When Will You Come Back, Mommy?
I watched my friend lose her way when her parents abandoned her as a teenager
Julie always had her egg.
Since we were 5, she brought her lunch in a large, round stainless steel box. During the lunch hour, we sat opposite each other on the floor, with the wrapping cloth spread underneath, and opened our lunch boxes.
Stuffed to the brim of her round box would be spiced rice, formidably protecting the treasure hidden inside. Her Faberge egg, that she’d carefully dig out like an Easter hunt. When she opened hers and dug out the egg, I wrinkled my nose in disgust.
I was a vegetarian, a snobby, uppity one at that; the kind that didn’t even eat eggs. I belonged to a special breed of Indian vegetarians who were neither vegans nor omnivores.
That was my one chance to flaunt the purity of my soul. It’s disturbing when I think about how early in life we learn snobbery. Even when I was fascinated by the treasure hunt, I felt obliged to express my disgust.
After seeing her egg every day for nine years, finding it missing was like the void after an amputation.
“Where’s your egg?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“The egg, the one you dig out.”
“Oh, my neighbor doesn’t make that lunch. That was my mom’s specialty.”
“Your neighbor?”
“Yeah, my dad and mom got promoted and were transferred to different cities. So, they asked our neighbor to cook our meals and watch us over at night.”
“So, will you be alone next year? What about the board exams?”
“I don’t know, man. I’m as clueless as you are.” At that, she walked away.
We were 13. Her sister was eight years old, the same age as my brother. Julie’s parents weren’t away for just a few days.
Those promotion transfers had a minimum duration of three years. I knew it because my dad worked in the same bank as her parents. I knew it because my dad refused his promotions to avoid the transfer; he loved his cozy. I couldn’t imagine waking up in an empty house with neither of my parents around.
Here was Julie, stuck with her neighbor for at least three years.
Nine years before the missing egg, my dad walked me into the classroom holding my hands. It was my first day at school.
I was stuffed inside a white shirt and a navy blue skirt that was neatly sealed by the school belt. My hair was tied in bow-ties on both sides with red ribbons. That was our uniform for the next 12 years.
He sat me on a tiny bench just as he spotted one of his acquaintances, John uncle.
My dad knew a ton of people in the city; friends, acquaintances, customers in his bank, colleagues from his previous company, classmates from his school or college. So it wasn’t unusual to run into people he knew. Every new face was an uncle or an aunty.
John uncle walked towards us with his daughter and sat her next to me. A lanky little girl, tucked inside a similar attire to mine. She had short, curly hair, requiring no ribbon. I would have been the youngest in the class had she not walked in.
I don’t remember which of the two declared to us — “You both become friends, ok?” Perhaps it came in unison. That’s how I met Julie.
I think we were both manufactured headstrong. Neither of us liked to be told what to do, let alone who to sit with or who to become friends with. Being who we are, we might have gravitated towards each other, as we did later in life. But right then, we didn’t like to oblige.
So for several years, despite being in the same class, sitting opposite each other for countless lunch hours, we actively resisted friendship. It didn’t matter that we were utterly friendless; we were prepared to rot for eternity in a friendless world rather than make friends with someone just because our parents asked us to.
We saw each other day after day for 12 years. That didn’t make us friends. We weren’t always adversaries, either. But as years went by, we chose to sit next to the other, instead of being told to. Even while arguing or fighting incessantly, we had become the constant in the other’s life.
“You have dandruff in your hair.”
“Oh yeah, your hair stinks from a classroom away.”
“At least I have longer hair than you.”
“Want to measure?”
At times, we were like the old couple on the verge of a divorce; unable to escape the other’s presence while also comforted by the steadiness of it.
Sometimes, the extra-curricular activities or project work made us co-operate with each other. But unless we were competing against other groups, we rarely cooperated. We instead sabotaged one another.
In our 9th grade, oblivious to our feud, our English teacher, Joanna Ma’am, paired us on an English assignment. One of us was to lead the preparation and presentation of an essay and let the other lead for the next one. When I was the leader, I rewrote everything of hers, keeping only her ideas. And she returned the favor in kind.
These sabotages went unnoticed because neither of us vastly surpassed the other in anything. We never aimed to be a class topper; happily stuffed in the teachers’ can of ‘kids with potential’, both of us scored between 85–90%. All that changed when her parents packed their bags.
As any Indian kid would attest, we lived and died for exams; two in particular. The board exams in tenth grade decided whether a kid had a future in Science and Maths. Not meeting the threshold meant the kid was relegated to the hell of Humanities for their eternity.
And the board exams in 12th grade did the same for a future in STEM. The parents, dreaming of an engineer or doctor in their kid, cheerled the war dance. Insufficient grades in the 12th grade pushed the kids to non-professional courses.
Pride aside, we didn’t even know what jobs awaited those who didn’t have professional degrees. All our career guidance programs only spoke of professional degrees. So, even at that young age, when we didn’t know what a job was, we were all obsessed with finding a job.
We all felt the heat from everywhere since the ninth grade, with even neighbors enquiring about our test results. And right around that time, Julie’s parents left her with her neighbor.
“So, how’s your neighbor’s home? Do you have a study room or anything now? Do they have kids at home?”
“What neighbor’s home? Mollie and I live in ours, and the neighbor comes when it’s time to sleep.
Even as a 13-year-old, I was aghast at that. She didn’t live with her neighbor in their home. Instead, she and her sister still lived in their two-storied house by themselves, except at night, when the neighbor crept in like a ghost to keep other ghosts in check.
Did anybody help them with their homework or studies? Who ironed their uniforms? Who tied Mollie’s hair?
She wasn’t different to any untrained eye. She still seemed the cocksure girl, and no teacher bothered to enquire about her situation. Would I have known if I hadn’t seen the missing trench in her lunchbox?
As we approached our tenth-grade exams, we shrank from every extracurricular activity and burrowed ourselves in the books. I withdrew myself from the music competitions, the drama club, and the Scouts and Guides activities. All of them sucked time; the invaluable time which was meant to be sacrificed at the altar of exams.
But right as I was withdrawing myself, Julie went away on one such activity for an entire month. There wasn’t a single person from our grade in her entourage. It was unbelievable to all of us. But while drinking their Kool-aid, the teachers didn’t give it a second thought. Even while considering it unthinkably reckless, nobody bothered her parents.
She was away for a month during one of our most important academic years in the school and the teachers never batted an eye. When the results were out, I scored 89.2% and she had 77%. In all these ten years together, she had never diverged so widely from my score.
Two years later, after another round of sleepless nights over 12th-grade exams, I was at 85% and she was at 58%. She couldn’t qualify for the engineering or medicine entrance exams without 60.
She was now stuck in the brain fog of non-professional courses that offered questionable employability. In a society that was obsessed with grades and academic qualifications, she fell from her glory of ‘kids with potential’.
My mom and I were stepping out of the supermarket.
“Look who’s that! It’s been a while since I’ve seen you!” it took me a while to notice Mary Aunty and Mollie, Julie’s mom and younger sister. I was in my third semester in Engineering.
“Hello, Aunty! How are you? How are you, Mollie?”
“I’m doing well; back home after all the transfers. Mollie is well too. You’re doing engineering, right? Mollie is pretty good at studies, too, unlike her elder sister.”
Like alcohol on injury, her words stung sharply. I felt her mom’s backhand slap aimed at Julie in her absence. She was still disappointed at her daughter for not qualifying for the professional courses.
She ignored hers and her husband’s abandonment of two little girls, 13- and 8-year-olds, to their neighbor so they could pursue their career. She shut her eyes to the sheer recklessness of leaving two little girls unattended in a place that was infamous for sexual assaults.
Kerala, where we grew up, was and is notorious for violence against women, despite being the most literate state in India. Parents protect their girls like hawks. So, leaving two young girls with their neighbor, however trusted they might be, is unthinkable.
She was ashamed that her daughter had to settle for an arts degree while carefully erasing her part in the story. If she insulted her daughter to me, I wondered what her direct blows would be.
Like the witch of Aiaia, I looked for my draught and spells; to make her into the six-headed monster like Scylla; to avenge my friend for her mom’s abandonment, to avenge the backhands and insults that they threw incessantly at her.
In the years that followed, Julie sailed through life’s turbulences alone. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Arts and worked for a year in a low-paying job before doing her MBA. Instead of staying enslaved to one unfortunate phase of her life, one in which she had no agency, she became the master of her fate.
And she finally found her tribe along the way.
When we moved away after school to different colleges, we discovered that we were friends. We had been a constant in each other’s lives for over a decade. We knew each others’ history, the struggles, the weaknesses, and the strength. We knew what the other person was before the world encroached on our lives. We became friends in ways we couldn’t expect someone else to.
She also met her husband, who, contrary to her expectations from life, loves and supports her wholeheartedly. She became like the snake plant, the most resilient of them all, which her parents couldn’t crush. The abandonments and insults only made her stronger.
She never once blamed her parents for any of her tribulations until she had a daughter herself.
“I can’t imagine leaving my kid alone for a day. Did my parents truly leave us for an entire three years? What if someone had raped us?” She texted me incredulously one day, frantically worried like a hawk.
I was myself incredulous that it took so long for her to realize that. Was she so consumed with survival that she didn’t even notice how monstrous her parent had been? Some people shouldn’t be allowed to become parents; it should be a criminal offense.
But selfishly I wonder — if her parents had taken her along on their transfers and if she had moved from our school, would we have become friends? Would we have become the companions that we are today?
