...
I never could really understand her.
There were six screaming decades between us.
Sometimes, I made an effort to place myself in her shoes. But of course there were no shoes then. She was a teenager, like me at that time, but barefoot, doing household chores, cooking, cleaning, washing, accepting everything as it came. She used to talk of her village, of hills and beautiful valleys, and I would wonder if one can really visualize that distant a past, especially when one is half blind. I always thought she made up a lot of stuff, but I believed nonetheless. Because if I would not believe, she would not tell me her stories, and I really wanted to listen to them, fact or fiction, because the undertone of her tales was a heady mix of nostalgia and hope that made them almost always better than the stuff in my novels. She did not know how to read and write, and sometimes, when she caught me laughing on a Wodehouse, I would try to translate and read out to her… about places she would never go to and people she would never meet. She loved to meet people, and that used to irritate me, because she could not speak Hindi, and I had to play a translator for her precious tales, knowing that people were not appreciating them as they were meant to be appreciated. I always felt that she loved my sister more than me, and this would be the basis of all our small and big fights. When we were done fighting and I would threaten that I would not ever speak to her and she would cry and I would say sorry… then in her characteristic deep timbre voice she would say that I had her exclusive love for the first four years of my life, and that should be enough to last me a lifetime.
It is.
There were six screaming decades between us.
Sometimes, I made an effort to place myself in her shoes. But of course there were no shoes then. She was a teenager, like me at that time, but barefoot, doing household chores, cooking, cleaning, washing, accepting everything as it came. She used to talk of her village, of hills and beautiful valleys, and I would wonder if one can really visualize that distant a past, especially when one is half blind. I always thought she made up a lot of stuff, but I believed nonetheless. Because if I would not believe, she would not tell me her stories, and I really wanted to listen to them, fact or fiction, because the undertone of her tales was a heady mix of nostalgia and hope that made them almost always better than the stuff in my novels. She did not know how to read and write, and sometimes, when she caught me laughing on a Wodehouse, I would try to translate and read out to her… about places she would never go to and people she would never meet. She loved to meet people, and that used to irritate me, because she could not speak Hindi, and I had to play a translator for her precious tales, knowing that people were not appreciating them as they were meant to be appreciated. I always felt that she loved my sister more than me, and this would be the basis of all our small and big fights. When we were done fighting and I would threaten that I would not ever speak to her and she would cry and I would say sorry… then in her characteristic deep timbre voice she would say that I had her exclusive love for the first four years of my life, and that should be enough to last me a lifetime.
It is.
Labels: Life...or something like it...
