COZY

The parents are staying. Which means non-stop Bloomberg television (watch the stocks go up and down, up and down), good home cooked Ameri-Indian food and curling up on the couch watching sitcoms and football. Everybody Loves Raymond makes my mother laugh - her face crinkles up and her eyes crinkle up and she shakes her head. "Dysfunctional," says my father. "They are dysfunctional." And he laughs, too. Silently, with a funny little furrow of his brow, not unlike the crinkly cosiness of mom.

"No," says my mother, "that's what a real family is like. All this phoniness, all this pretending, here in US. People are so afraid to talk. They are lonely." Like all immigrants, my mother has a narrative that says this is better about America and that is better about the mother country. The narrative serves a purpose. The narrative makes things make sense. Like, well, a narrative. A story, with a meaning. With a moral. And in my mother's narrative, people in America are good and honest, but sometimes lonely because they expect a kind of perfection that is sterile. If only America would listen to this nice Indian mother. She'd sort them out, all right. And God help you all if she decided to do just that. Goodness.

Comments

[calvo]

I like this little story, Madhu. It's kinda nice to "meet" your parents.

:)

[MD]

Thanks, calvo. (

(I am getting fat and lazy with all this parental attention, though :) )

[Lisa Williams]

I saw you last week and can attest you were neither fat nor lazy.

I would be happy to vote for Madhu's mom for President, myself.

[MD]

Lisa, we should run a draft mom campaign, lol.