First written: Sep 2024

Updated: February 2025.

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 angrily 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 afterwards 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 in 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 realized, without having the realization 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 transferred 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 realized 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. 

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. something to that effect. in response to something i had said to him. we had been walking in Mehrauli archaeological park, him, me, my sister, and my husband, and had just sat down in its restaurant to eat something. maybe the food or something else led the conversation to our recent visit to his hometown, and how there, an aunt of ours had felt obliged to invite us home and cook for us even though she had been sick. and how or whether our appreciation of her cooking, despite me being down with a travel tummy and not wanting to eat her puris and halwa, somehow perpetuated the belief and the custom that women live to feed and care for people. my cousin was of the opinion that given that our moms and aunts grew up in a world where they were not just taught this, but they started to derive their happiness mostly from others' happiness when being fed and cared for, the least we could do was continue to give them that happiness. i of course, differed by saying something to the effect that it was upon us to show them other possibilities of living, and that we were part of the problem if we just ate and praised their cooking, sometimes against how we truly felt about that, and thus kept demanding them to continue as they had been brought up. he said something about why i was always wanting to change people rather than accepting them as they were. i acknowledged that i was and replied that other people had told me that i was 'too progressive', and suggested that maybe he and my other cousins didn't get my perspective because they weren't possibly as progressive. that angered him and from there it spiraled onto how he thought i was calling him a racist (despite my confused protestations that i had never used that word for him), that i didn't need to judge him and everyone else all the time (to which i pointed out that in telling me that i didn't accept people and tried to always change them even he was making a big judgement and how people should be willing to be judged by others if we all do it all the time; he did relent to this grudgingly), and then eventually into a calmer declaration that he couldn't have someone in his life who thought she was more progressive than him. i remember saying that we probably had different definitions of what progressivism meant, that we would all always be less or more something than the people in our lives; and i remember the restaurant staff asking us to leave because of our loud argument disturbing other patrons. somewhere in that argument he also hinted at how me not letting people wear shoes in my home and not letting them take their chappals onto my living room rug had offended him; how he was usually the sorts who went with the flow and how my rigidity made him feel constrained.

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, especially 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. his mom had wanted daughters, if any children at all, and she was particularly fond of me.

once, years before he found the woman he would marry, his mom had visited him and stayed with him awhile. we used to live in the same city as him then. i remember my mother getting a call from his, an agitated hurt call after she had found condoms amongst his belongings. he had been unmarried then, probably in his mid/late-twenties. i also remember hearing his defense to the find, something about using them for masturbating, and possibly some hint to how that was a 'healthy habit'. i remember talking with mom and sis about it, that of course he was sexually active with his girlfriends, and that we shouldn't have to lie about such things simply because our parents couldn't accept the natural truth. his mother had always been somewhat neurotic too. (some years ago now she slipped into a deep depression, soon after retirement from a long academic career; she is a little better these days.) i remember feeling that although he, unlike many others in my family, dared to live a life beyond the boundaries of what our society permitted, he did not have the courage to come out with honesty about it. this was early 2000s. a few years later i would fall for this guy, who would take cross-country trains/flights to stay with me for weekends, once a month or so, and we would have feverish sex, without condoms, with him pulling out to prevent conception. the only person i have ever had sex with so far, who would also teach me much before we had the privacy for sex, that i needed to tell my mom something to that effect was up despite my growing up with a father who we had been taught by my mother to hide our lives from.

my cousin started visiting us and staying with us, on his short visits to delhi sometimes. we would take him out, share our only proper bathroom then with him, lay out our sofa-bed for him in our living room in our tiny flat then, and talk, play games, well into the night sometimes. once we took him out to dinner and i remember us talking about the movie Gully Boy, especially about the women characters in it. whether the girlfriend was crazily possessive or normal in threatening other women in her guy's life. whether the other character was stereotypically a 'white woman in india' given how easily she kisses the guy, knowing possibly that he is in a committed/complicated relationship with someone else. i remember these last words coming out of my mouth, and how i thought the director always cast Kalki Koechlin in such stereotypically white women roles, blissfully unaware of indian culture. and i remember my cousin accusing me of moralizing her desire for the guy, that that was how 'people' behaved when they felt attracted to someone, that if the kiss was reciprocated it grew into something more but in itself it was often the first expression of desire; but how would i know that in my small morally restricted world ... ending with the pointed question of 'had i ever just kissed someone like that?' i hadn't but i didn't then say that aloud. i thought about it for a long time, i still do. how for me there are eyes and words and body language and careful thought way before a kiss. how after a few months of dating my husband, i had on the phone told him how natural it felt for us to be breathing into each other's ears and necks, and i had asked him why he hadn't yet kissed me. how the next time we met we kissed, first barely brushing our lips against each other's, and then when i wanted to kiss him on the cheek as a goodbye how we ended up in each other's mouths. he used to call me a prude for the first few years we were together, affectionately. but even today, i wouldn't kiss someone to express my desire for them unless i had pondered over the consequences for both of us till its death; desire to me is still mostly emotionally and intellectually felt, much more than the need to kiss. 

for days after that argument with my cousin in Mehrauli archaeological park i went over every word said and not said, and i came to the conclusion that he misunderstood 'progressivism'. that although its definition is about wanting to change, people and society, to a more equitable and just one, he was probably unaware of it, and that in accusing me of wanting to change people he had in fact acknowledged that 'i was more progressive than him', but somehow he did not like the sound of those words, because unlike his judgement of me they sounded more in my favor. 

he recently called to wish us a happy new year, and we talked like nothing had happened to disrupt our relationship.