Family Enough: The Art of Creating Belonging
A creative and essential re-imagination of family
My extended family seems as far as Pluto is from Earth. It comes crashing down on us like an asteroid every Diwali. Last Diwali, I didn't run away or get scared with their invasion. I hugged the women. I laughed with the men. I felt love for the aunt who is developing vitiligo on her skin. I felt sadness for the uncle who has only one solitary tooth left where once stood a full squad, lined up in a grin. If you focus on the food and the kids, family gatherings are mostly okay. If you can carry earplugs and pieces of paper in your purse, even better. Only do this once a year or as directed by your physician.
My intended family is in the making. It comprises of two people. We journal together in the morning. I give him unsolicited pep talks and he declutters my fridge. This is a long distance family but when we meet we eat from the same plate. Our families hover around us. With the things they did and didn't do. The things they should have said but couldn't. But an intended family intends to find their own familyness, no matter the families of origin.
My immediate family of six is my Hukum ka Iqqa. The card I hide so much that I forget I have it while playing the game of life. We meet and speak about education. We eat the season's juiciest fruit. Everyone, including my seven year old nephew, is a leader here. Like the double sided arrow that enlarges an image on a computer, vertex by vertex, we lead the family in different directions. We are short people with massive dreamscapes. Rebels. Jewels.
My internal family is so loud that I can't recognise which voice is whose. I just know they are a quarrelsome bunch. They gather around the fireplace especially during decision time. Just an hour ago they debated if Raju should stay up at night or wake up in the morning to write this piece. I don't know who won and what were their arguments, but here I am typing into the phone in the dark with a blanket over my head.
I don't have a chosen family. I love my friends because they are not my family. The fact of family is that you can't choose it. The hope of family is that you learn to love what you're stuck with. And that it may take a lifetime.
Family hurts. Family happily wires you wrong and then blames you for it. Family is where we first see oppression, manipulation, discrimination. The real family games include Passing-the-Trauma-Parcel, Lack-of-Communication-Dumb-Charades, Blame-wali-Antakshari. But essentially, family is a classic game of Snakes and Ladders. With the trauma come gifts. With the uncomfortable privilege comes an opportunity to be responsible. Because our family doesn’t communicate, we discover art and master articulation.
Y’all already know family doesn’t have to be a symmetrical, heterosexual, endogamous, Star Plus Hindi TV type nonsense. But the next time you meet a childfree couple, see them as family enough. A woman and her cats, an old man and his daughter, queer parents of an adopted child are family enough. Friends and cousins who live together, neighbours who babysit and visit you in the hospital, your cook and helper with their own families are family enough. Being an adult calls for a radical re-imagination of family. Inserting ourselves into new families, into a kinship with nature. Forming a powerful union with other lonely people. Forging inter-caste, inter-faith, inter-active families that change the culture.
The family black-sheep is the best thing that can happen to a family. Here’s a person who refuses to eat shame for breakfast, and shows new possibilities. We must felicitate people who abandon their toxic families to discover new land. Everyone deserves to breathe in psychologically fresh air.
Recently, I fell in love with my family. I let this affair distract me from my relationship. Friends who didn’t have a family like mine taught me how to love my own.
Family can surprise you. They seem so set in their ways, like rocks beside the river. But your fluidity shuffles and softens them. I can’t wait for my nephew to soften my beliefs the way I’ve softened my parents’. In Sociology, they taught us that family is a the most basic unit of society. Then, a family healing and evolving, isn’t it the most basic and essential revolution?
Add to this list. What did I miss? How else can we broaden and redefine and better understand family?
This essay, like the last one, was born in a family of writers called Bavaal Writers.
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Raju, this piece is such brilliance-- I think I run to your pieces to see the acrobatics and scampering children - that's how ideas and connections move through your pieces - I cannot usually comment on a moment in the essay - it is the places it takes me to and a long neglected tiny muscle in this body moves every time I read you
Raju Rani, badi Sayani! 🤗🤗🤗 maano yaa naa maano, ochre skies is the best family. Keeps growing better than Indian families. All black sheep here. Best! Behad mazzedaar.