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These last two years, my son, Arjun, has been showing a healthy (whatever that means!) interest in the opposite sex – and I have been privy to his elation as well as his heartbreaks…
We are very close – he often says I’m more like the older sister he never had than mother – I can nag, chivvy, mercilessly tease – or share a joke and even music I come across – this hip hop dance track Good Vibrations by Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch (featuring soul artiste Loleatta Holloway) that I saw on VH1’s Cardio Video is a recent example!
Only later did I realize that Marky Mark and Mark Wahlenberg are one and the same! What a turn-around now compared to his bad-boy adolescent years!
Anyway, back to sonny’s love life! Here’s a transcript of a year-old conversation:
Sonny: You know, X isn’t really my type…
X was Sonny’s first girlfriend.
Me: What do you mean?
Sonny: Well, er… (with a slightly embarrassed laugh) she’s too, um, well-endowed - and she’s short!
Me: Desperation shows.
Sonny: Mom!!!
Me: Er, what’s your type anyway?
Sonny: (dreamily) Slim, athletic…
Me: (innocently) Oh! Well, I suppose opposites do attract…
Sonny makes a thunderous leap in my direction, muttering threats – and gives chase when I quickly scoot into the next room. We then have a mock scuffle that ends in a hug!
I really enjoy this complex, caring, maddeningly irritating, talented teen…
© Sosha Srinivasan
I relish creative stuff and commercials with a dash of humor always catch my eye. This one made me laugh aloud – because an almost parallel story line runs at home! My not-so-young son sometimes regresses into childhood and gives me a a long hug or a nuzzle – and hubby dearest looks daggers at sonny from his corner… Only (according to Wilkinson) hubby’s not anywhere in the competition – because he wears a full beard!
© Sosha Srinivasan
The story with a WW2 twist that I recounted in my previous two posts got me reminiscing about a few others…
During my stint as a management trainee at a Chennai hotel in the early 1980s – yes, the very same one where I had to do a juggling act with three telephones at the front desk(!) – I got talking to Mrs. Fernando*, an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) lady in her fifties who worked in the linen room. One day she sprang a huge surprise on me when she told me she was a survivor of Japanese prison camps in Singapore/ Malaya! She was very young at the time, around nine or ten years of age, and she remembered being force marched for several months between POW camps with her family – and surviving it all!
It really is amazing how you can meet people who have the strangest stories to tell.
Which brings me to three excellent books based on each author’s experiences in South East Asia during the war.
Empire of the Sun (also made into a riveting movie directed by Steven Spielberg) by J G Ballard.
A Town Like Alice (US title: The Legacy) by Nevil Shute.
*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.
© Sosha Srinivasan
The story doesn’t end there.
Yohanan* stayed, thriving on the small kindnesses of the extended family, while Lukachen’s* wife cursed him every time she lay eyes on him – and treated him like a slave…
There he lived another ten years far from the land of his mother’s ancestors (Tamil Nadu) and even further from the land of his birth (Burma (Myanmar)), until Lukachen drew his last breath. The treatment he got from Lukachen’s widow only worsened until Lukachen’s youngest brother, who worked in Bombay (Mumbai) intervened. He arranged a job for Yohanan in the same city.
Yohanan, now a strapping young man, returned to our hometown every few years and his thoughts naturally turned to settling down. A young servant maid caught his eye, a fact not lost on the family. The wedding was arranged in due course and the couple moved to Bombay. After several years there, Yohanan landed a better-paid job in the UAE, where he lived and worked while his wife and three daughters stayed back in Mumbai, where they eventually bought a large, well-appointed apartment with his hard-earned money (something most Indians couldn’t even dream of in the 1970s and the 1980s).
Yohanan was well into his fifth decade when he was felled by a massive heart attack. His daughters, though, subsequently did very well for themselves and the last I heard were well settled in the United States…
Footnote: I am not sure how Appachen’s brother who went to Singapore fared during WW2. I know, though, that he decided to settle there and his family flourished in the years that followed. One of his grand-daughters married a Singaporean Chinese, and another, a Swiss guy. Other cousins of mine from the same side of the family (the “house name” is Ikareth) have married, variously, a Swede, an Iranian, and Americans of Indian and Pakistani origin. Thus our generation is truly an international melange.
*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.
© Sosha Srinivasan
Indu Balachandran is a regular-but-sporadic contributor to The Hindu (which, by the way, has introduced a beautiful beta version at http://beta.thehindu.com/ – such an improvement on the original). I make it a point to read Indu’s offerings out loud to my son and they never fail to raise peals of laughter.
Here are links some of her earlier pieces:
- (S)hopping mad
- Lessons in Chenglish
- Oops Let Me Politically Correct That!
- Look what I picked up on my travels
Here is a passage from her latest article, Relatively speaking… on Tam Brahms (for the uninitiated that’s not an obscure composition by the famous German composer, but a short ‘n’ sweet way of referring to Tamil Brahmins!) describing a local relative introducing older kin to a visiting youngster:
“Do you know who this is? This is your Ambi mama who is Cheelu athai’s son-in-law Gopi’s cousin, who is married to Ramani athimber’s daughter, who is also the co-sister of Lavanya Aunty…”
Reminds me of older female relatives in our Syrian Christian community, of which my maternal grandmother, my Ammachy, reigned supreme! She’d start off real simple, but then lead us through this veritable maze of marriage and blood connections that became increasingly more labyrinthine by the minute. At the end of it, we’d have a glazed look in our eyes that would take ages to revert to normal…!
As kids, my cousin Mona (there is a link to her travel blog on my side bar) and I once travelled as front-seat passengers in a car with Ammachy and our respective mothers (who happen to be sisters) in the back seat.
There was a lull in their conversation and Mona grabbed the chance to liven things up a bit.
“Sosha! Don’t you know who I’m talking about?” she asked me loudly in Malayalam, nudging me in the ribs.
I looked at her blankly because we hadn’t been talking at all, merely watching the sights through the window.
“Our Benny mon from up-on-the-hill’s sister-in-law’s second cousin…”
“Oh!” I exclaimed, catching on as she gave me a broad wink and an even broader grin.
“… who married Pulimootil* Mathai’s daughter-in-law’s maternal uncle…” Mona finished with a small hiccup that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed giggle.
(*Pulimootil – a common “house name” that literally translates as “At the base of the tamarind tree”. Probably to differentiate between other Mathais from Plaamotil (at the base of the jackfruit tree), Maamootil (at the base of the mango tree) and Malamootil (at the base of the hillock)!
We turned our heads as casually as possible.
In the backseat Ammachy was now sitting bolt upright, listening keenly, eyes aglint, head tilted to one side – she was in her element. We could practically visualize tiny gear wheels whirring and clicking into place in her brain.
But she, the great exponent on Syrian Christian genealogy, couldn’t place who Mona was describing…
“Addhe aaraa?” she asked. “Who is that?”
[* Read Mona's comment here to fill in on what happened next - plus a couple of other details - which escaped my memory(!)]
The two of us burst into laughter… Mona had made it up and managed to fool her too! Sweet revenge!
It took Ammachy a few seconds to realize she was having her leg pulled, but then she – and Mona’s mom and mine too – joined in the laughter.
Ammachy lived to the ripe old age of 92. She was active and her mind was as sharp as ever until the end. No doubt all those mental gymnastics she put herself through regularly helped!
© Sosha Srinivasan
The universal relationship between parent and child is fraught with wild swings in emotion, running the gamut from frustration to philosophy, letting go to love – in the midst of some that defy definition.
Moira Yuill speaks for all sleep deprived new parents when she drily observes, “People who say they ’slept like a baby’ generally don’t have any.” And the new father’s woes are articulated by Imogene Fey: “A man finds out what is meant by a spitting image when he tries to feed cereal to his infant.”
Childhood is a learning experience – oftentimes more for the parent, though it may be the second or even third time around. “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” contends Michael Levine. Matrimony and parenthood has its champion in Peter de Vries who emphasizes that “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”
For the child, “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” according to John Betjeman. Montaigne was ahead of his time when he asserted over four hundred years ago that “… children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen at their most serious-minded activity.”
On the flip side, Susan Lewis observes, “Children don’t need toys to play. My one-year-old is never happier than when he is unraveling an audio tape, wearing underwear on his head or making music by clinking a crystal ornament against the glass coffee table. And his favorite part of birthdays and Christmas is the chance to taste so many kinds of colored wrapping paper while everyone else is distracted with whatever is inside. Even my older children don’t need toys — they are quite content reprogramming my computer, taking apart the lens of my camera or face-painting with the makeup in my bathroom. It is parents who need toys. We need toys to keep our children away from our things.”
When a parent is involved in instruction there is an added bonus; as the Talmud puts it: “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.” J B Priestley reflects on the joy of a childhood relived, be it through a book, a song or an experience recounted: “To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.”
This poignant feeling is expressed so well by Thomas S Jones, Jr in his evocative verse from the poem “Sometimes”:
“Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play—
The lad I used to be.”
So parents would do well to empathize with their offspring as A Marcel proclaimed, “It is not for the young to understand us. It is for us to understand them. After all they cannot put themselves in our places, while we have already been in theirs.”
Some parents have have unnaturally high expectations, forgetting that, as David Elkind commented in his acclaimed work, ‘The Hurried Child‘, “… a child is an active, participating and contributing member of society from birth. Childhood isn’t a time when he is molded into a human who will then live life; he is a human who is living life. No child will miss the zest and joy of living unless these are denied him by adults who have convinced themselves that childhood is a period of preparation.”
And, as Carolyn Coats so succinctly put it, “Children have more need of models than of critics.”
Children can annoy and exasperate: “There are many questions that no man can answer and most of them are asked by 5-year-olds.” They can also cause anxious moments. Floyd R Miller speaks for the panic-stricken parent:
“Even much worse than a storm or a riot,
Is a bunch of kids who are suddenly quiet.”
Also as Ogden Nash recited:
“Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore
And that’s what parents were created for.”
Finally at the end of an exhausting day, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarks, “There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.”
© Sosha Srinivasan
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