Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry. This is just a quick blog post to express my sheer fucking amazement at my parents. I am currently trying to plan my Proust commentary, and my mum started talking to me about my cousin, who was/is apparently back home as well. I told her that I had rung her and received no reply. She asked whether she was/is (back home) or not. I replied that I didn't know because I had rung her and received no reply.

My mother then went on to say how my cousin's parents must be very worried about her and that they are 'overprotective' of her. 'How so?' I asked, sceptical, seeing as how I am actually in my cousin's confidence and have some real idea of her relationship with her parents. My mother went blithely on to say how her parents driving down to see her and give her food - like my parents do with my brother - was 'overprotectiveness.'

Nice to see that she's missed the irony there. What would you call what you do for my brother, then, Mater? And why is it 'overprotectiveness'? Might that be because she's a girl and 'can cook for herself' and she doesn't 'need' it like my brother does? Is it 'common sense' when my parents do it for my brother? Mater attempted to rope me in to her cooking up something for my brother yesterday, while my dad simultaneously seemed to be packing up the whole week's worth of shopping, toiletries and all, to drive to him. I asked why on earth she was making Vegemince for him (and getting into a flap) when, last time I asked, she said that the people my brother lives with were 'really nice. And they are all cooking together.'

'I thought they were cooking together?' I asked, bemused.
'No...,' in an increasingly panicked tone as she mediated the addition of the stock to the Vegemince mix, 'he heats up his pizza... and they have their pizza... They just have freezer food, waffles and things, you know how he is!'
My dad came in. 'I found the thing he was asking for... Got his Right Guard... and he needs the waffles he forgot last time.'

My mum asked me for mushrooms, and in a fit of confusion, I dived into the freezer which I had just got the Vegemince from. 'You seem to have a lot of pizza.'
'Yes... Some of it's for G------...'


Hmmm! To get back to the anecdote at hand, my mum, after hypocritically labelling my cousin's family's behaviour as 'overprotectiveness,' then went on to say that they were more like that since the death of my little cousin last year (of course...).
'Well, P----'s death has brought them closer together as a family,' I remarked, suspicious.

Then, Mater followed up her one-two combo with the 'lucky strike.' Note that this is what she said, put in a perhaps slightly shortened form, but the sense of it has been preserved firmly:
'It's no wonder that P------- never learned to cross the road properly then, is it? Because they were overprotective, she never learned to cross the road properly.'
'Mum - I'm sure she learned to cross the road properly,' I said - almost in reflex. Perhaps it was the sheer, farcical disbelief. I always seem to end up in this position where I'm 'testing' what she says, not quite able to believe my ears.
'She wasn't street-wise. She wasn't aware of when to cross the road. See, we scolded and checked you lot, and so you got a bit smarter than that.'

Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry, but when my bezzi said the other day that my mother is Satan, and 'I'm sorry, --, but you are the spawn of Satan!' I laughingly agreed with her. Now, I'm thinking agreement but without the laughing.

What kind of person manages, a year after somebody's death in a tragic accident, to blame them for it by saying they weren't 'streetwise' all while assigning secondary blame to their family for 'overprotectiveness'? Not to mention taking the whole sorry incident as a way of fucking GIVING YOURSELF UNDESERVED PARENTING KUDOS?

I don't know whether to cry or scream. On the plus side, I found my photo album from when I was a baby today, and it was a huge relief. It would have been too much for me if I had lost it. It would have felt as though besides being the 'disposable' one of the children, my past - a time when I was cute and carefree and everyone loved me because they had to - had ceased to exist altogether.

But no, I found it. I was so thankful. I hugged it to my chest and I ran into my room with it, lifting it to my lips. I flipped through rapidly, and came to a picture of me on the swing, my lower lip protruding, skirt of my little dress billowing. I was about maybe 1-3, and inches from crying. I kissed my picture-self (protected by the plastic covering) and said 'I love you, even if no-one else does.'

I was, in effect, making a promise to that angry, little curly-haired girl. I will be there for her if nobody else is. At times when I feel like I can't give myself the love and respect I deserve, I will have to reach out to others for help, but I'm in the equation now. I have entered the arena of the battle for my soul. My family will make me cry and doubt myself, and try to rein me in with their insidious game-playing and guilt-based headfucking. Yet I can see it now. I am standing in for myself. There will be no more proxies - it used to be my ex and my parents locked in battle for me. Passivity no more - my current guy is a wonderful person who will be there for me, and keep me centred, but I have me now.

And even if I'm alone in my family, at least I know there are two of my cousins in my extended family who understand. My best friend. A sort-of cousin who I've recently adopted. The whole network of 'less-close' friends, acquaintances etc., who will play their parts. Y'see, I took a lesson from the death of my cousin too. And it was this: People are stupid fucks who will turn even the defining events of human existence into a soapbox for their prejudices and posturing. Someone's always missing the point. (I will probably write more on my cousin's funeral at some point, provided it doesn't freak anyone out).

Life is short. I loved her. I should've spent more time with her. We should've cooked together. Now that she's gone, I have a renewed need to hold onto those that are 'still here.' It's not always easy to maintain regular contact with those you love, but so what? Good things always take some work. I love you, P----, I promise I will never use your death as a way to shore up my own fucking prejudices and I'll never forget you. Thank you for everything. I'm trying to let your sister know I love her all the time. And finally, fuck the haters!

A True Pirate Daughter

My father had eye surgery on Wednesday (to remove a cataract) and has been wandering about looking distinctly more dishevelled than usual with a clear plastic disc taped to his eye. I like to imagine that I am the daughter of a pirate when I go out in my shorts and waistcoat, with a scarf tied round my head and now that particular little fantasy is one teeny step closer to coming true...!

Though that is not urbane, witty or particularly sophisticated, everyone needs a little stupid something to get them through times of stress. My eldest sister has come to stay with us for a few days, and although I have tried hard to ‘be good,’ it’s been bloody hard because she’s my eldest sister.

Allow me to explain (even though no-one reads this blog regularly other than myself!). There is a ten-year age gap between my sister and I and she regards me as ‘her’ baby, out of my brother and I, because I came before him. This means she can be REALLY patronising at times; she acts as a second mother. A mother who refuses to accept that I am (becoming) an adult. That would be bad enough as it is, but add in some fundamental personality differences and you’ve got the ideal combination for a passive-aggressive nightmare.

Yesterday, for example, we went food-shopping so we could make something ‘fun’ because it’s my brother’s birthday. Desperately short of ideas, I suggested Mexican. She murmured ‘I was thinking about making enchiladas... Enchiladas with Vegemince are quite nice, but you know, Dad doesn’t like it very much.’

AAARGH!!!! I wanted to let that out of my head through my mouth, with all the inherent blaring frustration. My dad, as an amritdhari Sikh, doesn’t eat anything even haunted by meat, fish or egg. As a Punjabi man, however, he is dead traditional and thus he doesn’t enthuse overtly about the meat substitutes that make our sparse vegetarian existence somewhat more bearable. And guess what, because we’re an Indian family, if he doesn’t like it, my sister’s not going to make it! I think that, as the oldest child, she suffers the need to try and please our (absolutely impossible) parents much more constantly and acutely than we do. So we lose out, all because Dad doesn’t sing hymns of praise to Vegemince. We ended up having ‘enchiladas’ which were not only protein-free (other than the vague sprinkling of cheese on top) but contained mangetout and baby corn within. MANGETOUT AND BABY CORN, I ask you.

See, if my mum had done something like that, I would’ve forgiven it because she grew up on Indian cuisine and nowt else... but my sister? My sister actually knows a bit about food, and that’s why I was so disgusted with her monumental cop-out. Most of all, it represents that attitude I hate so much: ‘I’ll conform to the needs of others so that they don’t need to conform to my needs.’

As an Indian girl, you get that bollocks rammed into your head all the way through your childhood and right up until marriage. Keep your nose clean! Keep your head down! Learn how to cook, and don’t expect help because Indian men aren’t going to give it to you! Eventually, you get to the level where you’re so hopped-up on fear and insecurity that you kowtow to the smallest of things, and by doing so, you allow other people to see that they can treat you a certain way.

As S--- said, when I tried hopelessly to communicate what all of this meant to me, it’s a question of degree. Just because you’re getting a bit of flak and rudeness from your husband now (as my sister has been for a long time) doesn’t mean that you’re safe! You shouldn’t hold that up against men who murder their wives and say ‘Well, it’s not that bad.’! What we have, in Indian society, is a scale of acceptability, and that in itself is absolutely fucking abhorrent. NONE of it is right. NONE of it is acceptable. Don’t have a scale, don’t have points on the scale which constitute ‘unacceptable behaviour.’ Do away with the whole thing and acknowledge that abuse of ANY KIND is INTOLERABLE. Today’s name-calling husband could be tomorrow’s murderer. By having the scale system, we are instantly implying that a wife could be to blame, somehow, for the way she is being treated – and even when parents or relatives have good intentions, this is hugely damaging to the victim.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? I really don’t know. Even before my sister’s marriage and my discovery of some of the skellingtons in our family’s closet, something about this really stung me. I am an egalitarian feminist – I want us all to be equal, but I acknowledge that right now, that involves improving the lot of women much more than it does improving the lot of men. Yesterday I read ‘Shame’ by Jasvinder Sanghera and it made me incredibly angry and sad. At first I felt annoyed with her for being so mopey about her family and for picking men who would treat her badly. Then I thought a bit more and got angry at the real culprit – the Indian family unit (though you could say it of the family in other cultures too) which often fosters a kind of unhealthy co-dependency between the child and the rest of the family that is regulated by fear, just as much as, if not more so, as by love. I think she mentioned both these things in the book, but I don’t think she tied them together as I just have.

Actually, I do know why I feel strongly about this. It’s because my family (both immediate and extended) are a lot more educated than some Indians, and I suppose I expected better of them than to go on mindlessly endorsing the traditions of a place where they don’t even live any more. The most annoying of my aunts has been through a lot of shit, I found out only last year: married into the family of a patriarch who brain-damaged his own daughter for whatever reason (!), impregnated by a husband who had someone else before and after the marriage and put on a train to London alone when six months pregnant, with very little English. When she gave birth to her daughter, the family then tried to disavow all responsibility and attacked my father when he attempted to make them face up to the consequences. There were the eye-opening marriages of my two sisters, in particular my eldest sister’s, where everyone’s tears were symptomatic of a heavy sense of regret and loss rather than joy at her marriage, and the fallout from their continual arguments. Last, but definitely not least, there was the murder/suicide of my cousin in India (who I only met twice in my life). Like so many others, she mysteriously caught fire and died from the burns without anyone being able to help at all. People may say the practice of Sati is dead, but on the evidence of that and several other similar deaths (such as that of Jasvinder Sanghera’s older sister Robina), I would beg to differ.

On a slightly lighter note, I appear to have strayed from the spec yet again! I PROMISE I will explain my politics/game thing and talk about trolls next time.