Love, with an albatross attached: Part II

(This is Part II of a two-part essay. Read Part I.)

Discipline

In my fourteenth year on earth, my Bombay Aunt decided it was time I got the advice that was to change the course of my life yet again. A career socialite and mother, her biggest achievement in life had been her marriage to a thin South Indian man with cholesterol problems and a 6'1", hard-science-inclined son. My cousin possessed everything a human being in modern India could wish: male genitalia, fair skin, caste, property waiting to be inherited and a capacity to love quantum mechanical concepts. In all these ways, he was now my superior. But all hope was not lost for me yet.

I was old enough to be warned, she told me. Her tone was one of careful seriousness. Friendship, she revealed, was a plot, a scam. The world's biggest scam. "They want to bring us down," she said, "and step over us." She used the Tamil word avaal for "they". Think about it, she urged. If you become occupied with emotions, phone calls and sharing experiences, you lose focus, you lose direction and they take advantage. They get you out of their way in class. They win. I didn't ask who "they" were and she didn't tell me. She was a Brahmin woman in post-Mandal India. We both knew who haunted her dreams. She needed no proof that her theory was correct, but proof came all the same when her son fell down two flights of stairs and smashed his left kidney a few years later. She was sure it was a jealous classmate who had pushed him because there was no other way of incapacitating him in the race for first rank. He was, after all, a good boy who stayed out of the friendship racket.