by Poorna Bell
They made me laugh, they made me food. They pressed cards into my hands, sent flowers. They let me rage, they let me cry. They didn’t always get it right, but they never gave up trying.
I know that I can’t change the mindset of aeons, that people will not believe I am truly healed from Rob’s death until I find myself in a serious, romantic relationship. But there’s a quietness in me that wants to honour all these other loves.
Spending time with Mum and Dad was a huge part of that. I remember Mum saying, after her own mother passed away, that she wished she had asked more questions, spent more time with her.
I didn’t want that to happen with them. I wanted to know about them as adults to better understand them, and our family.
Because especially when it comes to parents, there is a terrible truth about your lives together. Most of us have never known what it’s like to not have them around. Whether they drive you up the wall, whether you spend more time avoiding them than you do spending time with them, whether you love hanging out with them – whatever the size and shape of your relationship, we can’t imagine them not being there because they have never not been there.
The sound of their voices and the scent of them are pressed into the tiniest, biggest, most formative of memories. And what do you do with such a thing, that has existed in your life for ever? You assume it’s going to be around for ever.
Call it the glimpse backstage, but the truth of our relationship is that at least one of us is not going to make it beyond a certain point in time. It’s uncomfortable thinking: our brains hate it; our hearts despise it.
So for someone to say that I needed to get married in order to experience love in my life – just, no. I had love in my life. It wasn’t that I was turning my back on romantic love, but I wanted to make an active choice in my relationship with my parents, while they were still here, to prioritise and nurture this love a little.
There was this unassuming moment one day in their back garden in England. We were sitting in the sun, and Mum was chattering away, her gardening gloves flung on the table, secateurs shiny with the ooze of newly cut stems. I memorised every part of her: her short, curly hair, her pretty face with her tiny nose and eyes fizzing with energy, her brown skin freckled with sun spots, the sound of her voice.
Dad, so much taller than her, came through the patio door, in his slow lope of a walk, carrying three glasses and a bottle of prosecco. I took in his moustache, which he has always had, his rounder nose, his strong arms (despite being in his seventies because he’s a fitness nut), and I wanted to breathe them both in and make that moment last for ever.
I know they have never pressured me, but I also know it would make them happy if I settled down with someone. It would mean, maybe, that I hadn’t lost the rest of my life to the loss of Rob, as much as they loved him.
But I’m not ready to let go of this love yet. I am greedy with it; I want an endless afternoon of prosecco, of watching weird daytime-films-based-on-a-true-story with Mum, coffees in the gym with Dad. I know it’s selfish, but I don’t want to let go of them yet.
‘Married off,’ Jamal says? He probably doesn’t have much love in his life.
The emotion of it sits hunched in my shoulders, while we all try to shake off our lives in England.
Mum and Dad are retired, and they spend almost half of their year in India to escape from the British weather, and to spend time with their siblings and friends who are mostly based here.
I have my own life in Bangalore; I spent several of my most formative years here. They have a sweet little modern flat in the centre of town, where the old Christian quarter used to be. It’s a short Uber to the main shopping malls and the park I like to run in. I still keep in touch with my old school friends, the ones I made when I was here from the ages of seven and twelve, and although our lives are so different, they all contain that spark I love in my friends: funny, clever women.
When we were growing up, Bangalore was a leafy, green sprawl that never got too hot, or too cold, and the arteries of the city ran with veins of chlorophyll and oxygen. Now, gasoline, steel and glass have carved up the roads, but there is still beauty to be had in it. Rain trees spread their quiet, magnificent arms across roads packed with traffic, gulmohars with flowers as red as flame. Palm trees, coconut trees, bamboos creating dramatic archways and carefully tended gardens are found in quiet, little nooks.
I keep coming back here because there are deeper associations to love and fulfilment and belonging, fused to a primordial signature in my brain of what Bangalore is. The smell of rain, the whispering border where a light breeze carried over the hilltops meets skin sticky with humidity from the lick of sea. The sight of stone temples and their fresh, plump flowers; jasmine before the day has pressed them into a brown mess, bright marigolds puffing themselves against the day’s heat.
Like most Indian cities, the older parts are a chaotic tangle of streets. The roads can get dusty, the buzz of motorbikes and scooters mingles with the roar of trucks and imported BMWs. Here is where the best architecture is, or what remains of it. Tiny colonial gems with sprawling gardens and cooling verandas, ancient shopfronts with lattice work, old private members’ clubs. The wider, cleaner streets and big, glossy malls tend to be a bit further out.
People back in England ask me about Bangalore and I say, ‘Don’t bother coming here, honestly.’
They look surprised, but there isn’t anything for a tourist here. My frequent visits (almost yearly) are based on the memory of the Bangalore I used to know, not the one it is now. There is nothing really here to surprise me; it’s more like a second skin that I put on now and then.
In my parents’ flat, the spare room has a balcony. Usually on my first morning I sit on it and see the tree that is home to a bunch of fruit bats. We only know that because of nature nerd Rob who discovered them. He loved it here and used to smoke cigarettes on this exact spot. I look down the length of the street, the big, open recreational ground to the left, the tiny Ganesh temple behind the apartment block. At the end of the road sits a guy wearing a lungi who irons clothes; further down is the man who collects paper and sells it on.
My aunts and uncles drift through the flat over the next few days. Sometimes they call me by the nickname of my younger years, Poorni, a word that unlocks a chest filled with memories I haven’t thought about for so long. I’m the second-youngest of the cousins, so one of the babies of the family. It is hard, I think, for them to reconcile that I am thirty-seven, a fully grown woman who has an entire career and life back in England.
As these thoughts sleet through, I increasingly have to keep my doubts in check: Hang on, I no longer have those things, so what defines me here?
A big part of unpicking expectations is to understand where we come from better. What drives us? Where do we feel the pressure coming from? Why do we want the things we do, and does that need come from ourselves or someone else?
I already knew about the set of expectations I felt living in London, and subsequently the ones I had of myself.
But what did it mean in the bigger sense, taking into account my Indian self ?
It’s a running joke that if you are from the Indian subcontinent and you aren’t married with kids, it doesn’t matter if you’re the prime minister. Your community doesn’t care about your ability to make millions or wield lots of power if you haven’t walked down a marriage aisle.
Where does it place someone like me? In other parts of India, widows are viewed as bad luck; they can be shunned and abused. They even have dietary restrictions put upon them, such as only being allowed to eat one meal a day or having to go vegetarian. They most certainly do not go on Tinder and eat cocktail sausages.
While we joke about it, there is a certain darkness to this rigidity we have around markers for success. It’s not unique to India – Middle Eastern and Far East Asian cultures have similar drivers: get good grades, get married, have kids, honour your family.
The darkness comes because
it doesn’t create a lot of give for people who may be capable of some or none of those things. Where does it place South Asian people who struggle with mental health? Mental illness is still poorly understood, and people think it’s all in the mind, and that, if you really wanted to, you could get better by thinking your way out of it. I’ve heard people who are doctors, and should know better, profess this belief despite all evidence to the contrary.
In some cases it is ignored; it is certainly not widely talked about. When a person exhibits behaviour due to their mental illness, it is not understood or examined. Mental pain is not acknowledged or treated with kindness; it is mostly viewed as weakness, or it’s that person’s fault. So a lot of mental illness remains hidden, self-medicated and misunderstood.
It has struck me as the great paradox: that Indians by and large disbelieve in something like mental illness, yet have a huge capacity for belief in faith, superstition, witchcraft and spiritualism.
On the one hand, it’s impossible for people to think someone could be made ill by their own brain; but on the other, it’s totally reasonable that Mr Gupta shagged Mrs Reddy because black magic compelled him to.
Belief rolls through the streets like an invisible fog. It has made countless entries into literature and song. It is so powerful that some people who have been educated in the best universities will consult their numerologist after looking at the Dow.
No wonder Elizabeth Gilbert found it so inspirational; belief in the unknown and divine liberates you from the randomness of the world. It places sense where senseless things have happened.
My parents and I arrive in the midst of one of India’s biggest religious festivals, Navarathri.
On our way to dinner to celebrate their wedding anniversary, we see people out and about, some clutching jasmine, others lighting incense in roadside shrines – moving through ritual after ritual for the impending holiday.
In between slapping our legs to ward off mosquitoes, my dad tells me about this man – ‘the rolling sadhu’ – who rolled on the ground for 4,000 miles as part of a religious penance. ‘He became ill, dirty water fell into his mouth, but he didn’t give up,’ my dad said.
We all think about this for a moment.
‘So what do you think?’ he says.
I wonder about the effort of will and belief that would compel someone to roll on a dog-poo, cow-poo, human-poo, shattered-glass, spittle-flecked floor for 4,000 miles.
Maybe this is something to be congratulated and a sign of God’s will, but I say, ‘Look, Dad, you couldn’t pay me to roll to the restaurant, and Google Maps says it’s only ten minutes away.’
He then tells me about this other man in Bangalore, who used to be Muslim but converted to Hinduism. ‘Is that possible?’ I interrupt. ‘I thought you couldn’t convert.’
Anyway, my dad says, shaking my question off, this guy had managed to reinvent himself into some sort of local guru. He managed to gather a small but fiercely loyal following and, a few years ago, they all embarked on a journey to travel by foot from the southernmost tip of India to the northernmost tip.
It took them eighteen months.
‘EIGHTEEN MONTHS!’ Dad exclaims. We all sit in silence for a moment taking this information in.
I can’t persuade my friends to join me on a walking holiday for eight hours, I think, let alone eighteen months.
‘I wonder,’ he says thoughtfully, ‘what emptiness these people have, and what they, in turn, see in this man that he fills it.’
His words are so precise and poignant it makes me remember something about my dad. We all know Dad the doctor, and his tales of A&E – from the guy who got a vacuum cleaner nozzle stuck up his bum to the woman who thought she was ill because she had blue discolouration around her wrists and neck (it was clothing dye).
But I’d forgotten that, beyond being the reassuring, moustachioed father figure in my life, beyond helping me move house from random flat-shares, beyond being the breadwinner, there is Dad the poet. He used to write poetry before he got married – reams and reams of it. In the dark car, his words hang in the air, glimmering like spun gold as we speed on to our destination.
We don’t really know our parents or grandparents as people. Not in the same way we do our friends, partners or colleagues.
We have this idea of them that was set back when we were kids, and because a lot of us don’t ask many questions of our older folk, there are basic things about them we don’t know. Often, these are surprising things – acts of innovation, self-belief, independence.
They can inspire and teach us a lot about our lives, but the problem is we don’t ask the questions, and by the time that generation reaches a certain age, all of the boldness of their youth gets distilled into concern around how you’re living your life. We don’t initiate conversations because we don’t want to be nagged, but it means we’re also missing out on a lot.
My parents are immigrants, and I remember when I first started asking them questions about their lives. Gone were Mum and Dad, who toiled all day at work, lectured me about saving my pennies and spent weekends watching Strictly Come Dancing with a glass of wine. Here were Jaya and Ashok, whose stories are those laced with the hard-won gloss of pioneers.
There are stories of a thoroughbred white horse named Ruksh, forbidden loves, schools set in Ghana and Ethiopia, weightlifting competitions, terrible tales involving beetroot, a young girl fighting for her life, and a young boy bunking off school smoking cigarettes.
Mum and Dad may seem like they live a comfortable life now, holidaying and having fun, but their origins stories inspire me.
Mum was a sickly child born to Nagaveni and KK Shetty, child number three of five children. It turned out she had a hole in the heart and was not expected to live very long. But every year she kept going until she made it to the age of nineteen, when she met the man who changed her life – or, rather, saved her life. It was a man named Dr Hegde, who was staying with them as a boarder while he studied for his exams. He suggested to her parents that she have heart surgery. It was relatively new surgery in those days.
She packed her little suitcase and admitted herself to hospital. ON HER OWN, PEOPLE. FOR OPEN HEART SURGERY. The rest of the family visited her once the surgery was done, and slowly she recovered. Before the surgery, she was told she may not live to forty, and definitely wouldn’t be able to have children.
She survived, and it was the making of her. She went on to get married, have Priya and myself, find herself her own career and build a life from scratch. She went to work in London and still cooked dinner every night. Currently, she’s sixty-seven, and she lifts heavier weights in the gym than most women half her age.
Dad had a different upbringing. He was one of four and the baby of his family.
There is only one picture I have seen of him without his moustache – he looks young, too young to belong to us, but I suppose he didn’t at that time. Gawky, long legs and round, solemn eyes that belie a cheekiness for cadging cigarettes and stealing his brother’s scooter.
When he was sixteen, his father unexpectedly passed away at the age of forty-nine, in their little blue house that was our first proper home when we moved to Bangalore.
Although he wanted to go into agriculture, they rejected him because he had a stammer. He then applied to medical school, and the person who interviewed him took him to the head of the school for a second opinion.
‘Will his stammer get in the way?’ the interviewer asked the head. ‘I don’t see why it should impede his ability to be a doctor,’ he replied, and they accepted him.
To this day, Priya and I instantly soften around other people who have a stammer. I cried when I watched The King’s Speech. It’s our love for Dad that flows through, built on everything he had to do to overcome it, and what he made of himself in spite of it.
Dad went on to become an orthopaedic surgeon and he has helped countless people, including myself. I credit him with saving my life because he picked up on a heart mur
mur I had in my early thirties and forced me to go to the hospital for a check-up.
It turned out that I too had a hole in the heart, but unlike Mum it wasn’t evident from birth and I’d managed to keep going until I started to develop symptoms of breathlessness. If it had gone undetected I could’ve had a stroke or a heart attack.
By his own admission he was hugely under-confident as a kid, but he found refuge in fitness via the piddly weights section at his university gym. ‘The maximum weight’, he said, ‘was a 12kg dumbbell.’
‘Dumbbell singular?’ I asked. He nodded. Fitness as therapy and confidence-boosting is something we have in common. When Rob passed away, fitness was what I found comfort in, when being around people got too much.
At the age of seventy-one, he still goes to the gym six times a week, and, last I heard, he was signing up to cycle London to Brighton.
I wish I could’ve seen a picture of him when he was a medical student, taking part in the Gulbarga Medical College Bodybuilding Competition at university. It was a story I told all of my friends at school after some relative told me my dad was a champion weightlifter and came first. ‘HE WON,’ I crowed. ‘My dad can kick your dad’s ASS.’
Then, after years of telling this story, I recently found out he came third. ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘how many people took part?’
‘Four,’ he replied, and went back to making his coffee. ‘What?’ he said when I looked at him, shocked, as if our entire father–daughter relationship had been a lie.
Ashok and Jaya are inspiring in that they have taught me about resilience and strength, but the stories of their parents are truly exceptional.
I learned more about them as we left Bangalore and journeyed to Assam, a place known for its tea but not known for tourism. Few of us have ventured to the little-trod northeast of India unless you work in the military or air force, like my uncle Ajit did.
Most people said, ‘Why the hell are you going to Assam?’
We were going to Assam because it was a place Mum and I were both interested in visiting. We’d been to Goa and Kerala dozens of times, and this part of India was shrouded in mountains, mist and the unknown. I was drawn to its secrecy.
