Indian Unfolding: Musings Of A Small Town

A house without a father

The house that I grew up in wasn't specifically a big house, but it was a crowded one, we lived in a joint family. There was a small balcony where the entire family would gather in the morning to have tea.

I would always sit in my father's lap and my brother hated it. He blamed father for loving me more.

From the top of the balcony I would see the gate-keeper greet father and clean his car. But he never cleaned mother's car. She said she was fine to do it and a penny saved was a penny earned.

My mother was a teacher in a high paying school and she did housework before going to school and after coming back.

My grandparents were mean to my mother. They didn't approve of her doing a job and hated it more that she kept her salary to herself.

As a kid I never noticed these things. It was when father started having an affair and I would often catch mother crying over it, did she speak about things that made her sad.

I often asked my mother, what made her stay. She told me that at the house she grew up in, they could hear the sound of the peacocks each morning. This was her favourite thing about her house. When she came here, she found the familiar cooing of the peacocks. That sound helped her get up in the morning and made it feel like home.

And about the time father was about to come back in the evening, the peacocks would start cooing again and she knew that she had been through the tough part of the day. It was him that kept her bound, that helped her get through everything.

When father decided to leave to have a life with the new woman, his parents became kinder to mother. She always says it was because they feared that she would take us away from them.

After father left, we moved out to college and mother left us to ourselves. I was in a place in life where I never wanted to marry. But mother felt otherwise. She felt that a woman needed the care and safety that only a man could provide, even after everything she went through.

I asked her what if my in-laws turned out to be like hers? She said that just like she did, I would find something to hold onto, and that would make my life easier.

So I let her pick a suitable groom for me, just like her parents had picked one for her. But this time, she was excessively careful. She chose one who lived in a 3-BHK apartment in Mumbai, with just his parents, who had the same salary as me, and used the same smartphone as me, whose parents didn't want any dowry and were simple, just like we were.

But I never got around to loving my husband. I never found the kind of passion I had felt when I kissed someone on a rooftop or the kind of love I had made with an old friend in his wife's car. And I didn't find the sound of the peacocks any better. Yet I never left this house. My husband could tell that I wasn't in love with him, every time he undressed me and we had sex.

One day he asked me why I didn't quit. I told him about my mother's peacocks.

He then asked me what I loved most about the house I grew up in. I told him that I loved my father the most.