Veneer of the Vile
“Don’t we find women carrying their paternal baggage into their married life!” he continued. “By and large, they tend to stick to their parental roots than sowing fresh family seeds in their matrimonial soil; it could be the natural weakness for one’s kith and kin or it may be individual inhibitions for integration; whether or not the environment at the in-laws’ place is conducive for camaraderie. Ruma opened her heart and home to her people who had shunned her when she needed them the most and as they wormed their way into her affections, she lost her sense of proportion; given her snobbishness as my people paid no more than courtesy calls, I too developed a distorted vision of relationships in the ingratiating company of her relatives. So, as her flock became hangers on, my folks ceased visiting us altogether; why should they for we seldom reciprocated their visits, and even when we went to them on occasion, we never gave them the feeling of our being at home in their homes. What with a false sense of being apart from them, we came to live in our ivory tower, flocked by those who came to grind their axes.”
“How did all that affect your son?”
“As I see it in hindsight, Satish was born to a right couple gripped by a wrong psyche,” he said with apparent sadness. “Having survived that road accident, Ruma and I live in guilt, I for the death of her daughter in Rathi’s lap, and she for the demise of her friend with my child in her womb. So, we began pampering Satish as if the atonement of our sin lay in catering to his every whim and fulfilling his every fancy; even when our purse was lean and our mind subdued, we spent a fortune on his birthday bash; how silly that we come to celebrate our kids’ birthdays as if they have become national heroes. If not for 02 October being the national holiday, would any notice Gandhi’s birthday coming and going; I bet none remembers in which year he was born, save those readying themselves for the quiz competitions; yet, we come to lay store on our children’s birthdays when they wouldn’t be knowing what was going on around them.”
“Showiness has become the malady of our times; haven’t wedding cards come to resemble wall posters. None seems to mind that the card and the copy don’t jell at all; maybe, it’s all prognostic, who knows?”
“If one has money to spare, maybe it’s an excuse to spend,” he continued. “But thanks to the peer pressure, even with a shoestring budget, it has become the in thing for all. Maybe, one cannot expect forbearance from our people in the face of the newfound prosperity that too as our nation remained poor for centuries on. But still, how the poor were to tackle this financial burden imposed upon them by the profligacy of the rich is anybody’s guess; perhaps the ever growing size of the bribable provides the clue. Why blame the lesser mortals for their corrupt ways; if they were to remain upright and teach philosophy at home, won’t the children of the nouveau-riche teach their kids some lesson in inferiority complex; so the rich man’s vulgarity has become the poor man’s alibi to be corrupt. Somehow, we have contrived to pervert our thought process even; take the case of the school curriculum; the grind is the same regardless of the mind involved. What the sluggard could do than to mug-up, ending up as an also ran. Why not make the courses for the horses instead of flogging the lagging but to no avail; it’s only in the sports that the differing capabilities are appreciated to devise ways and means for all to have their place under the sun; won’t the bantam and heavy weight classification in boxing, wrestling and weightlifting suggest that; the perils of pitting a lightweight champion even against a heavyweight trainee are not beyond anybody’s imagination.”