Mom,

 

I know that you feel we haven’t been on the best of terms in a long while… perhaps even, you might assume, after we shifted in to Raj Mahal and after your sojourn with cancer. I don’t think that is true; I think somewhere down the line we all have grouses with our parents over some issue or the other. It is only as we grow up and become adults do we see those errors more plain facedly. Of course, I cannot judge your actions and reactions of so many years ago, I am not equipped to do so and it wouldn’t be right of anyone who knows all the facts to do so, because they wouldn’t be you. Your decisions and choices are entirely your own, and whether or not they had the best repercussions, you must know, and so do I, that at that point in time, you truly believed you were making the right ones.

 

So now that the past is out of the way, let’s talk of the present. I have grown up to be someone – like most members of the family – a creature of our own circumstances. You see, over childhood, I grew up to be a romantic. Yet romanticism didn’t get me anywhere, especially since I was different from the norm, I couldn’t expect things the way I thought they would happen for me. But thankfully, there is one thing that my upbringing instilled in me and that was to be honest with family.

 

I have always been true to my family and implicitly honest with you. Whatever I did, whoever I am, you were the first to be told. I guess I was rewarded by the acceptance of that honesty. You have been an absolute succor in my time of need, when I was still grasping the untold and horrible imaginings of what life would hold living as a gay man in a country that offered us no real hope. In this stead, you were my hope, but as I grew outward, I realized you were not the world.

 

You being a single parent have sheltered us from so many things, in effect you have sheltered us not only from all the bad, you also sheltered us from learning the untold amounts of what could be terrible. With me, I guess Papa’s man handling and terror instilled in me a self-doubt that is excruciatingly debilitating. I will not continue to blame him – I have realized there really is no point in it, and I gave up on that a long, long time ago. I will say however that some scars may have healed, but there is a cold in them that seeps into the marrow and will never fade. Especially for people like me, who aren’t truly strong enough and could have been made to learn how to be strong. However, because of your strength, I learned to depend much on you and never learned to inculcate and generate my own.

 

I remember very strongly a line from Tennessee Williams’ play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, it is said by Blanche DuBois, this lady from the South who cannot deal with the harshness of reality and life. She says, “I never was hard or self-sufficient enough. When people are soft – soft people have got to shimmer and glow – they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a – paper lantern over the light… It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I – I’m fading now! I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick.”

 

This sums up what I felt when I read it for the first time in college and I realised at a very early age that I was pretty soft inside. I like romantic movies, I like comedies. I hate horror movies. Seeing people being cruel to each other and the sheer waste of close-mindedness. I also realised that I had a very large level of tolerance and over time, nothing really could shock me in terms of life and love.

 

But my heart has been broken a fair number of times, and I have begun to see people for who they truly are. Not just people that I have tea with or share a laugh with, but people who I love deeply. I see their flaws and their failings and I see how much better they can be… and perhaps I resent the fact that they can be so much better but choose not to be. There are so many things I can write here to tell you, of how disappointing people can be to me and I to them, conversely. And it really is not completely in our hands after all. We expect things and the expectations lead to disappointments and rude awakenings.

 

I used to believe in destiny, I used to believe in higher powers, how life wasn’t all a fait accompli. But as I grew up, Devdutt once said, I grew jaded. I see things as they are but in a more nihilistic way. I still want to love but I can no longer trust. I have been hurt too many times, by people I really truly care very deeply about… You have seen it happen, and not just once or twice but several times. I believe you would call my reiteration of love a wild sort of hope in some sort of deliverance to a promised land I always believed in. But over time, I feel the finer emotions all leave slowly and surely. These days, for example, I tell Venky very clearly, I love you, but I do not know how to trust you. I cannot trust anyone to do the right thing… and it is very easy for us to say, as long as we do the right thing, it’s all well and good, but you see, I do not even believe in that principle anymore. I have seen cruel men prosper and the kindest of them suffer.

 

All in all, I realised too late that I was good looking. I could have done a lot with a little bit more confidence. Now that I have realised that I have the looks and the talent, it comes at a time when both of these could fade at any given moment. So, then what do I do? I live in a state of constant fear. Constant uncertainty. So, in times of strain, I shed it and unburden it on you. Of course, I realise it is about to happen and so many times I control myself. But sometimes when I lash out at you, it comes at times when I expect more of you, I expect you to be sharper, stronger and finer. Things you always could be counted upon to be … However, I am beginning to realise that you are growing older and weaker and I lose what I use to count upon … the roles have reversed you see, and it is difficult for me to deal with. But I will. I always have risen to the occasion, it just takes me a little longer when the need is not imperative.

 

I do not know if I have made my stance clearer or if I have made things all the more confusing. I will say in no unsure terms that you have been my best friend and my compatriot just as much as you have been my mother, and as one grows older, one realizes that the need for the former two is more essential. However, in doing so, we let the lines of best friend and mother blur. I love you and never have stopped loving you, of that you must be absolutely sure.

 

In no memory of the past, or experience of the present, or course of the future have I or will I ever regret that you have been my mother.

 

You will always be loved,

 

Your son,

Harpreet.

 

3^rd October 2017.