LIFE
Who Can Tell What Later Looks Like?
A life full of delayed dreams is one without seasonings
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— The Summer Day, Mary Oliver
‘If it works, don’t touch it’ is a well-known adage among programmers. The software program might be hacky and suboptimal. It might have defects that were yet to manifest externally. But if it works, don’t touch it.
When Natasha found her middle-aged mom, Asha, crying on her rooftop in the middle of the night, she must have remembered the adage. Asha wanted to walk out of her 35-year-old marriage.
“What’s the big deal? Which household doesn’t have problems? Why are you being silly?” Natasha asked her mom, baffled. Her dad wasn’t a bad man. She couldn’t understand what had come over her mom to wreck their lives. It worked — why touch it?
But Asha could no longer live without joy. Her life had been prosaic for long enough. She could no longer let her husband suck the air out of her life.
At first, she asks if she could stay with Natasha. When she doesn’t get the support she hoped for, she leaves the home unannounced to spend a day doing things she always wanted. It was the beginning of self-love.
They are the protagonists of the short film, Everything is Fine, which ends with Asha enjoying a pedal boat with her daughter.
I recently discovered an entire genre of short films with nuanced social commentary, available on YouTube. Living outside India, my glimpse into the life inside is quite limited and often skewed by the lives of my family. I try not to extrapolate and generalize what I know.
So, watching these beautifully scripted and brilliantly acted short films made me realize how similar our lives were.
The movie reminded me of my friend, Aditi. Fourteen years into her marriage, I could see makings of ‘Everything Is Fine’ in her life.
Aditi’s parents were both scholars. They were both professors at a reputed university and received invitations from across the world to give lectures. Her dad, however, dictatorially prohibited the women of his household — his wife and two daughters — from traveling.
He didn’t want the daughters to travel, and he wanted their mother by their side. His control was so profound that the daughters continued seeking his permission in life after becoming earning adults who had families of their own.
But with what I’d rather not call an Electra complex, Aditi married someone who was similarly tyrannical as her dad. Her husband kept strict tabs on her expenses, questioning her even for trivial purchases such as mascara. Even when she brought a salary comparable to her husband’s, she wasn’t at liberty to spend as she pleased.
So, after finishing the movie, I texted her. “How’s Aunty? Is she feeling better now?”
Two years ago, Aditi’s dad had passed away.
What took him was misinformed obstinacy. He believed doctors were swindlers who were out there to steal people’s money. So, he neglected all the symptoms of a stroke the first time. The second time, his family forcefully admitted him to the hospital.
But after the troubling symptoms passed, he became an unmanageable patient who demanded discharge. The doctors relented with a note to the effect of ‘unruly patient discharged against medical advice.’ He was gone in a couple of days.
Aditi’s dad was 85, leaving behind a wife of 40 years.
Even though two years had passed, I wasn’t sure how a woman in her 70s would handle her late singleness. After a codependent relationship for four decades, where would she start with life?
At first, she was angry at her husband for his reckless obstinacy in leaving her alone. But as time passed, she began appreciating her freedom better.
“Oh, she’s doing great! She just came back from a trip to Australia and is planning another to Bali in a couple of months.” Aditi replied half an hour later.
“Who does she go with?”
“Other widow friends like her. They no longer have to ask anyone permission, right?”
Aditi’s dad was a benevolent dictator who provided abundantly for his family. At first, his absence loomed large in all their lives. But as time passed, they recognized how stifling, in some dimensions, their lives had been.
A few months later, after the initial grief passed, Aditi’s mom agreed to join a group of friends on their trip to Kashmir. It was an all-inclusive tour in which all she had to do was show up with her clothes.
After spending two weeks with her friends, not worrying about her kids or grandkids, and not feeling guilty that her husband wouldn’t approve of this, she realized how a part of her life had been stifled all this while.
She began traveling more often; Goa, Lakshadweep, Australia, and Bali were all just scratching the surface. She signed up for tailoring classes and began stitching all her clothes herself.
I was immensely glad at the turn of events. But it also made me sad. How tragic was it that she had to wait until her husband passed to enjoy life? She had her money and leisure. What she didn’t have was independence or support.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Aditi was following in her mom’s footsteps. Will she have to wait until she is 75 to enjoy life?
Unlike Aditi’s mom, mine had a different problem.
My dad always had the travel bug. Even when he had barely any money to spare, he found ways to travel. But, for as long as I could remember, my mom was reluctant to.
She seemed to me like an ant, always working on something. She woke up earlier than all of us. But her entire mornings were swallowed by chores and religious rituals until she rushed to her office, always a little later than she must.
Her evenings weren’t much different either. We lived in a large traditional house, and the weight of the traditions fell disproportionately on her.
My dad didn’t stand out among the men of his generation. He didn’t lift his finger on the chores. He would ask for a coffee from the living room which my mom would bring to him.
After gulping it down, he might either ask for another cup if it didn’t satisfy him enough or if it did, he would leave the cup beside him for my mom to clear up. The pile of laundry was hers to fold. The floors were hers to mop.
In all fairness, my mom was oblivious to everything else that happened outside the home. Even though she was employed and brought home a fair share of the household income, she had no idea how to pay the electricity bill or telephone bill.
She didn’t know how to open a bank account. She wouldn’t go to a doctor alone. She never came to any of our parent-teacher meetings. My dad took care of them all.
So, the distribution of responsibilities wasn’t entirely unfair. But my mom crumbled in its weight. She couldn’t also swallow my dad’s travel bug. Instead, they made plans to travel the country after retirement. We’ll go see the Himalayas after we retire, my dad often remarked.
After their retirement in 2019, they visited me in Seattle. We traveled around the Pacific Northwest, the Yellowstone, and the Beartooth mountains, some still snow-clad, others blooming with wildflowers.
After two weeks, my mom’s skin started turning red, and her body steadily inflamed. She found every surface of her skin painful to touch. Even the interior of her mouth became so sore that she found it difficult to eat.
The doctors we visited in the US just pointed her to the sunscreen counter. It’s just the sunburns, they said. Repeated visits to different doctors didn’t get us any different results.
So, my parents decided to go back to India for further medical care. She was diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disorder, Dermatomyositis (DM), that gets triggered under extreme UV. As predicted in the medical journals, DM later gave way to cancer.
She has since been on treatment and prohibited from going outside for at least five years from the onset of the disorder. My dad locked away his travel bug to care for my mom.
My parents didn’t always have the money. Over the years, they had enough to spare. But instead of finding a way to balance life and work, they postponed what they really wanted to do to later. And my mom went into involuntary house arrest in her long-awaited retirement.
We all do that — postponing life.
Most of my friends are financially better off than their parents were. But the increased affluence doesn’t seem to offer them increased leisure. Often it feels like the mantra is, Let’s work now so that we can live later.
But none of us know what later has in store for us. That epiphany shook us out of the US.
Working in tech, the US is where all the money and opportunities were. We could dabble with a wide variety of innovative products and challenging problems. The exposure within and outside the company was huge. To grow a tech career, the US was the perfect destination.
But in return, you mortgage every waking and, at times, sleeping moment of your life. The stress never left me. I couldn’t leave work at my desk. Living in Seattle with its mountains, I could make a mini-vacation by disappearing into them every weekend. But it doesn’t matter what I call it. The body never detoxed the stress.
With the limited vacation days, the job insecurity, and the healthcare-immigration-job nexus, I was practically postponing life to later. We visited our families in India only once every three years.
So, at the end of the pandemic, when people around the world rediscovered the priorities in life, my husband and I did ours too. We didn’t want to pledge our lives to work. We wanted to visit our families more often. We wanted to be able to forget work at the end of the day.
We wanted to travel more often. My dad had infected me with the travel bug since childhood. I was so bitten by it that when I met my husband, I made it clear that it wouldn’t work between us if he didn’t like to travel. Luckily, he did too.
Just before we left Seattle, my husband had a high-profile promotion in the works. The recognition, the scope, and the scope of influence riding with the promotion were huge. But when the moment came, he decided to forgo them all. Life was more important. The pandemic has shown us clearly how there may never be a later.
So, we decided to say goodbye to the US, take a massive pay cut, and move across the Atlantic.
As the Yiddish proverb goes, ‘We plan, God laughs.’ Sometimes God laughs with us, some other times at us. So, all our grand life plans are worthless. But we only have a single life. Even to those who believe in reincarnation, the next one is going to be a new installment without a memory of the previous one.
There are so many people unfortunate around the world who do not have the means to plan their lives. Holding three jobs with nothing to spare, they may not even dream of a vacation. Hobbies or travel may not even be in their lexicon. I’m clueless about how to help them.
But there are so many others who are in a better position than that. They might plan their financial portfolio meticulously; life itself takes the backbench. But as the years pass unnoticed on autopilot, what will you say when the little bird pecks on the shoulder to ask, ‘Are you ready?’
“Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be? … Is today the day I die? … The truth is, Mitch, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
— Tuesdays with Morrie.
