Speedpost , livre ebook
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2015
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138
pages
English
Ebook
2015
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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
15 août 2015
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184754254
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
15 août 2015
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184754254
Langue
English
SHOBHAA D
Speedpost
Letters to My Children about Living, Loving, Caring and Coping with the World
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
My Mother Is an Alien!
Circle of Love
Growing Up Is Hard to Do
What s Love Got to Do with It?
Net Nannies and Cyber Gypsies
The Heart Goes On
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
SPEEDPOST
Shobhaa D , voted by Reader s Digest as one of India s Most Trusted People and one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in India by Daily News and Analysis , is one of India s highest-selling authors and a popular social commentator. Her works, comprising both fiction and non-fiction, have been featured in comparative literature courses at universities abroad and in India. Her writing has been translated into many Indian languages as well as French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. She lives in Mumbai with her husband and six children.
Also by the same author
Fiction
Socialite Evenings
Starry Nights
Sultry Days
Sisters
Strange Obsession
Snapshots
Second Thoughts
Non-fiction
Surviving Men
Selective Memory
Spouse
Superstar India
Ranadip, Radhika, Aditya, Avantika, Arundhati and Anandita
. . . For a life-sentence of hard but joyful labour
God must be a mother . . .
Introduction
7 January 1999, the last day of the first week of a momentous year. I am squatting on the beige carpet of my bedroom in front of an old Chinese chest-of-drawers. This is where we store our albums-dozens of them. It is our unorganized memory bank, an instant reference system. I often find myself rummaging through the pictures. Sometimes, I m in search of a specific image: Arundhati s first day at play school. Aditya s puzzled expression the morning his head was shaved for the mundan. Radhika with a live grasshopper parked proudly on her bare knee. Anandita with her birthday cake smeared all over her two-year-old face. Ranadip sticking a long, pink tongue out at the camera. Avantika making her photo face (head tilted, wide smile). Sometimes, I seek stray moments from a holiday, a celebration, an adventure, or even just a relaxed weekend in Alibag. Moments that may have been relegated to distant memory and need to be revived.
I get immense pleasure from our family albums. They are an easy reckoner of our lives. Often, I take in my breath at a forgotten photograph-good God, is that really me? And Dilip? How young we look. And there s Rana, so handsome and so awkward in his adolescent gangliness. Look at all of us caught at different times, in different moods, our old selves immortalized by a battered-up idiot-proof Minolta. Going just by the snapshots, we appear to have had a lot of fun together-which we most certainly have. But what is not reflected in these happy family pictures are the other, off-camera moments, when we ve argued and fought and hurt and made up.
Some photographs are more revealing than others. Candid camera, as they say, doesn t lie. An unguarded expression, body language that gives the game away, a posture that s posed and far from relaxed. A grimace, a scowl, a frown. Tears. I look harder at these shots and try and remember what it was that might have triggered off that particular crisis.
These days, I spend quite a lot of time glancing through the albums. I haven t kept them terribly well, I must confess. They lie there in no particular order. Some are meticulously dated, others require guess-work. But each and every one of them captures and freezes for all time a special fragment of our lives. We laugh in most of them (as people generally do when a camera is aimed at them). But those which catch us unawares are the ones that interest me more. Of late, I ve been systematically destroying my own bad pictures. My kids tease me about this, but it took a shrewd actress to point out to me that it s bad pictures that everyone remembers once the person is dead and gone. Search and destroy, she commanded. I shamefully admit I ve done just that. Not too thoroughly, though. There are countless lousy prints still stuck in those albums-but I m going to find them. And tear, tear, tear.
It was on one such mission that the idea of Speedpost came to me. I remember it being a late Saturday afternoon. My youngest children, Arundhati and Anandita, were sprawled on my bed watching Small Wonder. I was only half-listening, as I flipped through the latest batch of pictures-the ones taken on my fifty-first birthday. I looked at my own expression, and then at my children s, their eyes brimming with mischief, their smiles wicked. I recalled the few minutes early in the morning when I d walked out of my bedroom and into the dining room where they d set up the mini-celebration before leaving for school. On a large yellow poster there was a caricature of me-their mother-drawn by them. The lettering on my T-shirt read Born wild . On the top half of the poster, perhaps as a concession, were the words Fifty-one, and even more fabulous . I smiled at that. The previous night they d overheard me cribbing to a caller, These are my last few hours of being able to claim I m fifty and fabulous. Somehow fifty-one and fabulous doesn t quite have the same ring to it. It was only a joke. Hell, who cares how it feels after fifty anyway? One just stops counting. Not kids, though.
I hugged them for trying to reassure me. It really was sweet, and I guess I did need it. Now I was staring at the photograph that had recorded this event, and so many other equally precious ones. I chuckled out loud and my daughters looked up, startled. I flipped the pictures over and dated them carefully. This was my job. I was the one who compiled and maintained photographic records. Not that I was particularly good or efficient at it. It was just that nobody else wanted to do it. This was one of my mother duties-custodian of family albums. That s what made me laugh. All of us are in those photographs, but I m the one keeping track. Just like with everything else in our lives.
I turned around to look at the girls and noticed Arundhati s long, bare legs as if for the first time. Her teenage limbs . The denim shorts she was wearing were way too short. I said so. She tugged at them absently as a reflex action, like it would extend the length.
I went back to filing the photographs and putting them away in the chest-of-drawers. That s when I found the letters. A few written by me to the children on their birthdays or at important turning points in their lives, a few written by them to me-childish notes, baby doodles, but each one of them saying something strongly and transparently. I noticed how the handwriting had altered with the years-from a higgledy-piggledy scrawl riddled with spelling mistakes to better formed, more rounded letters, then entire, grammatically correct sentences. Progress! How precious these letters were-are. And how much they tell me-about the children, about us.
Five years ago I had jauntily promised to write individual books for each of my children. This is a compromise. This is my way of saying, It s a start. I may never write the others, but I am doing this one with all my heart. For all six of you. To make up for the lost moments, not fully enjoyed or appreciated. As the clich goes, it s never too late. I figured this was the perfect time to reach out, as we ready ourselves for the next century, as we pause to review the one just ended, as we hesitantly inch towards new beginnings, unsure of what awaits us . . . We as parents know nothing is going to be the way we ve experienced it. I feel afraid. At times, I think I won t be up to the task of providing the sort of guidance changed circumstances demand. We, in India, have witnessed more sweeping changes taking place in the last decade than over the past hundred years. Think of it. Satellite TV. The internet. Foreign labels. Snazzy cars. Designer this, designer that. Anything and everything that can be conveniently clumped under the global lifestyle umbrella. Enough to overwhelm us all. But what the hell, I m going to take a shot at it anyway. I have to. I m going to say it as it is, speak my mind, tell a few home truths, and keep my fingers crossed.
We ve grown together in so many ways. I ve learned from you; I hope you ve learned from me too. I ve tried, you ve tried. I ve sulked, you ve sulked. We ve both argued, disagreed, stormed and relented. It s been an ongoing process of adapting, readapting, caring, withdrawing, rewarding and punishing. But at the end of it all we ve been in this thing called parenting together. Which is the reason for this book-open letters affectionately and sincerely addressed to each of you. But before you pounce on them, beware. A warning. I have revealed a few of your secrets, but only a few. Nothing that will cause you too much embarrassment in front of your friends. I have revealed a few of my own as well. I thought you should know them, so we can understand one another better. We ve travelled quite a distance together and there s still a long way to go. You guys are the future, but we have a shared past. These letters are a reminder of that-good times, fun times, angry times, sentimental times. Speedpost is about memory and love, confusion and uncertainty. A record of our dilemmas and moral choices as we struggled to come to terms with our respective expectations and identities, you as children, I as a parent.
The new millennium is upon us. Are we ready for it? I ve asked questions-so many, too many perhaps. I don t expect answers. But I do want you to think about them-quietly, seriously. If even half of them make sense to you, if even a few make you pause and reflect, perhaps even change, every bit of the effort that has gone into the writing of this volume would have been worth it. At this point in my life, it is the only gift I can offer . . . Or even value.
Trust me. As I trust you.
My mother is an alien!
Mumbai
July
