Written by Ishita Sengupta |New Delhi |Updated: October 25, 2019 6:33:42 pm
About Love: A lesson in owning/accepting your ‘embarrassing’ family
In her documentary About Love, Archana Phadke records the everyday(s) of her family members and, in doing so, shows us moments we often carelessly overlook.
I am not sure if there is a lesser unkind way of admitting this but for a large part of my growing up years I remained embarrassed of the women in my family. Looking back, I cannot place a finger on when it started but I remember how warm my ears would be when Ma would meet teachers at meetings and tell them I was not studying hard enough. With flushed cheeks I used to look away not because she complained before my peers but because she so visibly struggled to string together her sentences in English and later haplessly looked at my father for help. I would always look down, evading my convent-bred classmates’ glances, certain that they were secretly laughing at her or, worse, me. The instances varied with time. My father scolding my mother for being late and she not making a sound, my sister never being able to keep secrets I had trusted her with, my uncle taking pride in his wife’s obedience and expecting us to do — be — the same. There was— and still is — anger at the bitter words men in my family so thoughtlessly if not deliberately scattered at home and outside. But the disappointment at my mother and aunts’ continuous, damning silence always stung more. It embarrassed me.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario