On Eroding Termites and Unbidden Renewals
In the seventh standard, I learnt something about life that would stay with me for the times to come. My closest friend was Ayesha and we both had decided to not participate in our school’s Annual Sports Day. Scheduled right before the Christmas break, it was a momentous event with an equally important Chief Guest. One year, we even had Kiran Bedi, India’s first woman IPS officer.
Almost every student was participating – some swam, the more athletic ones played basketball and the truly gifted ones ran relay races. There were also charitable events like lemon-and-spoon race for the non-athletic, nerdy and sullen-faced kids like me.
But neither I nor Ayesha wanted anything to do with sports. We were chubby and our thighs rubbed together when we ran. I was however a dancer and my Mohiniattam teacher would refer to my body as matka, an earthen pot, in her opinion, “the perfect body for the dance form”. Others, including my mother, were not so gracious in their assessments.
So, we made a pact. We would hang out together along the peripheries of the school ground while the rehearsals, which consumed half the school day, took place. But a few days into our rebellion, Ayesha stopped attending school. Her logic was simple – she didn’t want to wake up early in the chilly mornings for only half a school day.
My father allowed no such accommodations. I had to attend school every day. So, I hung out along those peripheries for over a month, alone, sulking, pretending that that is exactly what I wanted. When Ayesha came back from hibernation, I pretended all was well. However, my friendships have never really recovered. Even today when I make a friend, when I find someone whose darkness matches mine, my mind starts calculating the myriad ways they might break my trust.
In class eleventh, I did the same thing to a different friend. The philosophy of Karma, I have learnt, is only partially true. We pay for mistakes but mostly, they are not our own. After promising my friend Era that I would join her on a school trip to Goa, I left her waiting for me at Nizamuddin Railway station, incidentally again in the freezing Delhi winter. I had no intention to go; my parents were going through a marital crisis and that was not the time to request funds for a school trip. In my head, this betrayal was totally justified and was chalked up to the toxic environment at home.
And yet, these were not the first instances where I recognised how fragile the bedrock of relationships can be. My earliest breaches of trust happened early on from within my own family. My mother would promise to attend parent-teacher meetings but wouldn’t show up. My father would promise to teach me chess in the evenings but after only a few days, would retreat into Kishore Kumar’s music and whiskey. They didn’t stand up for me when I was sexually harassed and bullied at school. I learnt to not trust them and that promises were only empty words. Sometimes earnest and sincere, but almost never meant to be honoured.
And maybe that is where the normalisation of betrayal began. Betrayal has become not just an aberration but a routine possibility in any relationship which we have to accommodate, account for and let go of. Last year, when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was expected to put aside years of heartbreak, angst and unmet expectations and become a caregiver. I was expected to show up for someone who had hardly ever shown up for me. I did finally take up the role but only on my own terms. With boundaries. Our relationship, supposedly sacred, had already been eroded by termites.
In Indian culture, the onus of upholding the relationship is placed on the less powerful one in the equation. I was expected to be a good daughter and ask for no accountability. My mother was already presumed to be “good” by virtue of motherhood.
But the supposedly hallowed parent-child relationship is violated every single day in our country. Parents commit unspeakable violence such as foeticide and honour killings upon the very beings they claim they would give their lives for. If our most fundamental connections are broken, how can we ever build healthy relationships with those who come into our lives later – friends, colleagues, lovers and ultimately the state? They say that “blood is thicker than water”. But what if the blood is poisoned? Where does that leave the water?
Of all the betrayals that I have been accused of, none is probably as grave as refusing motherhood. For those of us who are born elder daughters, the word “mother” is less of a compliment and more of betrayal of the self. At the age of 27, I discovered that I do not want kids. Any children I had would inherit my emotional destiny, as I had inherited my mother’s. I could not let that happen.
Years later, shaken at how easily our strongest institutions capitulated to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was grateful for my decision. In an internet rabbit hole, I discovered the philosophy of antinatalism, which assigns negative value to birth and is growing in popularity as human beings are confronted with mega-crises such as AI, climate change and fascism. I am however, not an antinatalist. The decision I made at 27 was not a moral stand. It was an organism’s intelligence guiding it to not reproduce in an environment that felt hostile and uncertain. I am not the only one who feels this way; fertility rates are declining across the world.
During my research, I found the work of academic philosopher Patricia MacCormack. Apart from having a great taste in over-the-top horror films, Patricia actively advocates for human extinction to rewild the planet and claims that she’s yet to hear a “good reason to have kids”.
Patricia has been called a lot of names, including, provocatively, “a traitor to her own species”. It is telling how those who deploy weapons of mass destruction upon children and commit genocide are not assigned such a label but an esoteric philosopher is deemed fit for it.
I have been accused of the same treachery as Patricia. I have been accused of betraying my Brahmin caste, my savarna genes and even my nation by not giving it “intelligent” and “high-quality” people like me – an educated upper-class woman with light skin. I have been told that my non-motherhood is a loss to the nation. I have also been accused of betraying the kids I didn’t have by not letting them have access to “the great mother I could have been”.
If there is a contract between me and my nation, it is a two-way street. Being born a woman in India means the contract is only meant to be honoured on one side; you are betrayed right at birth. So perhaps by not letting my country access my womb, I have betrayed it back. Fair and square.
Maybe the breaking of trust is inevitable when the promise itself is flawed. Betrayal reveals the fractures within the promise, the cracks within a dream and the narratives that don’t deliver. It reveals hostile environments that we exist in and their incompatibility with mainstream societal roles and obligations that are thrust upon us. And in a transitory world, it may reveal the edge of the end. A structure teetering on collapse. The unravelling of trust exposes the fragile pillars our civilizational and personal identities stand upon and especially the hypocrisies within our holy cows – nationhood, fatherhood, motherhood, love and even the self.
So, what do we do when the promises that our very lives are often staked on, are broken? For the longest time, I believed that ruptures and fractures represent the most terrible aspects of humanity. I was convinced that there is simply nobody to bank upon. It is a completely rational albeit desperately desolate position to take. And yet, life continually shatters any ideological stand we cling to.
A few years back I rescued Mushi – a tiny street puppy struggling to survive. I found her in a pack of dogs on a construction site. While the workers did the pack, Mushi had stopped eating and was just a few days away from death. Fleas and ticks feasted upon her weak body. The workers informed me that Mushi’s mother would attack her often and never let her drink milk. A vet I later checked with claimed that this was not an uncommon phenomenon. The mother often lets the runt of the litter die and even consumes her own offspring so that the stronger of the pack gets a higher share of the resources.
It took me a long time to make sense of this behaviour. We are not the only species who betrays each other. We are not the only ones who feast on our own. This reckoning may not have healed the treachery and abandonment I have been subjected to by the state, my family and friends and lovers, but it offered perspective. Betrayal may not be just ideological, social, cultural, familial, professional or intimate, it may be biological. Basic, essential. Embedded in the code of life. Woven within us. And, most importantly, it may not be personal.
And just when I had begun to soak in this new awareness, I learnt that not only is it possible to repair our hearts, though only somewhat, it is also possible to continue believing in each other.
My mother has not been the only cancer victim in my family. My father too had stage-three head and neck cancer, which he passed away from in 2021. Upon his diagnosis and harrowing treatment, which was almost as brutal as the disease itself, his large network of friends, family and professional coteries disappeared overnight. His siblings, embroiled in an ancestral family dispute and angry with him for not giving up his share, stopped visiting us completely.
Grace came, but not from where we expected it. The doctors and AIIMS New Delhi stood with us like a rock. Even during the COVID crisis when there was a nationwide crisis for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds, they managed to get him a bed and treated. On his deathbed, his siblings may not have visited, but our driver donated his blood. Our driver’s wife brought us homecooked food and a flask of chai every single day as my mother, my sister and I spent night after night on the icy marble hospital floor.
Still, the complete abandonment of friends and family was a source of deep anguish to my mother. Once my father was in palliative care, the compassionate team from CanSupport India visited us and for the first time in over three years my mother broke down. I also had a dream calling me to the Nizamuddin Dargah where I had never been before. In the last few weeks of my father’s life, I was aided by the presence of the Sufi saint, gently nurturing me to let go.
Solidarity happened, but it was imperfect, unexpected and didn’t come from those who owed it to us.
Maybe the betrayal of everything we hold dear is an opportunity to forge new bonds, new connections and newer solidarity. It is a chance to build a better narrative; something fresher, more inclusive and deeper. Obligations are only upheld by identities which themselves are constrained and circumscribed. A recognition of the suffering of another, a direct jolt to the heart, may lead to a fraternity far greater than obligation ever could.
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