For many years after she left the country, while I was still young and individualistic and getting accustomed to the rough and tumble of married life in the middle of a large and voluble new family that left me feeling like I'd been through the tumble-drier of a high speed machine, I thought my sister was lucky.
With a nuclear family, she didn't have to worry about the larger group, about sisters and brothers, about in-laws and outlaws, about anyone but the small unit that she was nurturing. No way did she have to consider the complete traditional meal and the "right" wear for when aunty's cousin's husband's niece's brother-in-law from the backwoods came to visit. Nor did she have to prepare the khitchdi (an Indian rice dish) the way it had been done for seven generations of toddlers who'd opened their mouths dutifully along with their brothers and sisters and first, second and third cousins and went on to study and enter the civil services and other status appropriate professions thanks to this early sustenance!
She didn't have to defend a wayward child who refused to conform to food habits or group behavioural practices, she didn't have the spotlight focused on her children's questionable pastimes and their quarrelsome friends, she didn't have every report card examined in minute detail for signs of flawed intelligence (always, naturally, from the 'other' side, depending on which side of the family was looking at it), she didn't have to squirm in embarrassment in the face of a howling tantrum in the middle of a get-together when the most judgmental of another generation was present. She didn't have to listen to lectures on age-old rules from various levels of nosy relatives - her rules were made as she went along.
But make rules she did. When we met her occasionally, on her rare trips home to her native land, we marvelled at the feather touch with which she wielded an iron hand, wondering how she managed to bring every one of the brood to toe the line drawn by her. How did she get them to speak in those well-modulated, pitch-perfect voices, keeping their pronunciation and enunciation flawless whilst all around them was a cacophony of cousins?
Raucous comings
Maybe, I figured, we just needed to get far away from these raucous comings and goings of extended family and other animals as we struggled unsuccessfully to please everyone and wound up antagonising, in larger and larger concentric circles, a slew of humanity we didn't even know we knew!
And as we struggled with all these invisible pressures, it was galling to realise that she'd not merely got away from it all, she'd got away with everyone's sympathy as well! Poor thing, we'd hear, how she has to struggle all alone, all on her own! All that housework, and having to earn a living to boot! Give me some of that struggle, I begged silently, yearning for that catch word - alone! Imagine (I closed my eyes in bliss) never having relatives dropping in out of the blue, imagine a birthday where there are only a few, select, chosen friends of the birthday child, imagine not having to worry about Grandpa's taste for chili and Grandma's dislike of it, and Uncle Somebody's sweet tooth and Aunty Busybody's diabetes control!
Then the years passed, one tumbling into the next. With a little bit of give and a little bit of take - and a lot of push and shove - the extended family grew on me and became a way of life.
I no longer envy the freedom from scrutiny of the ones who left home shores. Rather, as I sprawl amid the happy disorder of a family reunion, where everybody is shouting and nobody is listening, where I am only a small part of a large, multi-layered generation sandwich, I spare a kindly thought for the ones who got away - from the chaos and warmth of the big fat Indian family!
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
