And the end is almost here..

We can’t live life backwards, but we love looking back. Especially in families it’s subjective with whom you are looking back - a mother will think differently for a daughter and yes differently for both her daughters. The same mother will think like a wife (and what she was before she became wife) when looking back when she thinks about her husband. The same wife has a whole new story looking back about her parents and about her sister. It’s a complex maze and very subjective n selective.

We cannot choose our families like our friends, you have to live with them for a long period of time before you have your own, Even if you are not living with them - they are there, voicing their opinion, views, suggestion/advice etc. Especially with video you can also see their face and be attentive - I know many who scroll through Facebook and Wapp messages as her mom rambles through her day - what happened, what did not. It’s hypocrisy in one sense but the daughter is fulfilling her duty by calling her daily at 9pm.

Reading ‘The First House’ by Avni Joshi is like trial by fire. Because reading it you will come across some passage and some character or some incident which you can relate to your life and flinch. Her portrayal of the incident / character will be so brutal that you will think - I thought like this (and even though in your heart n soul you will think this is the right thing. You would have said to yourself ‘No this isn’t right’ and deleted it. But like we all know our mind stores everything - we just need a trigger to recall it.

It’s easier to deal with friends and colleagues because you can just cut them off, be diplomatic or avoid them but in family you will have to live with contradictions, suppresses emotions and an ever changing human at the other end. Till the end.. 

As the year comes to a close we move back to our First House where we stayed for 10 years. It has memories of children leaving for school and then college and then again college. It has stories of illness, recovery, death. It has stories of locked doors and battle fought at both sides of the door and inside the door. It has seen so many sunrise and sunsets, death of a tree which flowered every autumn and was filled with birds who would wake us and pitiful cries of fledgling birds for their feed.

I don’t know how long I will live, but the house will probably outlast me and continue seeing this human story unfold.