“However close you might be to one, you’ll never really know about one.”
“That’s true but still we appraise others without getting into their shoes that we won’t be able to do any way,’ he said. ‘God knows why, but my grandmother became inimical to my father, not to speak of my mother. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, my mother told my father that she would have no more of the old tyrant and he might set her up separately for she knew he owed it to his mother to take care of her and that she was prepared to manage the house with the rest of his salary; well fairness to all has been the hallmark of my mother’s character. But my grandmother any way preferred to stay with her daughter.”
“Isn’t it strange that women tend to be partial towards their daughters all the while craving for a son, while men, who seem to think that daughters don’t confer parentage, and yet cling on to them?”
“Looks like women always feel vulnerable in this man’s world,” he said. “Didn’t the psychologists theorize that woman sees her son as her proxy to get even with it, but when he gets married, she perceives his wife as the usurper of her assumed power to dare the world? Maybe the feeling of being back to square one tends her closer to her daughters with the accompanying sense of alienation towards her daughter-in-law; but for man, while his proclivity is to beget a female, his craving for a male in the lineage could be owing to our culture conditioned by religion, and that’s the irony of the sexes. Shortly before my grandmother was gravely ill, I gave her a piece of my mind as to how inimical she had been towards her own son and his family, and when her health deteriorated, she insisted on living her last days at her son’s place; maybe in the course of life our sensibilities are blunted while the scent of death stirs our sensitivities to its subtleties. Well, she did breathe her last in my father’s arms and who said death separates; but sadly as if history tends to repeat itself, even in the family setting, my mother, when widowed, became inimical to the idea of my brother’s marriage so as to sponge on his bachelorhood earnings till her end. It’s the tragedy of my life that I had to be equally harsh with her, and I only know how painful it was; ironically it was no less satisfying for me that my grandmother’s change of heart let her die in peace and my mother’s change of mind enabled her to rein in her vested interest before it was too late for my brother; oh, gripped by the devil of insecurity how wretched she used to be, and when exorcized of it, how joyous she became after my brother’s marriage.”