When I walk to the nearest grocery store to buy just the one lemon that was lacking for my mother’s pickle dish I’d rather just make the two-minute journey uninterrupted. All I’m hoping for is to walk a few steps, speak a few sentences to the shopkeeper lady asking for the lemon, pay her the only crisp 10 rupee note I brought (and thus emptying my pocket) and make the return trip, retracing my own steps with the lemon. A few minutes devoted to being a good daughter. Everyone’s jolly and happy.

It’s being the good socialite for those minutes that worries me, downright scares me even. Neighbors you don’t even know names of but associate with the color of their homes (that is assuming you know their homes) stop you for some ‘chit chat’. I would have thought that given its linguistic composition ‘chit chat’ is short for brief conversations such as the “Hey, how are you doing? I’m well, good to see you. Bye” brief.

But why is it that ‘chit chats’ that take place among us (ahem neighbors) are neither brief nor really a conversation? That is just how it is I suppose. Chit chats begin innocently enough, your neighbors or, lord have mercy, relatives stop you on your way back from your lemon excursion and ask you how you’re doing. You tell them all is well (and even if it isn’t you don’t tell them that) and they ask you about your parents. You repeat the same all is well song albeit with a little variation in phrasings. Then they begin their torrents of questions put so precisely you know they have rehearsed it with some hundred other people such as yourself.

“What are you doing?” Taking a gap year. “What use is a gap year, that’s wasting a year when you could have been doing your degree?” You see there’s a thing called indulgence…“Indulgences are for the rich, the first world people, not us, we ought to be practical. Where do you plan on studying?” I’ve been thinking about applying to foreign colleges. “Everyone wants to leave, just leave. You know how hard it is? I had a friend who went to Japan to…”

So on and so forth it goes. You would think that people who take their time to wait on you and pounce upon the opportunity to counsel you have your best interests at heart. And I’m not yet skeptical enough to believe that goodwill and kindness are all lost in this world. But it gets harder to convince yourself that the person you’re facing and who is opposing every syllable off your mouth with his own versions of realities really wishes only the best for you. 

We have grown up in a culture that values experience over everything else (sometimes even common sense) and heeding to the advices of the elderly is a virtuous thing to do. My parents taught me to do the same but every so often I question those values. I took a gap year by choice and working in the meantime while discovering new people, places has done me a world of good. This is still learning but just the beyond classroom style. Learning, all the same.

Having to insist this to my legions of relatives and neighbors who somehow believe I owe them an explanation is the hardest test (of patience) I’ve ever given. And somehow all the explaining I do doesn’t seem to help them understand my point one bit. Most of the elderlies I’m explaining my situation to are highly critical. I understand that they grew up with restrictions, being closed off to the progresses of the world. But this generation isn’t so. The web and the media have broken through all such walls of restrictions. I suppose the older generation is yet to catch up, thus the skepticism.

I understand that hundreds, if not thousands of Nepalis, are struggling living away from their country and I understand as are their nieces or their friend’s friend’s sixth cousins. But imposing their reality as my decided future isn’t educating me of the struggles. It is forcing their opinions on me as well as trying to put me down. None of us need to lead lives in the fashions of the older generation, holding on to false nostalgia.

It shouldn’t be a problem that we were raised without having to sleep on straw mats or that we grew up without having tasted village butter and without our feet caked in mud when running in the fields during the rainy seasons. We’re still a generation surviving on the nasty air of the cities. That alone is enough to prove anyone’s might. So, I feel, our opinions and decisions shouldn’t be discounted on grounds of inexperience.

My greatest cause of worry is when what you are saying is simply dismissed. Dashains and family gatherings are always a full blast interrogation on young ones. It’s the same cycle year after year – what, where, how, who, and all the why’s are asked, and for very less allowances for an answer. And even if an answer dares to be heard over all the squabble, it’s squashed by people living with their broken dreams and unbending ideologies. What’s even more worrisome about such interrogations are the questions themselves, prodding and poking for the answers we are asking our own selves. Yes, we are yet to figure out what we wish to do with our lives but that’s fine, we are neither Buddhas nor Buddus (fools).

Society is for our comfort, to make our lives cohesive, or so they wrote in Social Studies textbooks. Great cohesion it is when a 19-year-old refuses to do her mother any more little favors. Your pickle, mom, can do without a lemon.

 
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