Where Angels Tread

(dedicated to the numerous nieces and grandnieces on the International Women's day, 2021)

My parents loved girls. They didn’t have daughters of their own but they treated and considered a whole bunch of girls their own.

Since my mother’s seventh death anniversary last month, I was thinking what my parents' best trait was - They loved kids in general but girls were very special to them. They were married 70 years ago and spent most of their married life as migrants in a distant place away from their relatives. Although very closely acquainted with the numerous nieces, my parents missed the day-to-day interactions with them. My parents made several friends, many of them families with girls, and considered those girls their own. My parents believed that girls bring a great amount of sanity and good fortune to the household. As much as they loved their sons, my parents felt that angels do not tread around the house without daughters. This was a special trait in the highly patriarchal Indian society, at least as I was growing up, in which daughters are considered a bit of a burden despite having more than half the deities as females.

My parents felt that their two boys (three, in the beginning), and them as well, only behave well, act morally, and stay orderly with girls around in the household. For them, gender exposure is an essential part of childhood upbringing. They made sure that I and my brother constantly mix with the other gender of our age and we always have girls of our age moving around in the house. As we were growing up, in the Indian society, as it happened to be very open in those days, it didn’t matter much if these girls were our own sisters; in a sense, they all were, thanks to our parents. As for my parents, their long waiting ended with my brother and sister-in-law having two beautiful daughters.

Fast forward fifty years, me and my wife have two fabulous grown-up sons, but we wish our first grandchild is a daughter. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tribute – In Memory of Professor Subhash Karampuri

Image
It is with profound sadness that we note the sudden passing of our dear friend Subhash, following heart complications. We were very close to Subhash and his family from the time we first met them in 1976 at the newly established Kakatiya University (KU) in Warangal, India. While we were in different departments at KU—Subhash in Botany, Aravind in Physics, Najmuddin and John in Economics—we became very close friends and shared a strong bond. On campus, we were inseparable and known as the ‘Gang of Four’. Our friendship extended beyond the campus, and we became very close to Subhash’s family, spending many evenings and weekends at his house. His family became our family in Warangal, as the three of us were then bachelors. We enjoyed the warm hospitality and delicious cooking of Shashi, and the affection of his young sons, Sujai and Sushil, who would sit on our laps and hug us. Our friendship with Subhash did not end when the three of us went to the USA in the early 1980s. B
Read more

The House My Father Built

Image
Soon after my parents got married on the second day of 1951, my father built a small house in our ancestral village in a south Indian state. The one-bedroom dwelling with a mini-courtyard (actually two, in both front and back) and an open kitchen was built in a corner of my paternal grandfather’s property. In those days that house stood like a laser among candles. Ironically, my parents never lived in that house. I suspect the decision to informally abandon that house was partly the result of the time my parents spent on a long vacation that followed their wedding. It was sort of an extended honeymoon, for several months in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, more than 1150 miles north of our village. India just became a Republic a year before and what followed was a mass exodus of people from the educated south to the capital city in the north seeking suitable employments in the several newly created government departments. I recall my parents telling us that they stayed in Karol Bagh, a
Read more