Veranda Tales-A meaningful life with purpose

Storytelling has been an integral part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to stories during the hot summer evenings and nights with my cousins. Mothers and grandmothers would gather all of us children for story time. It was usually pitch dark except for a very faint light coming from the flickering candle. Power cuts were as frequent as the hot and humid summer days. We all spread out on a cool concrete floor or bamboo mats on the veranda intently listening to fascinating stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, and peasants alike. Stories about love, life, families, and people entertained and taught us life skills. These stories transported us to distant worlds, strange yet familiar. Often the same story told by two people sounded different as storytellers added new twists and turns adding their personal style and flair to the stories.

Storytelling wasn’t limited to summer evenings and bedtime. I was surrounded by adults who didn’t pass up an opportunity to share their wisdom using the art of storytelling. These rich vibrant oral traditions include songs, poems, stories, and సామెతలు (Sametalu are proverbs in Telugu). Men and women sing songs as they work in the fields, grinding grains and spices and doing other daily chores at their homes. Stories are often used to teach important life lessons, interpersonal skills, and survival skills. These stories and the time spent listening to them made our lives richer leaving an impression on me. This series is all about reliving those memories as I share these stories.

ఏమి చేస్తున్నావురా అంటే పారబోసి యెత్తుతున్నా అన్నట్టు (emi chestunnavura unte paarabosi ettutunna annattu)

I graduated from college with an engineering degree and came back home as a different person. I started out as a sixteen year old freshman missing home with dreams and hopes to graduate from college with flying colors. It wasn’t meant to be. I went through four years of struggle to barely get through my classes. I kept falling behind and further behind and was thankful I got out with a degree in the end. I still have nightmares that I didn’t actually graduate from college. I came home without any prospects to get into a graduate program and any prospects for securing a job. My parents lived in a place where there were no prospects for finding a job in my field of study. నాన్న (Nanna is father Telugu) was not on board to send me to a bigger city to find a job and live on own. నాన్న (Nanna) who was there for me and had my back was no longer in my corner. He was disappointed with my inability to get into a graduate program and he didn’t take the time to find out what I needed.

I was depressed and miserable as I watched my classmates move on with their lives to start their graduate programs or their first jobs. The home I grew up in was no longer a familiar place. I missed my college life and was eager to be on my own. Days stretched into weeks, weeks stretched into months as I kept sinking deeper and deeper into a blackhole of despair with nothing to look forward to and no place to go. I had my arm stretched up looking for someone to pull me out of the abyss. I felt like a ship in the middle of the ocean without direction and no land in sight.

It was then during those dark days of my despair, we got the word that my cousin gave birth to her first baby. I attended her wedding just two years earlier. My cousin was just a year older than me. I wasn’t particularly close to my mother’s side of the family and didn’t visit them often. The only visits were limited to special occasions such as weddings and funerals. Even though I didn’t know them well, I was eager to get out of the house to see them, congratulate the new mother and see her newborn baby. అమ్మ (Amma) was pleased to send me as a representative to her older sister’s place and off I went before she changed her mind. The baby girl was very cute. My cousin looked tired and worn out from the pregnancy and the childbirth. My aunt was very busy taking care of her daughter and her new grandchild. She was a force of nature as usual cooking, cleaning, supervising servants and her other kids as she superbly managed the household. My aunt had three daughters and a son. All but the oldest daughter were at home for the birth. My uncle’s brother lived with them. It was a full house.

I spent most of the time with my cousin and her new baby. I helped rock the baby, and change diapers. My aunt supervised and made sure the newborn was cleaned according to her specific instructions. Baby’s bottom was covered in soft white cotton diapers fastening the sides with large safety pins. I was scared at first that I would injure the baby and was rather careful. There was a small porcelain bowl with fresh water disinfected with a few drops of Dettol antiseptic liquid. We dipped cotton balls in the water disinfected with Dettol to clean the baby’s bottom after removing the soiled diaper and before putting a freshly washed diaper on her. The room was a chaos central with dirty diaper pail in a corner, a stack of freshly washed diapers and burping clothes on a table nearby,  a small bowl full of cotton balls, a porcelain basin for a quick wash to clean the baby,  and hot water bottles for the new mother to ease her pain and make her comfortable.

People kept stopping by bearing gifts for the baby and the mother. My aunt was busy making tea and snacks to serve the guests. The dance of hosts offering tea and snacks to guests, guests politely refusing as the host insists and then accepting the tea and snacks repeated all day long. My uncle talked to the men while the women came to the baby room to offer their blessings to the new  mother and the newborn. They commented on how she looked just like the mother or father or both. As it was the tradition, my cousin came to her parents’ place for childbirth.

My cousin’s mother-in-law and her husband came for a visit. Their visit was brief. My cousin’s sister-in-law stayed for a couple days. My cousin was married into the family my uncle worked for. The class difference was very apparent whenever the in-laws came for a visit, even more than what was usual for how daughter’s parents treat their in-laws. Daughters' parents are at the bottom of the totem pole. Totem poles are carvings of important illustrations of family lineage and the cultural heritage of the Indigenous peoples in the islands and coastal areas of North America's Pacific Northwest, especially British Columbia, Canada, and coastal areas of Washington and southeastern Alaska in the United States.

In my cousin’s case, with the difference in wealth and the employer and employee relationship, it was very clear who was the boss within a few minutes of their arrival. My aunt and uncle were traditional and their only goal was to find suitable families for their daughters to marry into. When the offer came from their employer showing interest in my cousin as a suitable wife for their son, my aunt and uncle were over the moon. Twelve plus years of age difference didn’t matter and my cousin was married off at a young age of 19.

My aunt and uncle were very puzzled why my parents would spend so much money sending me to engineering college. In their mind the money was wasted like గోడకు కొట్టిన సున్నం - ఎప్పటికీ తిరిగి రానిది (godaku kottina sunnam - eppatikee tirigi ranidi), which means that you can’t get the paint back from the wall once you paint it. In their mind, educating daughters was like painting a wall since there was no return on that investment and on top of it there was still the dowry and wedding expenses to marry them off. It is a lose-lose proposition. So there she was after just two years of marriage and she became a mother. She seemed to have accepted her situation with mild complaints about the hierarchy at her in-laws' place living with an overbearing mother-in-law and an older husband. They made sure my cousin knew she came from a family below their rank and made it clear how grateful she should be for the honor of being the daughter-in-law. As I watched the interactions I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like marrying into the British Royal family.

My cousin outsourced entertaining her sister-in-law to me. I spent time talking to her so I could keep her out of my cousin’s hair. She was down to earth and didn’t throw her weight around like others in her family. She talked about her two children and life. Her children were attending a boarding school and she missed them. It sounded like she didn’t have a say in the decision to send them to the boarding school. She was bored at home and spent her time supervising her cook and other household staff. She told me she was so bored that every single day she emptied whole spices, rice, dal and other grains from their containers into a bowl, then wiped the containers and poured them back in.

As I listened to her, I could sense a feeling of loneliness and isolation. I still remember her face as she talked about her life with no purpose and direction. It resonated with me as I was experiencing the same at that time. Her story of how she obsessed over cleaning her spices, dal, and rice containers every day, reminded me of, “ఏమి చేస్తున్నావురా అంటే పారబోసి యెత్తుతున్నా అన్నట్టు (emi chestunnavura unte paarabosi ettutunna annattu)”. It means, “When asked what are you doing, the person responded I spilled things just to pick them up”. It is used to indicate meaningless busy work with no purpose. This sameta became associated with the memory of this lady I met so many years ago. I remember this sametea when I remember her and vice versa. I don’t really know what happened to her and if she ever found a purpose and meaning to her life. I hope she did and she found a way to find purpose and lived a fulfilling life like I did.