In the last week of July my grandmother passed away. Given how much her body had been wrecked by pain isn't he last few months, this was a welcome release. When the family comes together to mark the passing of 93 years of a life spent contributing to the community, working for female empowerment and producing a repertoire of literary works, it is a somber but not a sad occasion. My family was proud of its head of family and we treated the shraddh as a celebration of her life. So young though my daughter is, my husband and I thought she needed to be a part of this occasion.
My ancestral home is about 6 hours from Guwahati (past the Kaziranga forest). The quickest way to reach there is to fly into Jorhat and then take a taxi for a one hour ride over non-existent roads to Golaghat. The flight quickly decimated our collective energy. We reached the Delhi airport at an insane 4 AM - took a one hour flight into Lucknow, then Calcutta, then Guwahati and then, finally Jorhat. All these are quick one hour flights with passengers deboarding and boarding at every airport. Because of the short duration of the flight, we never actually got any beverage or a proper meal. By the time we tumbled out in Jorhat, it had been 7 hours of miserable snacks and itsy-bitsy bottles of water that kept us buoyed enough to help our baby handle the multiple takeoff and landings. It was really really exhausting. But my baby did not seem particularly perturbed - we have come a long way since her first flight.
The ancestral town is a rather small place full of nice, simple and extremely boring (!) people. Over the next few days, as the ceremonies proceeded, I found myself fuming on the sidelines as family friends and relatives hovered around our baby. I could not quite understand the lack of sensitivity in the manner in which some people would barge into the room where my daughter was peacefully sleeping, roll her over and then shove money into my hands (as a gift for the baby). And once she was thus rudely awaken, even as she prepared to bawl out her irritation, more people would come and start clucking in her face or snapping their fingers (as though she is a circus monkey as I later vented at my parents). Yet, there wasn't much I could do - most of these people are so ancient and venerable, (and most likely will be dead by the time I visit again (😈)).
But not all people were that uncouth. Relatives who had poured in from the cities (Guwahati or Delhi), were much more polite and even helpful. They would ask before holding my baby (instead of just grabbing her like it is their right to do so), were gentle and generally kind - keeping an eye on her for us as we ate or took a break to attend to the guests.
And this is what makes me wonder. Parenting is hardly a localized experience. People are exposed to babies in every part of the world, cities and villages alike. Then why is the attitude to babies so markedly different? Just because a baby cannot speak and express him/herself why is it that some people easily forget that they are capable of feeling discomfiture too? That snapping fingers at a baby out of the blue is a tad rude? That waking up a sleeping baby is unacceptable? Are we, as city slickers, too soft on our babies or are they too rough? At the risk of breaching political correctness in categorizing non-tier 1 city people thus, I really feel that an awareness of babies as human beings is completely missing in certain sections.
And did I as a parent fail in allowing all this to happen? I felt angry but kept a smiling countenance throughout the onslaught. I did not have the fight in me to express displeasure at people 2-3 times my age. I imagine that a more involved parent would have done something about it - maybe even smoothly without offending anyone.
But me? I could not. All I could do was wait till we were alone and then hold my baby tightly to my chest and caress her.
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