense of the goddess Saraswati, it was aunty J who stood up for me staunchly. ...

"An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society." -- Wikipedia By the above definition, my mother's housekeeper / companion K, despite never having stepped even on the shadow of a school (to use a Bengali turn of phrase), totally qualifies as an intellectual. Well, maybe not the last bit - she doesn't exactly offer prescriptions for social ills, but she does reflect analytically and dispassionately on all things societal and freely shares her thoughts whenever I visit. I like how no one is out of the bounds of her objective criticism, she includes both me and herself as well as all her near and dear ones. For instance, two years ago I made the days-long multi-marathon-flight trip to India bearing two suitcases, one of which was full of diapers sent by my husband for his bedridden mother. K shook her head mournfully at the total poi...

Day after day, I sit in a corridor lined by classrooms in our local community college. Every Monday and Wednesday morning between 9 and 11 this semester, I'm comfortably settled on one of the padded benches by the wall with my winter coat, computer bag, purse, laptop, eyeglass case and reading glasses dispersed around me, smiling at a meme on my phone or typing away on the keyboard topping my lap. This semester, I am a familiar MW sight to all who pass. Also, as a plump, elderly person with spectacles, I probably give off mom-grandma vibes. Hence, it's not surprising at all that 80% of the people who walk through that space, look at me and smile. Many of their faces have become familiar to me as well. There's the teacher of my son's class (the reason I'm in the corridor), a short young man who smiles and nods politely if our eye meet as he's headed to class. There's the balding security guy in uniform whose face used to be stern the first few weeks but has...

One look at the caller ID and I knew who it was and what they were going to say. "I am the director of the pre-school program at the gymnastics center", said a woman at the other end. "Your son's teacher told me that he has been running around in class. It is unsafe for the other kids and not fair to the teacher. Can we try to find another day for him?" My heart sank . "Wednesdays at 4:30 or any of the other days would work", I whispered. There was a whole minute of silence while she presumably tried to find a spot on the schedule. "I'm sorry, it looks like all the classes are full. If we can't re-schedule of course we will refund your money". I was silent. My six-year-old had been so excited about this class. His sister had been going to gymnastics for years and did the most amazing things in the basement using the battered couch and their old crib mattress. He tried hard to copy her and now he was finally getting a chance to go...

A few months ago we got very busy - guests, traveling out of the country etc. So we allowed the mail to pile up. Then, one night when we had guests over to dinner and mail was scattered all around, we put it neatly in a small laundry basket that was conveniently at hand. That was the first major mistake. You know what happens when you give something a home - it settles in and starts belonging there. So now it seemed perfectly natural to toss more and more mail into that basket with the sense that the mail was being dealt with. Then the holiday season was upon us, all kinds of paper work had to be done, classes registered for, cars to be taken to dealers, the skies were cloudy all through January (excuses, excuses!) and before we knew it three months had passed. "Clear mail" got written in my planner successively on several weekends (my modus operandi is putting down every task for a particular date; if it doesn't get done that day, cross it off and move it to another da...

"It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile." - Lucy Maud Montgomery The time of day that used to be full of enchantment, in my childhood, was the afternoon. It was this transitory interval of quiet suspended between the morning buzz and the evening hum. The adults, who were not out at work, would be taking a well-deserved siesta after the chores of the morning - sprawled on their beds or mats, gentle snores keeping time with the droning ceiling fans above. And the entire house...and time would be mine! This was the time to dig into trunks and boxes (containing odds and ends such as a beautiful gold-embroidered red veil from my mother's wedding,...

He looks a little bit haggard and tired here. It's partly because of the scraggy beard and partly because the first day at anything for anybody is tiring, especially since you have to be on alert the whole time. However, just before going to bed Rahul said, "The best part of my day was going to orientation." So there you have it! The day almost went wrong. We thought orientation was at 10 and went there early, Rahul all keyed up and ready. A job coach (not always easy to locate these days) had been found and she was there on time too. Unfortunately we had the time wrong it seems and we had to go back home deflated. Luckily, another job coach was found for the afternoon orientation from 2-6. So after some math practice for the test tomorrow, Rahul went off to Kroger again. Other than paper work, there was some practice getting carts and bagging. The job coach was C, a very protective, voluble and helpful person in her forties. She took charge of Rahul's document...

When I moved to the U.S., my aunt, my father's eldest sister, gave me one of her sarees. "This saree is very special to me," she said. I don't know how many times I've kicked myself for not asking why.( If only I hadn't been so horribly tongue-tied, that pistachio green dhakai saree, instead of sitting dumbly in my suitcase, would have become a conjurer of memories from an unusual life.) I could have asked that question any time in the eleven years that followed, before my aunt passed away at sixty seven from agonizing complications caused by her lifelong illness. It's too late now. The thing is, I was more than usually shy with this aunt because I hadn't known her in my childhood, hadn't sat with my arms around her neck while she chatted with my mom or fallen asleep in her lap like I had done with my other aunts. In fact, I hadn't even met her before I was twelve. She had broken multiple social and moral (according to her father) conventions...