Sunday, August 13, 2000		Life Ties

IT was the first wedding in their family. Enthusiasm levels were high and the entire extended family had converged for a week of festivities. The boy’s mother, a modern woman, knew that the younger generation was not particularly favourable towards heavy traditional wear. She had painstakingly planned her part of the trousseau accordingly. There were exquisite Banarasi sarees vying for attention with western designer wear. Traditional kundan jewellery sets were juxtaposed with dainty lighter pieces which could be teamed up with an assortment of outfits for daily wear.

Misty-eyed, she put together little trinkets in satin covered boxes, each piece bringing in its wake a rush of memories. There was the bangle which her mother-in-law had given her on her first karvachauth. It had belonged to her grandmother. The workmanship was exquisite but more than that it was the fact that it had been in the family for five generations. Then there was the tikka which was worn by her husband’s sister who had gone on to become the first woman scientist in the country. There were a pair of antique jade earrings, which she had picked up on her one and only foreign trip to China, said to belong to the Emperor’s favourite concubine.

Most of the trousseau had been selected keeping in mind her daughter-in-law’s tastes, skin colour, temperament and nature of her job. Since there were no daughters in the family, the entire buying and putting together exercise had been invested with a lot of love and sentiment which went three decades back in time! Her son had got acquainted with Kavya while he was studying in the USA. The parents met her a few times and were happy to see them well-adjusted. Since the bridal couple were getting into India only two days before the wedding, most of the shopping had been done before hand. Of course, there had been many phone calls, e-mails and couriers exchanged to ensure that the sizes were right and that choices and preferences had been kept in mind.

The wedding was a merry congregation of three generations with everyone making it a point to come and bless the bridal couple. Everything went off with clockwork precision. The new bride was brought home. Some of the relatives were still around. When the time came for her to open her suitcases and jewellery boxes she was overwhelmed with the variety and classiness of every hand- picked item. Her native intelligence also rang a bell telling her that it mustn’t have come cheap. Each item must have cost a mini-fortune for her in-laws who had modest means. When she saw that she was unlikely to wear more than half of the presented items, given their casual, informal lifestyle and her simple and stark style of dressing, she decided to return the things she felt she would most certainly not use.

She did what most of us would consider unforgivable. She opted for the honest and direct line of approach rather than be coy, mushy and hypocritical about her reaction. She took her mother-in-law aside and told her gently, " I truly appreciate the grand collection that you have put together for me. A lot of thought and effort has gone into it not to mention a sizeable chunk of your savings. Please do not misunderstand me but I feel I must tell you that I am not going to wear any of it. It would be such a pity to stash it away into a locker. I will keep the mangalsutra but return the rest."

The old lady was caught completely unprepared. She managed an incoherent response and stumbled to her room hoping her awkward behaviour had not given the young girl any wrong signals. The sense of hurt, rejection and anguish she felt found a release in tears. However, in a few hours she composed herself and took charge of the household as if nothing had happened. When the guests departed and it was time for the children to leave for the States, she requested her daughter-in-law to accompany her for a walk.

Lovingly holding her daughter-in-law’s hand, she said, "When we got married we had to help our parents pay off the loans they had taken to get us respectably married. The children arrived soon after. Life just flew by. We meet one commitment after another and as such never had the money to splurge on luxuries like expensive sarees and jewellery. Iam not complaining because I was happy with what I had. But somewhere I had this desire that my children should begin their life with a decent bank balance. So instead of having an ostentatious wedding we had a simple ceremony, giving

you what we would have otherwise spent. Also I wanted to give my daughter-in-law good jewellery and clothes so

she could dress up and look even more beautiful as she moved around the house. No doubt you are earning and will keep making additions but I wanted you to have these exclusive pieces, some of which are family heirlooms. You were extremely considerate is looking at things from our point of view. Ivalue your genuine concern but I still want you to take what has been bought for you. You may find it heavy and out of character today but maybe 10 years down the line you may like to wear it. In any case once given, it is yours. You sell it, gift it, hoard it, do whatever, but please take it for it has with it all our love, blessings and good wishes."

The mother-in-law said this without any rancour or bitterness. In fact, she took care to have this little tete-a-tete in strict privacy for she didn’t want anyone jumping the gun. These were still early times and the trust and bonding had to be cemented between the two women of the house.

Once her initial disappointment, hurt and rage had subsided, she could realistically look at the modern, independent and frank outlook of her daughter-in-law. She saw her child-like transparency which was not an attempt to be vicious or prove her superiority. Having lived abroad for the better part of her life, she was self-oriented, practical and straightforward. By reducing the gift to its bare physical cost, she had inadvertently diminished its real value which was the feelings and sentiments attached to the ceremonial gifting and passing down of things which may be inanimate and showy pieces of mere ornamentation. Somebody had to help her put the gesture in perspective.

She could have talked to her husband and son expressing her hurt. She could also have swallowed her disappointment, pushing it into an obscure corner of her heart. But she vetoed both options because she didn’t want to destroy what hadn’t even begun. She hoped that her message would go down positively and they could, over a period of time, develop a relationship based on acceptance, love and spontaneous sharing.