there are 3 cousins i am kinda close to. all of them are men. one on my dad's side who still lives in that city of my earliest childhood memories and feels sort of left behind by us, me and my sister who often feel sad and maybe a little guilty for having abandoned him there. the other two on my mom's side, both of which my sister is not as close to as i am. one is about 3 years younger than me, and the other about 5 years older than me. this older cousin i barely knew when i was little, but around when i was in high school mom, me and sis lived with his mother for some months in that family house built by my mom's father, and soon after in an apartment in the immediate neighborhood; my own dad was then posted in a city where my parents did not want us to live or study. this cousin was doing his mba then and would come home for vacations. we would sit and talk, often when the others had retired to bed. he told me about his seemingly cool life then in that elite post grad institute where i probably aspired to go to too. he had also just finished studying at one of the best undergraduate colleges in india, in delhi, and delhi had been calling me in an inner voice for some time. i looked upto this cousin. i thought he was wise, unconventional, pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and liberation from the norms of the society i had been raised in, as he possibly had girlfriends then and more importantly he was of the opinion that our society was too moralistic about sex, which he evidently found claustrophobic. i was part of that society for him then, and at one point when i curiously asked him about some girl in his yearbook he reacted agrily and with derision about how i came from a moralistic perspective of sex and male-female friendships. i probably had something of a platonic crush on him, i was in awe of him, liked spending time with him and looked forward to his visits. his angry burst did not disrupt any of that because i just let it erupt and die down and after we were as if it hadn't occured. once my dad was visiting while my cousin was around, and because my parents occupied the bedroom that mom, me and sis shared, my sister and i had to sleep in this large common room which was also the dining room, the tv room, and also had a large bed where visitors often slept. i remember my cousin was to leave the next day, and i insisted that he slept with me and my sister. that raised a strange argument and discussion in the house because the adults, our parents, felt something was wrong in cousins of different genders sleeping on the same bed but because no one mentioned the word 'sex' and no one wanted to even suggest it, and because i persisted in my demand adopting this attitude which was seemingly unaware of what the problem might be, everyone relented knowing how i admired and looked upto him and also possibly because this 'middle room' was open, large, quite the opposite of any surreptitious space, and shared windows with my parents' bedroom. throughout the night i remember my dad kept waking up and coming to these windows to make sure 'nothing happened'. and i didn't sleep well because that bothered me. it made me feel the weight of how the world expected any male and female body when in proximity especially at night to only be capable of having sex. but it also made me feel like i was my dad's property and thus his responsibility to protect. but that it wasn't me really that was his responsibility but simply my virginity or my 'honor', because i had never seen my dad so worried about me in other respects. it also made me feel very defiant such that i slithered on my bed closer to my cousin, pretending to be asleep, as close as i could get without touching him; and then i slowly started slithering downward to the bottom of the bed where i thought i might be out of my dad's view. i felt like i was challenging my dad to say the words and be open about what he was afraid might happen. even in those days i realised, without having the realisation of it, that the society that was bringing me up was hypocritical. months later, when we lived in that apartment in the neighborhood, and my dad got transfered to another city, a much larger, more reckless, more 'immoral' city in my opinion then, and i was upset (but also excited) about moving to, leaving my high school friends who i then felt were the people of my life, my cousin was brought in by mom to speak with me, to console me about the move; he knew the city better than us and had been working and living in it. since then my cousin and i have met and stayed in almost constant touch throughout our life. ours is also a close-knit family on my mom's side sometimes to the point where three generations of people gather meet and talk together which i have been finding annoying as the oldest generation has been tending farther and farther on the scale of religious and cultural staunchness or fanaticism. except for the years when i was living in that other country, my cousin and i would also call each other up on weekends sometimes, when not in the same cities, and would have long conversations. he was the one person in my larger family (other than my parents, sister, husband) who was curious and open to ideas other than his own. since our return back to india, in fact, this cousin showed even more curiosity to our ideas, way of living, but mostly our political ideologies and how we lived in and understood our marital life; he was still of the opinion that our society was moralistic about sex, he still looked down upon that, he still put me in that category too, but he also understood and possibly wondered about the way we defined our marriage, with fidelity and loyalty being the cornerstones without the need to procreate and grow our family and without co-habiting with parents (which i think is the norm even now in urban india as long as the younger married couple lives and works in the same city as the guy's parents). meanwhile my cousin had had multiple girlfriends, had married one of them, and after many years in the marriage had realised how incompatible they were and got a divorce. the rest of our large family had always known how incompatible his then love and wife seemed to us and thus him, how he had been smitten not by love but by the glamor of her (she is an exuberant, ambitious, loving, extrovertish and stubborn person, who was a TV actress and an event hostess, and who loved the spotlight of attention). he had had a few girlfriends after the marriage as well. xxxxxxxxx But this post is an effort to understand this last weekend when my cousin said to me that he needed to recalibrate and dial down our relationship and show up in my life less often. that he had in his love for family misunderstood or misjudged how welcome he was in my life. and that my definitions and my way of life were becoming too much for him to bear in his cost benefit analysis. xxxxxxxxx This cousin was brought up by my mom and her younger sister substituting for his mom in his early childhood as his mom had not really been prepared for or wanted motherhood, esp that for the little boys she gave birth to. When my mom got married and left her paternal home, it was her younger sister who cared for him and he considers her like a mother. xxxxxxxxx Once, years before he found the woman he would marry, his mom had visited him and stayed with him awhile.

in one of my classes this semester, only 4 students are enrolled. and on any given day, 2-3 turn up to class. 2 are guys, 2 are girls and only one of them is kinda regular. a few days ago only one guy and this regular girl were there when i started talking. i showed them the attendance sheet i had created and put up as it was still the start of the semester and i started logging that day's attendance in it. the girl interrupted me with a slightly concerned "maybe we can wait for 10 minutes ....". my instantaneous reaction (to all such words by students in general) was "don't worry about other students/people". and then something about her guileless concern about those missing the attendance call made me add to that, "you know we women are brought up with the training that it is our job to worry about everyone else, and it is not fair". the other kid in the class was at this point busy writing something down in his notebook and seemed disconnected from our conversation. and the girl replied to my words with "but shouldn't everyone be like that?" implying whether it was not an ideal world where everyone was worried and concerned about everyone else, and rather than me telling her to tone down her concern for others which i was suggesting came from our conditioning as women in this society, would it not be better that we also conditioned men like that? i don't remember my exact words, but i said something to the effect "No. this is probably coming from not just age (and some experience) but also how we (human beings) have started to understand these things better... there is only so much worry one can take, and worry turns to stress, and moreover we don't have the same information as those other people have for whom we might be worrying so that worry might not be helpful often..." i did not say that sometimes it might actually worsen things for those others or for third parties in the situation, that such worry can often turn women into nags, that it is not just not fair but also possibly counter productive... she nodded somewhat absorbingly. and then i started teaching. 10 minutes or so later i just realised that no other students had walked in. and i happened to smile and mention this. the girl student smiled back.