When you’ve clocked a certain number of hours in small-town /rural India you find that you are able to expect and answer entirely personal questions from complete strangers with reasonable equanimity. A personal bio-data touching on every detail of family and belonging, marital status (reasons for said status), education, modes of income generation etc is the usual expectation, which I have learnt to submit to without much rancour, and increasingly without much thought. It has now got to a point with me where I have a ready-made spiel for each question, which I deliver almost on automaton with the same inflections, pauses and smiles. I am usually able to predict the order of the questions. With me, perhaps because it is difficult to pin down my nativity by looking at me, that is usually the subject of the first round of questions.
In places where I am generally known to have come from Hyderabad the question is usually how I came to live there. Nobody seems to believe that I have a Hyderabadi face, which is a pity because I have a very Hyderabadi heart. But of course I know that the enquiry is about the land of my genes and not the land of my heart.
Here, in West Godavari the question is its own peculiar phrase. “Yekkadandi proper?” I explain that I am a Kannadiga who lives in Hyderabad. Next comes the hazarded guess-question? “ Mee ammavallu…?” The answer to this question posed in any language has always been an unequivocal, warmed- Yes! My mother-folk live there in Hyderabad. But this time I am being caught stupidly short each time. I do say yes, after a pause, but I feel a pang of subterfuge. I feel oddly that I cannot claim a Mother-folk anymore, that those of us remaining are just folk who used to belong to my mother. But I don’t talk about this. Even the most involved questioner wants only the general circumstances of my life and not the details. I surprise myself, but I seem to understand that a recently dead mother is just a detail in my social identity.
How much we are socialised into investing in the broad strokes! I don’t doubt there are several solid reasons for that. But individually we all know that pain, pleasure, beauty, variety, sameness, love, god - are all in the details.
