By Nandita Dutta
On a hot summer day, she stands by her windowsill, fingering the leaves of a potted money plant hanging from a wall bracket, peering from within the bouncy flowing curtain of them at the road that her kids will take to return from school. But she’s not really looking. She’s thinking about finding a job.
She thinks of herself as a good mother. No, a great one. No other mom she knows has been as invested in finding the exact right school, or skillfully keeping junk food out of their lives, or been more mindful of emotional development from before wellbeing has been a buzzword. She has done motherhood instinctively, like she knew all about it from the very beginning, like she never needed lessons or guidance, like it had been hard-coded into her.
From within the depths of marital bliss and familial tranquility, this yearning, this desire, is rearing its very undesirable head. From whatever she has been taught, she isn’t supposed to feel like this. Her unsophisticated upbringing in a small town of Bengal has alerted her to nothing of the sort. No such feeling has come up, maybe aside of the feminist fiction of Bengali women writers, slid slyly into full sharodiya issue of Bengali magazines, nestling innocuously between recipes for bhapa doi (baked yogurt) and the most flavorful tomato khejurer chaatni (date chutney), and serialized double features of detective escapades and travel stories to Darjeeling and Puri. These magazines and stories, though, have only shown her the question, and left no clue as to the answer.
Her friends, all moms of two, all content to have brought up the adequate amount of kids per family, and all thrilled to be ladies of leisure finally – getting time to explore hobbies, spending January afternoons in the park with their younger kids, sitting on the grass, peeling oranges, covered in shawls and pherans (Kashmiri wool kurta) and the apricity of the winter sun. They do small side hustles, buying dhakai and taant sarees from Gariahat, reselling in the big city. There’s no sizable profit, but it does its part in building community and bringing the ladies together for an afternoon of cha and ta (tea and snacks), it is the paara’s (colony) ladies’ version of Amway.
A whole routine of chores will begin as soon as they kids reach. She turns to go into the kitchen, glancing briefly at the photo of the family, on top of the refrigerator. It is at a picnic the year before, a moment of pure joy, leaking sunlight, framed in a square of silver, where the kids are falling over and draping themselves over the parents. She feels a pinch at her side, an almost physical reaction to the nostalgia. Maybe not nostalgia, not melancholy at the passage of time, the children growing up, but at her growing discomfort at becoming more inconsequential everyday. She’s falling into an abyss of insignificance, fading out, pixelating.
The only skills she has brought from her ancestors and family are the domestic arts. And she has been taught masterfully too, her crochet is the finest, her knitting flawless, with the smallest of knits and purls that can rival a store-bought sweater – god knows inexpert knitting is evident in everyone else’s sweaters with enormous chunky cables. Hers are tiny, full of finesse and flourish. Her paintings are requested by neighbors to display in their homes. Her cooking is chef-style. She thinks back to her own college days where she studied – wonder of wonders – classical literature and music. Fat lot it helps now, she thinks. No real skills, to find a real job, she often grouses internally, while folding laundry robot-like. Her artistry at homemaking is as intuitive as if it has descended straight from the pages of a home economics semester syllabus. There’s no room for neighbors even to compete via their children, she has the ones which are teacher’s pets and top scorers and the ones that greet uncles and aunties with Good Morning or Good Evening every time.
But she has her eyes set on the road the kids are taking, the view they have. There’s a sense of covetousness – is it jealousy? Can someone actually be jealous of their own flesh and blood? Or is it that it is possible to pour so much of yourself into others, and that it happens so gradually, so insidiously, that you don’t even see the depletion. Only when it’s all gone, you ask yourself – what was the idea of me?
She knows, though, the definition is very crystally, painfully clear, has been handed down from generation to generation and baked into the DNA of the girls, and not up for debate. They are wives, mothers, the holder of the reigns of the household, the motherboard of the very system of the home. They are the main thread, bearing the weight and caprices of all depending designs, they are the oil and salt and onions and tomatoes of all their meals, the keys to all the treasures ferreted safely away by their prudence and good management. They are the soaps and lotions and Yardley powders and hair combs and khopa (hair bun) pins and silver earrings and kumkum (vermillion) and kajal and embroidered lace handkerchiefs that keep the family fresh, fragrant and presentable.
I’m thinking of taking a computer course, she announces when her husband returns that evening. It is a bit out of left field, but he swiftly composes himself and asks, Oh! Why?
I want to get a job. Kids are out the whole day. You are out the whole day. No one needs me at home. I want to learn how to not need anyone too.
But what job will you get at this age? He’s genuinely puzzled.
She doesn’t bristle at this – he has been tolerant enough of her need to evolve, or what he thinks of as ‘her whims’, to have earned it. She decides it’s ok to be jealous of the kids. She remembers how she felt a tinge of something from her own mother at her wedding – something to do with her going away to live in the big city. She had chalked it up to sadness. Today she understands. Her mother wanted for herself, what she raised her daughter to achieve. Envy is only ever directed at everything you want for yourself, you only ever notice what you want to become.
She scours the newspapers to understand the nature of her world. All her dreams inside the house are fulfilled, and have lost their sheen, as fulfilled wishes often do. Though she doesn’t know whether they were her own dreams, or just dreams that were downloaded from earlier versions of the same system. There hasn’t been much upgrading – her grandmother was the same, as was her mother. She has only learnt the latest, most advanced version of the skills that were deemed relevant and nothing else. Not unlike AI, she has absorbed everything from her environment, greedily, hungrily and is morphing into something with desires and internal commands that have no basis in the past. Is this how generations change? The incoming generation only recognizes and identifies what was missing in the earlier version and tries to fill in the gaps, she thinks, full of computer jargon from the brochures she has collected.
It’s a class of college-going youngsters. All their extra classes add up to that one page that they will call a resume – a rectangle containing a view into all that you stand for. It’ll show everything good about you in one go, the one shot you have at showing the world how you’re worthy, best-suited, better than the rest. She’ll need one too, she’s learned, to apply for a job. And she will finally have something to write other than BA in Bengali Literature and MA in Music, though some of the best parts of her that will never make it for display into this shop window.
They are all dressed in smart, young-people clothes, so different from her cotton sari, which she still wears, whether inside the house or out. Her wide-eyed enthusiasm keeps her from realizing she’s older, different. She feels the same waves of anticipation, of ambition, as these youngsters who are just starting out, carrying their whole world in squares of digital devices inside their backpacks. Like centering and channeling all your intellect into this one device, sitting on one table of one cubicle, is the epitome of skill. Just the very economy of effort and enterprise is a reflection of real work. Anything else seems less. Like her own scattered housewife life, like flecks of construction dust has to be gathered up and swept away, like all the toys and books and jackets and shoes and keys and remotes – the detritus of a middlebrow life and must be returned to rightful places, hidden away in boxes and drawers at the end of every use. So much effort, everyday, the same cycle – such a contrast from this minimalism, this clean slate, the blank page. The scribbled pages of domestic talent hide well the nothingness that comes at the end of every day.
The kids have to start letting themselves into the house and fix their own lunch, she is out every afternoon. There’s no whining about doing extra chores, as if they were just waiting for this
emancipation. She is so taken aback at the lack of dissent, that she wonders if she should have done this much earlier. She’s even more surprised, pleasantly, when her daughter sits with her in the evenings, sometimes helping with homework, sometimes explaining to her basic MS Office, Windows, Introduction to Programming. The younger one is even more adept, but at practicals, not theory, and dictates his own textbooks for her to practice typing.
Often, during class, she’s drenched with guilt. What if they forget to turn the stove off after heating their food? Her mind’s eye keeps playing visions of calamities, like in a bioscope camera. What if they cut themselves on a knife, or glass? What if they find a cockroach, freak out, run out of the house and lock themselves out? Careful, she keeps thinking, mentally yelling at them like she would, five hundred times a day, if she were at home.
Her first job is entry level, office administrator in one of the export firms that are dime-a-dozen in the area. She has a desk, a computer, a swivel chair, new work friends. They are younger, but have wider views than network marketing over afternoon tea. Her old friends, the paara ladies, have shown no particular heartbreak over this. They are happy to get by without her making almost everyone feel just a little incompetent, just a little off-kilter, with her semblance of contentment and control.
She has a salary. The job is a lot like what she does at home anyway – a corporate version of putting things away, but the salary spells tangible appreciation. Though her family is always appreciative, and is full of cognizance and compliments for everything she does. But she doesn’t know why that’s trite now, why that novelty wears off quickly. She can’t pay her husband back for the classes (she insisted on this) with compliments. or with the envy of her neighbors, or with the hard work at home that will never appreciate in value.
The chores have fallen by the wayside, the house is a mess. The computer, however, is completely under her control. She turns it on, the family picnic photo bursting forth, her desktop wallpaper. It’s the window, the one she can still see her kids through, the one that neatly ensconces her new routine, her office work, in neat white or blue squares, and it’s the window out of which the envy, the yearning, the emptiness is gone, even though she’s starting from scratch. This window is limitless.
Nandita Dutta is a communications professional, coffee-addict, clueless mom and chronicler of her family’s life in photos and videos. She is one of those writer-cliches, like MBA-turned-writer or work-from-home-mom-turned-writer. Both of those, actually. Born in Kolkata, bred in Delhi, now she is firmly on the Mumbai side of Delhi-Bombay arguments. A gadget-nerd, she is a committed gymbro, has a TBR list that cannot be finished in one lifetime, and is going to extol the virtues of audiobooks to anyone who will listen. She is currently working on her first nonfiction book. Her short story Prayers appeared in reflections.live and she has been published in a memoir-style anthology (Author Magazine – Dear me :: Scribing Positivity: 25 Letters, Infinite Inspiration) available on Amazon.
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