Mother

I am getting old, and the whole of life is folding around me.

My 40s have been full of tension, but also some material gain. Perhaps one followed the other. Life has been kind so far, but I do not know about tomorrow. Whatever happens, it won’t be exactly how I envisage it. Our generation has seen it all.

The first black-and-white television came to our house one day, and everyone in the locality crowded around it. Then came computers, assembled, and video games, pirated.

The Internet revolutionised the world, but for us it was largely limited to Yahoo chat rooms. Chatting with strangers. ASL. Understanding what that meant took me a very long time. I saw that men and boys had no demand in the chat rooms. A friend, no doubt a well-wisher, suggested that if I wanted to have a life and some luck, I should say I was a female. And there they were, lining up to chat. ASL, ASL.

Before I realised it, the man I had been chatting with every week, purely as a friend, turned out to be a woman. She had changed her identity to avoid the same kind of attention that I was desperately seeking: just to have someone safe or sane to chat with.

No, there was no fairytale ending. I never got to know her real name or which part of the world she belonged to.

The virtual world before Facebook was exciting too. Everything new on the Internet was exciting. There was MySpace, and what was the name of that other place? Orkut. Oh, those sweet memories of checking on my crush, and crushes, only to be crushed seeing their relationship status changing like seasons, without me being responsible for them in any which way.

But then there was another virtual space: Second Life. I hung around there with a Spanish girl. She left me when she realised I was Indian. “Asian.” She told me so before leaving.

And now, in my 40s, I am faced with artificial intelligence, which can take my job away any time, any day.

So much fun.

I have been riding this adventure all the way to the boss fight arena, and the boss is undoubtedly very, very powerful. It is continuously hitting me, and the green bar on the screen is blinking red with just one hit.

But I have put a cheat code into the console. I have unlimited health drinks.

I am a reporter.

Which supposedly means deep sourcing.

I am fine as long as my sourcing is intact. Game over once it is gone.

In times like this, you become more religious. You trust God, even if you are cheating with one eye open, thinking, God doesn’t notice it.

But unlike the gods of other religions, ours is a goddess. We Bengalis have different versions of Maa.

The fun with Mother is that all kinds of cheating are allowed.

Mothers are a peculiar kind.

I’m talking about Indian mothers, the kind that I have, both in flesh and as my goddess. They rarely pamper their kids. But if they do, they make sure it never becomes a habit. An inevitable hit on self-esteem follows.

But they do provide food and clothing.

Mothers feed you well. Keep you dry. Comb your hair so that you look respectable.

My Mother is also like that.

I know I won’t get much, but somewhere I know I won’t be left wanting.

This kid can keep playing in the park without fearing anything. When the time comes to go home, my mother will take me in her lap and walk away, without bothering about my protests.

Indian mothers are very, very tough.

I tell you.