Reevaluating Relationships: Navigating the Complexities of Family Bonds

 

There is no singular aspect to anything in life. At least that’s what my perspective has been in a life of nineteen years (and then some). Before writing this, I was studying my idioms, and the idiom ‘knit brows’ appeared just above ‘kith and kin’, which I felt was so very perfect to describe what I am going through at the moment.

There are certain things that don’t make much sense to you beyond your engagement until they do start realizing around you and about you. The love story between Peshwa Bajirao and Mastani was of course an inter-cultural romantic tragedy, but broadly it was about an emperor who fought and won many battles against many emperors in his lifetime but lost the battle against his very own, the people he called family.

I am no emperor facing a romantic tragedy, and my previous blog gave a steady (and real) impression of the fact that I do, in fact, love my parents and some of my other relatives and cousins with whom I am attached to. But then comes this dark and overbearing feeling that these cousins whom I comfortably share everything with or give away everything to would be the same ones who would bite me like the snakes that I didn’t see in the past that they, in fact, were.

And maybe they are no snakes and my words remain a mere suspicion, but there would never be the same level of love and attachment towards me, and maybe there would be just no love or attachment in the first place. It’s not because they have their own siblings who are part of their immediate family, it is because they would always choose those first cousins over me, someone whose own first cousins are such vile snakes in their own right.

I sometimes wish God made me a person who enjoyed his isolation much more. It is like I started evolving backwards. As a child I very much enjoyed my own company and my own passages of loneliness, which also benefitted me in more ways than one (I got habituated to reading, no other phase would strengthen my knowledge and grammatical understanding better than this early one). But as and when my older self started to open up more gradually to the world around me, I faced an intense and heartbreaking sense of loss and- I don’t know if it is even right to put it this way- betrayal.

Yeah, maybe I expected too much from people who could never possibly become my own. That is wrong in its own right. But an initial coldness and crudeness would have done enough to drive me away from these- the thing is, the people I write about today with a long face and the people who are the cause of tears in my eyes are the same people who, previously, were extremely warm, loving, kind and welcoming. To the point that the thought that they were not immediately related to me did not come across my mind. But that is the thing about people showing their true colours with delay: you would always like to reconsider, rethink and yes, rewrite your evaluation of them.

This has been written here because it is supposed to imitate, to some degree, my state of mind.