#Carreercurveballs

Though my parents belonged to the corporate world, I dreamed of making a career in Media & Journalism! Initially, my passionate love for the English language and literature propelled me to take up English as my Honors paper in my graduation.

 While deeply immersed in the study of the social and political changes around me, I kept stirring up new thoughts and ideas in my adolescent mind. I felt the immediate impulse to pen down my gut feelings in the college magazine.

In fact, during the ’80s, the elderly family members frowned for expressing their views on any time issues. They considered me immodest as a young lady to barge into their domain.

Nonetheless, I visualized myself as a newspaper columnist, writing my opinion on “Operation Blue Star” of the Golden Temple by Indira Gandhi or the loopholes in Indian parliamentary democracy. Those were not the days of the online revolution as experienced by the teens in India today.

 Way back in 1971, the Bangladesh war sowed the secret ambition of writing in my seven-year-old mind. During the war, I would try to decipher the meaning of the headlines in the newspapers.  The images of war-ravaged villages and the dispossessed refugees from the bang la border visited my dreams. My father would read out the details of the war to my mom, which I tried to comprehend in my way.

Diary writing became my new passion. I told my diary what I could not say to my classmates or friends. It was my first friendship with writing. After that, in my early teens, I wrote for a school magazine.

 As I grew up, I witnessed the excesses of “Emergency Rule” imposed in India by Mrs. Gandhi: those were the days of rampant corruption, pigeonholed Press (unlike present days), terrorized citizens, and illegal detention…

However, I expressed my political views in our college magazine in the early ’80s. “She Said What?” by Maria Braden had a huge impact on me. I also got consciously aware of woman’s rights.

However, my dream to become a serious journalist was yet in its nebulous state, and when I was fresh in college, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer at an advanced stage. While I battled to come to terms with my pain & shock at the experiences I went through, I began to sense with anticipation how our close family friends & relatives discussed with my dad, in a hushed tone, about my marriage prospect.

 As soon as my mom returned home after her operation and her course of chemo was over, my family became active in matrimonial negotiation for me. I was still in the 2nd year of my English Hon’s class and desperately pleaded my case. To my great surprise, even my robust corporate mom expressed her wish to see her daughter married before she breathed her last.

Though I refused to believe that marriage could be my ultimate settlement in life or wanted to challenge the social perception that a girl whose mom had a history of mastectomy must get into matrimony soon, I had to submit to the diktats of Time!

My husband was teaching English in a college, and that, perhaps, could be my faint glimmer of hope as I braced myself to domesticate my free spirit.

However, during our first meeting before marriage, I made it clear that I am in no mind stopping my education, to which he agreed in front of my conservative father-in-law.

After graduation and marriage, I accompanied him to a remote village in North Bengal, where he was a lecturer in English at a Govt College. I admired the collection of books on his bookshelves to which I had free access. A young lady of 21, I experienced rural life at its best and worst tucked away to a remote corner of India.

However, my euphoric mood of new marital bliss did not last long as I gradually felt disconnected from university life & the world outside. I read books copiously but missed my college and academic life.

 The North Bengal University, situated far away from that obscure village, was out of my reach; the newspapers that reached me were one day old, and TV installation in such a countryside was out of the question. I craved information from the world outside. Yet, when the news from the “present” world, a far cry from the village I lived in, became inaccessible, I poured myself into the ancient world of Greek drama and Greek history. Whatever I could lay hands on: plays and sonnets of Shakespeare or Victorian novels, I spent my spare time exploring the classics.

I am thankful for my husband’s encouragement and that he allowed me to assist his students if they happened to visit our house for clarification and help.

 I look back with amusement to those days when the students from the rural college (generally mu slims) gaped wide-eyed while I tried to clear up their doubts or explain a poem they found difficult to handle.

I secretly enjoyed how they marveled at their professor, who allowed his graduate wife to help his students if she could spare time. That informally was my first experience of teaching. I felt fulfilled in a way yet discontented because post-graduation studies in mass communication & journalism eluded my grasp. So, the first thing I did on my next visit to the city was to knock on the doors of universities.

Today, when I reminisce about my past and try to make a clear self-assessment, I often wonder why I ignored my more profound call for the studies of Media & Journalism and enrolled myself for Masters in English? Was it just because of my growing love for English literature or, was I attracted to teaching English like my husband?

 My parents, relatives, and husband motivated me to pursue teaching as it would be easier for me to balance out home and the world. Anyways, I breathed John Donne & John Dryden in the lecture room after decades, it seemed! I attended my university classes during my husband’s vacation. What fascinated me most was my Introduction to American literature: Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Marian Moore, Sylvia Plath, and others.

Good times must always come to an end, and it happened in my case as our vacation ended. I stayed back to attend my classes and, with my husband, far away.

 It became more apparent to me how impossible it was to pursue even my University Education. In short, I could neither concentrate on my Eugene O’Neil nor attend the mandatory tutorials for us.

 Suddenly, the atmosphere of my husband’s home, where I was a stranger, turned hostile. Life was no more normal after I returned home from the University and resumed my household duties.

 It surprised me to observe the other women in our household. Society did not expect that women should stray out of the domestic periphery. Shopping could be her only consolation.

 Consequently, I was constantly on tenterhooks as they sternly asked me to justify my long absence from home when I sometimes visited the American Library or British Council for any reference work.

I rang my husband up as life became cruder and harsher. I became physically so unwell that I gladly returned to our tiny home in the obscure village. I took some days of leave from the University.

 As days passed, my sickness intensified, and the doctor confirmed my inner fear: I was expecting! Time changes the flow of life. Although a part of my mind filled with nostalgic memories of my classroom in college & the University portal that welcomed me for a few days, I tried to reconcile myself to this new role I was about to play. A tender instinct filled my being from time to time as I, once more, poured myself into the plays of Eugene O’Neil and Indian Writers in English.

After three blissful years of mom-child bond with my infant girl, my husband got transferred to a Govt College in a suburb near Calcutta. I got re-admitted to the University for my Masters’s in English.

 It was a fine-tuning between household work, my little girl, and University classes while my husband was off to his college and returned home late, catching a suburban train to the city. I found him tired and drained yet smiling. I did not want to stop his smile and refrained from sharing my plight.

 Yet, in my agonizing moments with myself, I realized that this was the last chance I had to sit for my Post Graduation! Life’s ordeals grew tougher with time and I was hard-pressed to concentrate on anything. The more I grew assertive about my basic rights and self-esteem, the more challenges were thrown in my way.

Meanwhile, I felt relief when my parents bought a flat in Calcutta and shifted over to the place. My mom was battling her last stage of cancer. One day, things took such an unpleasant turn that I felt intimidated because my husband was away at a conference outside the city.

 I quietly sneaked out of the house, bag, and baggage, picked my four-year-old girl from her school, hired a taxi, and went off to my parents’ place. I informed my husband as soon as I reached my house.

 I told mom that I wanted to stay with her for some days and appealed to my dad to let me study for three months before taking my MA exam. My parents understood instinctively and agreed to support me. I was allotted a room next to my mom. I heard her groan in pain at night while I held my sleepy girl in my arms. Putting her quietly to sleep, I tried to focus. I was racing against time!

My parents informed my in-laws that my mom was in a bad state, for which I had to leave the house without notice. At times, I sat near my mom, held her hand, and she moaned:” You can’t possibly get through, girl. You got a good husband to spend the rest of your life in comfort. Why do you fight a lost battle, bringing ruin upon yourself and your little lonely child, away from father; a grandma awaiting her death and her mother busy in her world ?” A mixed feeling of guilt and anger swept through me! But I understood my mom’s fear and concern for her stubborn daughter. She was hovering on the brink of oblivion. I looked within, when alone, and someone whispered to me, “Take the chance.”

Anyways, I sat for my exams with a pounding heart and throbbing head in the hall since my preparation was unsystematic & overhasty. Those were my salad days when my mind was not under control, and on the last day of my exam, I regretted the mistakes I could have avoided in some of my papers if I had kept my overcharged mind cool!

The exam was over, and my mom’s health was somewhat better. I felt relieved to accompany my husband to our suburban rental for us to stay with him. We concentrated on our daughter’s schooling and grooming.

It was a phase in my life when I tried to compensate my husband and my little Alolika (Ray of Light) for my long absence in their life. I cooked his favorite dishes and spent time with her on the terrace identifying the stars in the night sky to her wide-eyed wonder!

 Computer games were not so popular among Indian kids then. So I regaled her with myths and legends from different corners of the world. She loved watching Animal Planet or the ghost movies on TV or DVDs we procured for her. I did not mind then that my career took a back seat as I watched her learn and grow bit by bit with a sense of fulfillment, a feeling hitherto unknown to me.

Meanwhile, the MA results were out. I sailed through pretty well, yet I could not excel in setting the record until graduation. I was disappointed as the secret wish for teaching in a college eluded my grasp! I needed a very high percentage to apply for the post.

 After the initial setback, I became resolute on carrying on with my dissertation paper on Eugene O’Neil’s plays I had been working on in my spare time. I visited the Head of the Dept of the University, who declared that I was ineligible for any research work as I could not apply for a college job. I was, naturally, heartbroken.

 I started giving tutorial classes to High school children and even College students at home to quieten down my sickened heart. When free from domestic chores and my daughter in school, I returned to my journals and subscribed to Outlook Magazine and “India Today” to distract my mind from a sense of ennui.

Once again, the repressed longing for a career in journalism reared up its head when I overheard the exciting stories about the Press and the details of my brother-in-law’s job as a sub-editor of a renowned newspaper. I wish, today if only I had mustered the spirit of my discomfort and asked him how I might get into the field! But I was often green in my judgment and lacked clear self-awareness!

Yet if one door was closed to me, another door opened with the passing of every year.

The best experience in my long teaching career to the pre-university students was my years as a Guest lecturer at Indira Gandhi National Open University for nine years. I learned as I taught Communicative English, Phonetics, and Indian Writers in English to the Management students.

My daughter grew up and shifted to Delhi to do her internship in Ogilvy & Mather. I filled up my lonely hours with my writing for Ezine.com. After two years of contribution, they honored me with an Expert Author Certificate. I felt grateful.

This egged me on to venture into the writing world.

 It is a long tale of gradual self-actualization through stories of defeat and triumph.

My Story of Continues…

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