Like every other middle class kid of the 60s and 70s, I was socialized and normalized at par for the time. There were some broad rules : Children were to be seen, not heard. Unfailing politeness, discipline and above all obedience, were the greatest virtues of a child. An obedient moron who routinely failed class, was preferable to a rebellious genius. With age, sons were allowed some liberties because they would soon be men and fathers themselves. Daughters were required to be maintained in situ condition - pure, virginal and foolish - till the next family took over their burden.
But India is vast country with a ridiculously wide spectrum of cultures and priveleges. Within these broad parameters, experiences varied depending on the region or state you were born in, the caste one belonged to, the food we ate, the profession and status of our parents and the languages or even dialects you spoke. This was the age before the internet, when you couldn't get by merely through memes and Facebook likes or retweets. Conversations required real, audible sound. And the language you used, or could use, mattered.
Both my parents also came from conservative Rajput families. Their parents, my grandparents, had migrated south from the blighted state of Uttar Pradesh and settled in Hyderabad decades ago. But as everyone in India knows, you can leave the cow-belt, but the cow-belt never leaves you. My mother's side adopted the Hyderabadi cuisine but never the manners. In a few decades, my father's family followed the call of the wide, arid, sun-dried waterless plains of his homeland and returned to his village in UP. My father had joined the army though, in homage or rebellion, I never knew, to his father's lifelong job in the Nizam's army. So I was born in Bikaner and my childhood was spent shifting from one small watering hole to another that the Ole British Army had transferred to the Indian army. Once every year we returned to visit both grandparents in opposite sides of the country.
So as a girl of the late 60s, being brought up in a Rajput parents' army family, in mostly small watering holes across the country, I had some typical characteristics. Army outposts had bad schools and worse teachers so I was ill educated but well turned out; I was mostly seen and never heard; I was unfailingly polite, obedient, respectful and disciplined, because there was no other option; But, much to my parents' great grief in later life, I was neither pure, virginal nor foolish. This interfered greatly with my normalization.
After school, there wasn't much to do, even in pretty army cantonments, except to go for long hikes in the hills, learn to horse ride, shovel the snow, and hang out with other army brats my age. But multiplying bland and boring into ten, didn't make it more interesting. So, after I'd exhausted all other entertainment, I usually hopped over to the library. Army libraries tended to be manned by a jawan at the time, not a librarian. It was purely a security measure: make sure books are signed out, not stolen. '
With no overseer, at the age of 10, I began to read books I later realized were probably not meant for me.
The first thing I lost was my purity.
I lost that when I lost religion. And I lost religion the moment I discovered books. That was my father's fault. I'm not sure to this day if he saw it coming or planned it that way.
To briefly digress, my father hovers like an enigmatic figure in my life. He died in an accident when I was 16 years old. In my angrier moments, I think the bastard planned it that way: lived long enough to shape my early life, but disappeared just as I was entering my rough teenage years. It left my mother holding the can. And she just dropped it. I didn't blame her though, she hadn't been fitted for the job. But pops made me angry. Trust a man to disappear when the going gets tough. In my softer moments though, I'm deeply grateful to him. I look at other women my age and think - there but for the grace of pops, go I.
He introduced me to two things that changed my life forever: sports and books. He was of course doing it because, well, we'd lost my brother to leukemia when I was six and he was three. Usually such a tragedy destroys a family. In a move inconceivable of a Rajput man of the time, he went and got himself sterilized. He told my mother he was convinced that if their next child was a son again after the death of a son, I the daughter would never get any attention. He wanted to make sure that didn't happen.
What prompted my father to take such a drastic step, I have no idea. Actually, I have some idea, but nebulous childhood memories can be misleading. Either way, at the time my mother was just 26 and my father 32 years old. This would have been a tough decision for him and their relationship. From my perspective, their relationship apparently survived, but my mother and I were completely and forever alienated. I didn't know why of course till my 40s when she told me about my father's apparently unilateral decision so many years ago. If true, I shudder to think of how unkind it was to her. And yet how kind it was to me.
They taught me two opposite sets of values that I would realize decades later, are incomplete, maybe even harmful, without each other.
If we were honestly greeting each other on religious festivals, this is what I have always imagined myself saying.
Happy Dusshera. Let's burn Ravana, pretend he's the real man and invite our children to the burning party. They'll grow up to be fine citizens.
Merry Christmas. Let's lie to our children about strangers in red suits who invade homes and grant wishes. That's a wonderful parental tradition worth preserving. Also, let's avoid talking about the crusades which were not religious wars. Spoiling the fun is not good manners. That's another parental gift to our children - good manners above everything else.
Eid Mubarak. This one's newer and less sophisticated. So let's recall how the holy book is exactly the word of god and meant to be taken literally. And how wonderful the father who sliced open the throat of his own son for the love of god. Imagine what he could do to those who weren't his sons. While we do this, let's however hug each other on both shoulders and gorge on great food. At the moment, we're only sacrificing animals, not sons.
But as you grow out of normative socialization, it becomes harder not to think about things. Why did King Dashrath banish his eldest son to 14 years in exile, because of the whimsical wishes of a petulant wife?
And how did this petulant woman's tantrum in a far off past (if the story's even true), become the raison de etre of one of the world's largest political party, the future of one seventh of the world's population,
The official version is that Kaikeyi had saved Dashrath's life and he had granted her one boon in return. As K's own son Bharat came of age, she grew ambitious for him and saw a way to get rid of the rightful heir to the throne.
Was he afraid she would kill him? If so, why not kill her instead? She wasn't even first wife. In all contemporary mythologies and histories of the time, younger wives were easily dispensed with and it wasn't really a cultural taboo. In the Mahabaratha, another contemporaneous text, a wife was shared between four men. Within the logic of that time, Kaikeyi really shouldn't have had such a hold over King D.
If it wasn't fear, was it hate? Did Dashrath the fair north Indian, hate Ram because he was dark skinned? North Indian dislike of dark skinned southies survives to this day. Was it great sex? Did D obey his queen and banish his eldest son for the oldest reason in the world - lust?
Whatever the real reason, it is hard to imagine that Prince Ram did not feel truculent and angry about this.
In which case, why did Prince Ram obey? One could argue, correctly, that whatever his reasons, King D owned the palace and Prince R had no choice. Either way, it seemed to me that the whole
Which would make Prince R a really angry man.
Why did his son obey?
Laxman chop off Surpanakha's nose if she was only in expressing her love of him?
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