What I like about TV and web series is that they come with the luxury of time and space, allowing the arc of the story to develop in enough detail. Events unfold at their own pace, and personalities reveal their inner complexities, measure by interesting measure. That additional time and space also allow the viewer to digest a different idea or perspective before moving on to the next. Happily, modern-day OTT platforms have brought us wealth in viewing from all over the world, but the content serialised on our homegrown TV channels is still frustratingly stagnant and disappointing. 

However, there is one series that I watch faithfully, Aai Kuthe Kay Karte, in Marathi (based on a Bangla series). The name roughly translates to: What Does Mother Do, Anyway? The story of a powerless stay-at-home mom and of her slow transformation, stepping out of her circumscribed existence to carve a life of her own, for herself, by herself, and on her own terms. I started watching it on a very bored afternoon a couple of years ago, willingly seduced by the promise predictable in the title, that mom would eventually do a whole gobsmacking lot. In the initial stages (that I zipped through in fast-forward), it felt as regressive as all the mother-and-daughter-in-law-syndrome driven content that has ruled Indian television for decades. Arundhati, the middle-class, middle-aged, unglamorous housewife, slaves to the beck and call of her arrogant husband, his parents and her children, gets trampled upon like the proverbial pathetic doormat, has no money, few rights, and no respect at all. But she carries on regardless, convinced that in her quiet uncomplaining service lay the greater good. I cringed in disgust as I watched her societally formatted martyrdom, but stayed patient, waiting for the inevitable flip, curious to see how that would be handled. 

And then it began to redeem itself. Yes, the production values remained awkwardly poor, the direction meandered around the sub-average, the episodes often stretching with stale ploys and juvenile inanities, the plotting more formulaic than inspired, and the scripting regressing off and on into stereotypical ideals about family values and women’s responsibilities. Phew. But somehow over time, it got a hold of itself, and developed something resembling a spine. The writing broached societal and inter-personal issues in their subtler nuances; the dialogues stirred, some dramatic and powerful, some quietly catalysing introspection; and the varied greys in most of the characters became believable and were convincingly portrayed. It all seemed to rise a notch, progressively so, and I felt vindicated as successive episodes worked through incremental changes in Arundhati and her situation. A growing awareness of the gap between her actual and desired status as woman, wife, mother, nurturer, thence a realignment in her attitude to the world and people around her, a gradual shedding of her crippling inhibitions and fears, and a gritty resolve to embrace a life radically different from all she has known hitherto. One of self-reliance, financially, physically, mentally and emotionally. Arundhati has now divorced her cheating husband, has a job and career, rented her own accommodation, and seems reasonably upbeat about her future. It spoke to me so loudly and clearly that it’s now become a compulsive watch. I’m hooked. 

A longish but relevant side note: 

I remember learning about the concept of value added in our national income accounting course in Economics. Specifically, imputing it where it wasn’t reflected in monetary payment. I remember the discussion around the bonded labourer, that human beast of burden beholden to landlords in an exploitative arrangement that typified erstwhile agricultural society, his value added subsumed in the coffers of his masters. And I remember my young mind drawing a parallel with the archetypal housewife and asking, who computes the value added by her? Her toiling through a ceaseless stream of chores, washing, cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing, cooking, serving, caring, counselling, nursing, nurturing, all through the day. And satisfying her lord and master at night, sometimes against her will. All without the prospect of retirement. Does she not add value? Then why isn’t her contribution accounted for separately in our GDP? Our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers and all the women before and after them, working assiduously, shouldering all responsibilities at home, enabling the men in their families to participate in the labour market and be paid. As Arundhati asks, if we have a societally sanctioned/enforced division of labour, why is working at home of any less value than working outside?

The answer, of course, is payment in money. That incontestable measure of value, source of power, yardstick of hierarchical status. Well, if every act that was done by the homemaker were to be monetised, she would have a hefty bank balance against her name too, no? Get real. That doesn’t happen. For her work is supposed to come from love and duty. Which are expected free of charge. Her time and energy and effort are owned by the collective of the family. But the pennies earned by her keeper are toted against his name, handed out as and when, providing for everyone (including her) to be fed, clothed and sheltered under his roof. Not that the keeper is necessarily cruel or callous, that may not be in his nature. But it is in the nature of the system that empowers him and not the euphemism of his better half. 

Well, women have travelled a long way since this archaic division of labour and many of them are now doing it all. Giving love, doing duty, earning money. And demanding love and duty from those they are with, though not always getting as much, for the men have been slow to adjust. Arundhati is but a late entry to this fluidly dynamic mix, but she will soon realise that one aspiration she aims for, that has hitherto eluded her: Respect, as an equal.

And yet there are millions and millions of Arundhatis all over the word who are still doomed to live their lives in the shadows of their patriarchs, still toiling without relief, often slave to that burgeoning and exacting master, the sacrosanct joint family. Denied that passport to freedom, a means to earn money, their own livelihood. And conversely and perversely, there are many, many women who own that passport, but are afraid to use it. Trapped by their conditioning, swallowing the narrative of the woman’s inescapable responsibility in home and hearth, teetering through that precarious balancing act between office and home, pressured, pressured, pressured, managing it all but still deferring to the male in the home as the legitimate voice of authority. The over-worked bread-winning maid getting battered time and again by her abusive indolent husband is just one obvious example. There are many among the upper classes that are similarly victimised by the same mindsets, that also laugh self-deprecatingly at the sexist humour that contemptuously ridicules the female and her feminism. Education is their means to money and money means to power, undoubtedly. But one needs the conviction to use it. Have-wings doesn’t necessarily translate to will-fly. 

Well, I applaud all the Arundhatis everywhere who have suffered, protested, braved a new life, and learned to safeguard their self-respect. All are not as viciously virtuous and irritatingly infallible as the one in the TV series, most are as grey as you and me, and their stories are probably truer and more inspiring than the one televised. But until we discover those, this one will have to do. Though I do wish that the one on TV would fumble a little, be a little selfish, get swayed from the smugly virtuous, be a little less correct. So that those who are in her situation but aren’t Miss Perfects like her could still believe they have a healthy chance to reclaim their lives for themselves. And while I’m wishing, Arundhati, please tighten your leaky water taps. Rather than getting my sympathy, your pathological crying makes me swear with impatience: What the hell did you expect, woman? Steel yourself. And move on.

Returning home has always been an absolute joy for me. Howsoever fascinating and fruitful the sojourn abroad, the promise of retrieving my own customary space to reclaim myself, my own bed to dream in, my own land and sun and soil, happily lures me back every time.

I remember one morning on reaching home from the US, being immediately assailed by the unmistakable aroma of curry leaves sizzling in hot oil. Breakfast in my neighbour’s kitchen, all so comfortably familiar. I stood a moment longer at my door, debating, pohe or upama? And instantly wanting a plateful of both. It isn’t as if these options aren’t available outside India. But it is their alchemy with our own exclusive contexts, the unapologetic glare of the sun shining outside, the heat I typically sense on my skin, the sound of the fan whirring overhead, our voices raised in our speech with our own idiosyncratic intonations and accents, the jabbering of the mynahs and bulbuls in our champa and gulmohar and amaltas trees …. all of that and more that makes it so distinctively and uniquely ours.

On a lighter note, it’s a relief for me to again stash away those bulky jackets, sweaters and scarves, all that swathed my tropical-raised self while braving the bracing chill of the temperate lands I roamed. I remember wearying of the bleary blues and blacks that swamped the sartorial there, my eyes hungering for the unabashed riot of colours we have at home.

Of course, it isn’t just about the trappings, the sights and sounds and senses that I feel myself at home with. It is much much deeper. I am rooted here, completely and thoroughly. That is, I am not merely a sentimental or serendipitously patriotic Indian. Not that I would flaunt my patriotism on my sleeve even though it is the ruling flavour. But yes, I am utterly convinced that this is where I was and am meant to be.  

I remember the time many years ago when I was mulling over some tricky choices. Whatever ambiguity I might have overlooked in other respects, there was one, among a few, that was categorically non-negotiable: I would never live elsewhere. I can be happy in any corner of this country, I averred, not abroad. I belonged here. All my people were here, all my contexts came from here, my music grew here, I was fulfilled here and imagined myself to continue being thus fulfilled in the years to come as well. Then why forsake this for any other?

Or, was I not brave enough, adventurous enough to pack my bags and try to make my life elsewhere? Test new waters, new climes? Was I playing it safe?

Maybe. But maybe not.

I was raised by parents who believed passionately in the concept of India, who themselves were raised in pre-Independence years dreaming of unfurling the tricolour one day. Raised by men and women who fought determinedly to free this land, to nurture and educate its children, to inculcate values of free and rational thought and expression. Growing up I would hear stories of my grandmother being battered in lathi-charges or being locked up in prison and my mother pining away for months on end without her. My other grandmother worked hard to rescue our women from their travails, to empower them, as also to help found a school for children. I heard about my grandfathers who supported their wives’ dreams with a dedication that did them proud, me too. I know how my maternal grandfather would step in to write editorials in his wife’s newspaper, sustaining her readers’ spirit and morale while she suffered incarceration. My other grandfather helped balance the women’s council’s books when his wife had torn her hair out in frustration at the unconquerable magnitude of the task. So many stories, so much pride in my clan, my people and my land, all that bound me to them. Why not revel in it for all time? Why play with loyalties?

And that is what I happily did all these years. Yes, there is plenty that ails my home, land and people, plenty that has gone awry from what had been imagined and dreamed of by my parents and theirs. This is not the India that they had fought for. Nor is this entirely the India I wish to wake up to every morning. Agreed. It is what it is. But that still never made me question where I had chosen to be. Migrate? Not for me. Not that I had any quarrel with those who did cross overseas, nor did I ever judge them their choices. They had their valid reasons to leave, I had mine to stay on.

And so, as and when those of the diaspora that I knew came visiting their old home, spending quality time with their ageing parents, hopping around to the corner for a batata wada, catching a night of music at Sawai or a home-grown natak, refreshing old memories, I knew that some of what they had left behind still called them back. And when we holidayed in locales abroad, soaking in their air and life and customs and systems, traipsing through their palaces and chateaus, museums and galleries, serenaded by their violins and cellos, forging connects with people there and breaking bread with them, we lived and did as them. All global humans for every happy while. But home was always where the heart finally was.

Until our daughter left for the US. And made her own home there with her husband. The years rolled from one to the next and we watched closely as she made her life there, studying, working, living, growing. Rooting herself in another land. Building her own tribe around her. Melding all that she had carried from here with all that she chose to embrace there.

Then we predictably and routinely juggled with time zones, picking convenient hours to call and chat, imagining her comfortably asleep while we worked through our days, praying that her days were productive with zero glitches while we slept. And that she stayed safe, happy and healthy. I suppose she did the same, but I’m guessing not with my intense fervour. She might have outgrown her umbilical attachment, but I’m still holding tight.

Many parents do the same, worldwide, we are not unique in that. They all do it bravely, some easily, some less so. They swallow their concerns and their worries so that their children don’t feel weighed down by them. It is how it is. But it feels all the more challenging when the physical distance that separates us is so punishingly vast that we need to travel long hours and days just to be together again. Yet I would gladly do it every single time. I did, through those rolling years.

Now when I look at the hills that surround the suburb she lives in, when I stroll through the spacious park close by, see the brilliantly blue skies overhead, spy the tiny hummingbirds flitting through her garden, see her neighbours stop and say hello when she is walking her dog, hear their music playing in their cars and malls, drive by their majestic evergreens lining their wide roads or their southern magnolia flowering magnificently in their summers, it also feels reassuringly familiar. And when I see her happy face in the midst of all of that, it feels right.

I make my pohe and upama in her kitchen and she smiles her satisfied smile that says, Just like home. I know it isn’t, her selective nostalgia notwithstanding, but how does that even matter? Isn’t home where the heart is?

So, what holds me back in my land today, I ask myself. My parents have passed, many of my tribe too, yet their history remains. I know in my gut that I still nurture myself and my life here. Much of me is still anchored here. I still despair at the grim stories that crowd our headlines. I still cheer when our young raise our flag in sporting arenas. My ears perk up with interest when I hear spicy chatter in colloquial Hindi and Marathi. I smile when the koel calls from the kamini blossoms in our garden. I luxuriantly inhale the petrichor from the first monsoon showers on our parched soil. My heart warms when my bai celebrates her children’s school grades with me, popping a pedha in my mouth.

And yet all the while my treacherous heart feels perversely and wretchedly torn between this home and our daughter’s, longing for them to somehow coincide. Knowing they won’t.

And then, when we came back from our recent visit to the US, after I thought I had well recovered from my moping and missing our daughter and was again glorying in my life here, I caught myself suddenly longing for another glimpse of those Californian hills. My eyes began to wander through her neighbourhood, going through its corners and turns as if they were my own. My ears pick up the sounds of a familiar western number from a passing car, my head beginning to bob in rhythm and I am washed with a brand-new nostalgia. My hands now long to cradle an ice-cold margarita, pair it with some chips and guacamole, and immerse myself in that idyllically lingering twilight. My fingers always itch to call her, hear her voice, see her face, see my son-in-law’s head nestled beside hers. Watch as she stirs her coffee in the mug we had bought together. Ache to be there again.

And I think, heck! There are loves and longings and loyalties, aren’t there? I know that what I feel for her transcends everything else, it is how it is. That makes me adopt what she has claimed as hers, that makes me want to join in on some of her adventures, that makes her new contexts mine as well, that makes my heart happy when my mind and memory conjure her familiar surroundings again, no longer as foreign.

Then am I no longer as loyally Indian, are my roots breaking loose? Or am I being clingingly maternal? Neither. I still love my land, my people and I believe I am as fiercely respectful of her space as I am of mine. I guess I’ve only now realised what many already have before me: that there can be another wonderful place to call home. It need not coincide with the one here. That I would be just as full of joy to return there. For the heart is just as happy there.

Ever since I started writing I have been questioned off and on about my choice of language, English. There are those among my circles of family, friends and acquaintances who are puzzled as to why a person born and raised in a Maharashtrian family, who has been living in Pune for the past several decades, and who is reasonably capable of articulating her thoughts in Marathi should opt for English when formalising them in print.

 
I try when I feel patient enough, which is rare, to explain the linguistic particulars of me and myself. I grew up in Jamshedpur where my father worked for Tisco, now known as Tata Steel. I went to school there with my older sisters and many other children from families that hailed from different parts of the country. All working in a town far away from their native origins, all building a cosmopolitan community or a prototype of an integrated nation, all happily melding their respective ethnicities in one melting pot. Our mothers would speak in different native tongues at home and all of us young children searched for the one bridge that could effectively and happily connect us all. Our parents opting to send us to a school that taught in English, that bridge was forged and we were joined.

 
So that was that. English came home and stayed. But not as a guest. Rather, as one of our own. On par with our own maternal languages. My mother befriended languages as we do people and soon she too was reading Shaw and Cronin and Maugham and Christie and Wodehouse just as we were, and as easily as she still read her Marathi litterateurs and the Sanskrit verses of her favourite Kalidas. While we were and still are fluent in Marathi, Hindi and English, the last soon became our default medium of discourse, of all debates and discussions. At home and outside it.

 

English still is my language of thought and action and emotion. And thence of writing. Of course, I’ve borrowed words that belong to our own soil and have blossomed under our own sun. I still adhere to calling our ubiquitous aromatic kadhi limba or kari patta by their Marathi or Hindi names, rarely referring to them as curry leaves, and most certainly not when I’m actually tossing them in hot oil. Or, jhootha/ushta is just that and I know no English equivalent that expresses its exact or entire intent. Just as chit, loot, pyjama, bangle, bungalow, veranda and so on were incorporated by the British into their dictionaries, I’ve added my own selection of Hindi and Marathi words and catch phrases to my everyday parlance in English. My own version of fusion.

 
But I look around me and I find a peculiar paradox.

 

On the one hand, I see an increasing embracement of English as one of the necessary tools in today’s economically imperative globalisation. With the ongoing technological revolution and its windfall of information access on devices that can fit into our palms, it wouldn’t be entirely inappropriate to say that we hold the world in our hands. But that world doesn’t necessarily speak nor understand the languages we grew at home. The ones we call our mother tongues. Out there we have Chinese (Mandarin, as its most popular variant), Spanish, Arabic, German, French, Russian and Japanese. And, of course, English, with which we are already familiar and have heard spoken in our midst since the past couple of centuries and more. From which words like officer (afsar), hospital (aspatal), captain (kaptaan), bottle (botal) and so on had already been lifted, modified and made our own. And from which today words like enter, search, like, copy, paste, send, share and such similar virtual commands have swiftly slid and seeped into our native tongues and are used indiscriminately even by those who have never stepped into a school and would hardly appreciate the foreign origins of parts of their everyday lexicon.

 

On the other hand, I also come across a bristling resentment against the very same language. It is seen as an obdurately surviving relic of our unhappy colonial past. A need to refute a language that was once taught to the ruled subjects to produce men that could effectively serve their royal British Majesties. A vestigial emblem that reminds us of of our political enslavement and economic plunder. That we should choose to express ourselves in that language could, according to resurgent nationalists, only indicate an abject but resilient colonised mind-set, a reluctance to right past wrongs, and an apathy in restoring pride and prestige to what was and is home grown. Moreover, they remind us, English was and is essentially elitist, a dividing tool, the separator of the socio-economically and politically powerful classes with high prestige quotients from the masses who are more comfortable expressing themselves in their own respective vernaculars. The still entrenched divider between the rulers and the ruled, perpetuating cruel condescension. A passport to vacuous snobbery. Shame! Times have changed, they remind us. Be Indian. Speak Indian.

 
But I have never regarded English as un-Indian. On the contrary, it is to me my means of communicating with my Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kashmiri, Bengali, Bihari, Odiya, Malayali friends. All kaleidoscopically Indian. To easily understand and be understood. To share. To bond. To commit. My national integrator. Very early on I could guess who was a Tamilian, who a Bengali, or a Gujarati, or a Punjabi, just by hearing their unique accents, their elongation of certain vowels, their suppression of certain consonants, their distinguishing phonetics, diction, typical mix-ups in syntax, their own respective native tongues stamping their identities with authority on the adopted one. But that just added bags and bags of fabulous flavour. And helped us appropriate what was once foreign as one of our own. Indian English.

 
And what exactly and uniquely is it to speak indigenous Indian? Tamil? Bangla? Dogri? Marathi? Which variant of Marathi, the one spoken in Mumbai or Nagpur or Kolhapur? Or the one that Pune superciliously believes to be its sole chaste avatar? Our much touted diversity could actually become a stumbling, if not dividing block, if we chose to revert exclusively to the homespun. Hindi, that was once adopted as our national lingua franca has really not made the inroads expected. There are those that disdainfully look down upon it or plainly refuse to speak it, much like the French refuse to speak English, fearing that giving way to the language of the northern plains may swamp their own particular ethnicities. Linguistic roots are a matter of ethnic pride and nobody can or should be expected to surrender that. And the longstanding power tussle that festers beneath the stitched bonhomie of states comes up front and close, because yielding precedence of one’s language to another’s is as susceptible to tensions as relinquishing water from rivers. The lingual divides flare up and subside intermittently, either spontaneously or deliberately, depending on who is looking to catch the eye and ear of the public and therefore looking for an inflammatory grouse to vent.

 
Then, what to do? How does this paradox get resolved? I can switch easily between Marathi and Hindi and English. But can we all? And is that even enough? How do I gain access to the ideas that could enrich my life but have been expressed in languages beyond the reach of my comprehension? Much is lost in translation, I agree, but that remains my only realistic hope of understanding what, for example, the farmer in that remote corner of the northeast thinks about the rest of his country and countrymen. On the other hand, the local municipal school’s watchman’s daughter who aspires to be a computer scientist was stumped by the standard of English in her text books. Why have not our books been written in my language, she asks in frustration. Really, why haven’t they? Or, for example, why hasn’t that Bible of medicine, Gray’s Anatomy, been translated into all our regional languages yet? Why should a girl who has studied in Marathi all her schooling life suddenly be expected to improve her English skills just so she can pursue her specialised academic interest? But the committed and motivated girl that she is, she buckles down and does, confidently melding her learned English medical jargon with her instinctive Marathi when giving instructions to the nurse assisting her in getting our babies born. Like that only.

 
And so this conundrum of languages continues and we trundle along speaking bits of this and bits of that. And get by. Make do. Our language jugaad. I chat with my neighbours in Marathi, sing in Hindi and write in English. And when I tell the weaver in distant Kanchipuram who has been modestly making ends meet while always gloriously making Indian that I want a beige coloured saree with a dull gold temple border, I know that, for all our proud espousal of our linguistic roots, he and the traders representing him are familiar with all the key English words. So I don’t need to learn Tamil, nor he Marathi. It’s business, baba! Just click on picture, press like and send. Simple.