I'm living in Bend it Like Beckham. Only without the football and the cute Irish coach.

I love my mother. I really do.

 

But there are times when I can’t wait to ship her off back to Scotland!

(For those of you who don’t know, she’s been there on a medical scholarship for the past year. She’s home for a short visit right now.)

 

I’m mad. I’m really, really mad at her. And what’s worse, I’m disappointed.

 

I’ve always been rather proud of my folks, their mandatory quota of persistent parental barminess notwithstanding. I felt them to be sensible, unpretentious people at heart who cared more about their kids’ happiness than about how we would come to reflect upon them. Which is, in an eastern ultra-conservative society such as the one I live in, a very rare attitude. 

I’ve grown up among kids who know their parents are cognizant of their existence only because they continue to pay their school fees and other kids whose parents lead them around by ridiculously short leashes, having apparently mapped out their entire lives for them at the point of birth. Those who feel obligated at birth to follow in their parents footsteps; resulting in very proud middle-class families who boast three generations of doctors, seven generations of engineers, a family connection worth of lawyers etc. etc. It’s practically turning into a caste system. 

And of course, the unwritten qualifications for your standard bourgeoisie life. You must start studying your brains out the minute you hit fifteen, spend inordinate amounts of money and free time on private tuition and get all 8 As for your Ordinary Level Scrimmage – excuse me, Examination. (For you clueless non-British colonists, think Harry Potter. O/Levels are the equivalent of O.W.Ls and Advanced Level Exam is what Rowling may call the N. E. W. Ts. We students feel that a name like Nastily Exhausting Sadistic Tests would be appropriate for this Victorian classroom horror, which our education system inflicts upon us.) 

No sooner has the ink dried on your last exam paper you must immediately start attending private tutoring classes for Advanced Level. You must put your life, friends, youth, morals, ethics and good sense on hold and get into University by hook or crook before the Soviets do. Never forget – this is WAR! 

Of course, nobody would be heretical enough to suggest that they might not really want to pursue higher education. That would be tantamount to stating that your life’s ambition was to become a bus conductor. The shame on the family! The airs of pitying condescension! 

You MUST become a lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant or, if all venues are exhausted, businessman, although everybody knows that businessmen are all crooks at heart. It was also acceptable for a girl to make a career out of teaching or secretarial work, so that she’d at least be able to marry into one of the aforesaid professions. By the time your twenty-five, you must have a steady nine-to-five job, with long-term prospects, ETF/ EPF or pension fund complete with government health insurance and retirement plan. Bonus points if your office is air-conditioned. 

Since “moving out” is not a concept that has caught on in the Eastern World, and is simply unheard of for respectable girls to live alone, marriage is necessarily the next step. And while the male may move out once he’s required to do so, by profession or self-inclination, the girls are stuck living with their parents until they’re stuck living with their husbands. In short, autonomous independence may be defined in the English to Sinhalese translator dictionary, as “something those wacky foreigners do”. 

Males below 30, you MUST get married to a “fair, pretty, educated, govi Buddhist girl of a good family and reasonable dowry.” And not before comparing horoscopes. Bonus points if she’s also working. Cannot have had any previous liaisons with any other guys. Girls below 25, get your parents to start scanning the “marriage proposals” section of the Sunday paper, so they can marry you off to a “handsome, educated, professional” of the same caste and race. Bonus points if he has prospects of going abroad. Major conversational topic among the hopelessly countrified. “Is that so? Well, you know, my sister’s daughter married and left for Australia, which is a mercy , since she’ll be near her uncle, who’s in New Zealand, and my cousin’s son is going to Cambridge in August, his aunt is in New York, you know, and their Jack Russell terrier is in Paris…,”   

And you must start procreating before you hit thirty, and have a load of squalling, smelly little bundles of joy so as shut up the spinster aunts in the family. Otherwise your whole existence on God’s green earth will be declared a failure. Never mind the island is already jam-packed with an over population of 20 million. We can’t let the Muslims over-procreate us! Birth control and family planning are the devils own tools, because, if nothing else, it implies people like having sex just for the fun of it! 

And once you do have a miniature version of humanity to look after, the cycle starts again. You start mapping out your kid’s life for it even before it’s old enough to realize that it has two pink feet and that they fit in it’s mouth. You forward your mail to fake addresses in Colombo so that you can convince the interviewing panels of the most prestigious private schools that your kid has lived across the street from the school since birth and that that is sufficient grounds for him or her to be admitted ahead of the 4000 other kids who have also applied for places. Funnily enough, 2000 of them seem to have shared the same house with you. And then you get down to moulding your own miniature little “educated professional”, who’ll have a MA from Harvard and give rise to the next generation of middle-class swots. 

Really. The sheer, bourgeoisie, narrowness of it all sends quivers down my spine. 

Which is why I’m all set to break convention, and become a journalist. Much to my mother’s horror, who thinks “reporter” is also synonymous with “mud-slinging rumour monger”. I want to travel, see the world on my own, without a male tag-a-long to “preserve my honour”.  Marrying is not one of the chief goals of my life, at least until thirty. This is an age which sounds horrendously old in my culture. I don’t particularly want kids, not because I dislike them, but because I suspect it will take some time for my maternal instincts to fully kick in.  I’m just at that age where I’m finding my own feet. I want to have one whole decade to myself, to be my own person and be gloriously self-centred, without having to worry about a family. I want to experiment with relationships and vodka, take risks, have boyfriends before I have husbands, learn to dance the salsa and ride a motorbike. And I certainly don’t want to tone down my Alpha-female persona in order to please any mere man! And I want to prove I can do all this without labeling myself a slut, “a fast number”, or forgetting the core values of my own culture.

My Thatthi (Dad) trusts me. He says he’s spent the past 20 years doing his best for us, and he’ll need to have faith that we will never let him regret having given us the liberties and opportunities he did. He says that we both have good sense and good values and we should now know how to use them without incurring shame in the eyes of the world. He wants me to be independent, and wants me to find out about the world. He trusts the person I am. 

My Ammi (Mum), on the other hand, sees only three things. Namely, that I am 19, I am a girl and that I want things out of life she cannot understand, and are therefore, dangerous. Because I am 19, it entails that I am also innocent and hopelessly naïve. Because I am a girl, it is vital that I retain the most spotless reputation possible by means of being shut up in a bandbox, so that I will be able to please my future in-laws. To quote her: “Now if you were a boy, you could do whatever you wanted. Boys don’t need to worry about their reputations. I know it’s unfair, but this is a male-dominant society, and you have to live in it. You can have as many guy friends as you want, but don’t ever try this boyfriend stuff. When the time comes, your father and I will find you a nice boy.”

@#$%^&?!?!

Shoot me! 

Which is probably why she flipped when she found out I was doing ballroom and Latin-American dancing. She can’t stomach the idea, or rather she's afraid other people won't stomach the idea, that girls and boys dance in public holding hands! She thinks it’s promiscuous and can only lead to a lot of hanky-panky!

It’s not like I’m going to go to a village wedding and do the samba! I know perfectly well which crowds will condone boy-girl dances and which don’t!

I’d laugh it wasn’t my own mother spouting this stuff. 

Do to my headstrong perseverance on the matter, as well as my father’s support, she has gracelessly capitulated to the idea that I’m going to do an American degree in journalism and business. But the subtle put-downs do not stop. She constantly tells company that I’m doing a “course”, which is like a diploma or elective, rather than a college degree. She keeps trying to guilt me into going to a UK uni with my sister, who’s doing biology, and the rest of the family, now that we’ve got Highly Skilled Immigration Visa, and I’m the only one she can’t cite as a dependent, now that I’m over 18. 

Me: “Ammi! I’ll be in the middle of a semester! I’m already in a university! An American-affliated one! I’m doing a bloody degree!”

Ammi: “Holding up the rest of the family is what you’re doing. You know we need to get your brother settled in the UK, and your sister is going too! I don’t see why you can’t do a course over there just as well! You just want to live in a separate continent from the rest of the family.”

Me: “Ammi! I’ve given this a lot of thought, and the US has the better market for journalism, plus their academic system is more flexible and closer to what I want! What would I do over in England, anyway?”

Ammi: “Same thing you want to do now. *sniggers* Write for the papers.”

…..

……

…….

I think I need to throw something at the wall.

 

Don’t get me wrong. Right now I’m bloody infuriated and madder than a bucking rodeo bull. She’s actually a sweet person in many ways, which I have trouble remembering right now. Intellectually, I know this is just the whole Bend It Like Beckham story retold, except my Mum doesn’t know how to make chapatti and I don’t want to play football. Ammi is just afraid because I’m drifting away from everything she knows and has grown up with. And Ammi and I have always been polar opposites. Ammi has always been a salt-of-the-earth, somewhat shy, country girl. She likes to let other people, like my Dad, take care of things for her. I’m like Thatthi, loud, opinionated, brash and forward, doesn’t give a damn what other people think, and extremely bull-headed.

 

Still!

 

She can’t be that conservative. She’s lucky she got married to somebody like Thatthi, who didn’t have a problem with looking after us on his own when she went abroad for her post-grad. It was what she wanted, and Thatthi supported her, even when many other people were disapproving of women leaving their children (two grown up girls and a diabled child, no less) at home in order to further their careers. She knows what it’s like to have dreams of one’s own. So why can’t she support mine?

 

I wish she could be proud of who I am, instead of trying to make me into something I’ll never let myself become.