Why is it impossible to find the right words to express one's deepest feelings and thoughts? I'm continuously amazed how a wordsmith like me often comes up against a wall of wordlessness when i want to express my deepest fears, feeling thoughts. The time that the words take to journey from the mind to the mouth make them sound banal by the time they are uttered. So most of the time I rely on food and film metaphors . . . . . . most recently I was trying to express the pang of emotional rejection by akining it to a bowl of garlic calamari risotto being grabbed away from a hungry person who had been promised food!!!
So is the case with my latest musings; alienation, old age, loneliness. What got me started on this was the paradoxes of my own life. I live alone and my father and his wife stay in another city. Despite being very attached to my father (a lot of emotional upheaval notwithstanding), I crave his presence when he's not there and yet when he comes to visit he suddenly feels like a stranger, who's habits and tics I dont know at all. Its probably the same for him. Emotional proximity and physical distance play strange mindgames when combined as a result we often cant understand each other, tiptoe around each other like strangers, desperately try to connect around shared memories of the past and in part feel guilty about feeling like this around each other.
It's serendipity (a lot of my life runs on this five-syllable word!) that I am at present working on a Hindi film script that deals with similar issues but in a different setting. Its a story of a upper middle-class widowed lady with two grown married children, a son living abroad and a daughter she lives with. When her son sends for her to come and live with him and his wife the Great American Indian Dream of an IT job, suburban condo, weekend barbecues et al she is delighted. After all, in India the mother's place is in the son's house. However as soon as she reaches the US she realises that her daughter-in-law is pregnant. And suddenly she isnt sure if she's welcome as her son's mother or as an honorary ayah. However months pass, and life is a lonely and uneventful routine of chores, childcare, and a limited relationship with her son and daughter-in-law who dont have much time or thought for her. This isnt because they are evil or heartless. Its a combination of dealing with their own alienation in a country which is their in name, trying to assimilate into the only life they have available combined with an inability to relate with the past which is what the mother represents. While like most Indians they consider the practice of grandparents rearing heir children as commonplace, their nuclear and fastpaced western lives leave them with no time or patience to relate to the mother as another person with thoughts, needs and feelings beyond her lifelong role of nurture and caregiver. In the process the mother too starts discovering herself as a person; something she has probably never done in her life. As she becomes attuned to her own feelings, the choice is in her hands to either go along the age-old path of duty and societal norm or listen to the voice of her heart and do what is right for herself.
While the exact story maybe be fictional, this situation of young immigrant couples importing theitr parents to tide them over childbirth and child-rearing is more common now than ever. As the world has shrunk and travel commonplace, the elderly have become more mobile than ever and international airports are daily inhabited by sedate elderly ladies or couples on their way to their children, bags meticulously packed with homemade delicacies; a portable and edible piece of India.
To make this story real, I am desperately looking for real -ife situations, thoughts and anecdotes related to this theme so that I can make this story as real and complex as life can be in these situations for all of us.
