Tell Me About Your Family

For the next two months I will be a visiting teacher at a couple of schools in Madurai, teaching English and a sundry of other projects while learning Tamil myself. Today, I went to visit two of the schools and to meet some of the administrative and teaching staff. On Monday I will begin my teaching assignment after attending the all-school assembly in the morning.

After I had entered the headmaster’s office was introduced, we sat down, and the first, and nearly only question he asked was, “Tell me about your family.” I had read that Indians would often ask this question pretty early on in a conversation, so I was mildly prepared, but was still somewhat taken for surprise at how directly he asked it. It was not really the question itself, but the situation and the delivery.

He did not ask it in a hostile way, but neither was it really asked as if it were a conversational ice breaker either, but rather that it was actually part of “the interview” for what I was doing in India. I balked, not really knowing how to jump in and said, “my family in Belgium, or America, or...both?” as I was fishing for a response or change in his facial expressions, neither of which happened. Instead, with his eyes remaining fixed quite intently on me, he replied, “Yes, tell me about your family.”

I went on then to first tell him about my parents and that they had been physicians, but that my father had passed away, and that my sisters lived in various places as well, though he was quite impressed that they were in film and education. He was saddened to hear that my father was no longer living and was puzzled as to why my sisters were not with my mother. However, when it comes to explaining my situation in Belgium, the responses are not as welcoming.

In India, and I had also read about this, and it has borne out in reality at this point a couple of times, I am more or less considered to be a failure because I am no longer married. There are four stages in a man’s life in traditional Indian life, and one of them is to be a father and husband. This transcends poverty on the level of what is important in Indian society, much more so here in the southern part. If your wife has not died, and you have children, then you have failed if you are no longer married.

This reminded me of one of the more moving scenes in Terrence Malinck’s recent film, Tree of Life, (which incidentally one of my sisters actually worked on) in which Brad Pitt delivers an incredible role as a man at odds with himself and his family, and who is just trying to make it in life, but hasn’t figured out how. When he loses his job, Pitt is simply brilliant in his turn from the domineering father to a seismically reduced shell of a man, who breaks down crying to his son, who has literally wanted to kill his father at times in the film, and just says that all he wanted to do was to make things work. Without them, he was nothing.

I could see the visible disappointment in the man’s face when I was explaining that I was here alone and that my daughter was with her mother in Belgium and that we are not together. It wasn’t condemnation, but it certainly was not enthusiastic. India has major domestic problems to be sure, and to be born a woman here is a burden that I can never fathom in a million years. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be born into their predetermined roles in society here, which is not usually a glamorous one, except for the extremes of the Bollywood scene on a larger scale. However, I did feel the pressure that Indian men have on the flipside today of having to be the “man” of a household and to fulfill that role at all costs, for to fail is, in essence, is to be less than a complete man in his stages of life.