If you’ve ever seen a psychologist, visited a counselor, listened to a radio psychology talk-show, read a magazine article on relationships, or watched “Frazier” or “Oprah” – you know that you’re supposed to set boundaries.
It’s the healthy thing to do. It’s what gives us the room to be us and to manage our lives. Boundary-less people are either pathetic or social lepers.
That’s the prevailing view of modern Western psychology and our culture in general.
I subscribe to this in many ways. When I ask someone how they are, and they tell me their every problem right down to why their morning coffee was too watered-down, I want to buy them a mirror and an audio-recording of themselves to listen to later. If someone I don’t know well or don’t like that much gets in my physical space, I sort of want to kill them, or at least banish them to another continent.
This attitude does not bode well in India where by and large, there are no boundaries.
People get in my physical space all the time. People get in each other’s physical space. In essence, there is no personal space. The cows have more personal space than people. Cows are actually kinda’ boundaried if you watch them. But I digress….
Yesterday, as I took an auto-rickshaw taxi across town to meet Emily for dinner, we ran into traffic on the narrow main-road that one might consider the Cross-Town Expressway, only it’s one lane at best. What was causing the Sig-Alert? A man pushing his very wide, two-wheeled vegetable cart down the street. In Los Angeles, he would have been dead within minutes – from angry people killing him, not being hit. In Jodhpur, people seemed very understanding because how else is he going to get the vegetable stand home?
While stopped in “traffic”, I had a cow walk up and sniff me on one side of the open taxi. On the other side – about two inches from me – two women were chatting away as if there wasn’t a taxi, let alone a large, scruffy white guy close enough to smell their breaths. They do not use Listerine.
On the way home at 9:30 at night, we hit “traffic” again because of people coming out of a temple where they were making offerings. People come out of the temple, into the street and sort of look around confused and meander a bit before choosing a direction and moving. Being in traffic doesn’t seem to be a real concern and drivers appear to expect the slow-down there.
Emily observed one of the few acts of boundary-setting we’ve seen in India when the owner of a sweets shop actually yelled at a cow who brushed-up against his shop to take refuge from traffic. Naturally, a sweets shop is intriguing for a cow and she got a little “nosey” which in turn had the man enraged as he chased her away. Shocking given that cows are holy to Hindus. He was either muslim or not religious enough to let a cow eat his merchandise.
This morning, we woke-up early because Emily had a live-lecture to give at 7:30. When she turned on her computer, she ran into a fatal problem – the WiFi wasn’t working. Sometimes they turn off all the switches in the office at night, which kills the WiFi along with the lights – a flick of a switch solves the problem. Emily opened the door to our room, which is adjacent to the main office (selected for maximum WiFi signal) only to find two staff members sleeping on our doorstep.
When I left the room a half-hour later, they were still there. I stepped around one guy and actually felt bad for leaving our room. When I headed upstairs to the lounge to work while Emily was lecturing, two other guys were sleeping on the floor around the sofa and chairs – but not on them. I quietly set myself up on one of the floor cushions on the other side of the room.
Although I felt badly for these guys, and wished they at least had some form of bed, I’m not so sure this is tremendously different than they would experience at home. In fact, they may have more personal space on the floor of a lounge which was formerly a living room in this nice, big, old Rajasthani mansion.
With some exceptions in the big cities and in cases where people move for work, Indian families still live together – throughout their lives. Married couples live with his parents. If there are three or more sons, you either see expansion of the family home, or everyone packs in.
Eventually everyone has children and things get a little more crowded. Parents and children often share beds and three people on a twin bed is not only common, but possibly the most advanced scientific achievement in India. How people conceive children in this arrangement is a mystery to both Emily and me. It definitely gives support to the idea of the stork.
As you can imagine, this situation is not ideal for everyone. We’ve heard stories of sisters-in-law who don’t get along, as well as the classic mother-in-law/daughter-in-law tensions. Daughters-in-law are responsible for all household work and chores. They essentially work for their mothers-in-law which means that women marry a family, not just a man. Emily has said that if she were Indian or Nepali, she would never marry an only-son because then she would be saddled with all the work for most of her life.
Lay this on top of the fact that marriages are still mostly arranged, and a woman can easily find herself ushered into a miserable situation through no fault of her own.
That’s not to say there aren’t many happy marriages. We’ve heard people say that it’s becoming more common for parents to allow couples to meet and get to know each other before getting married and to even have the right of refusal.
George at Keraleeyam told us that he believes strongly in people’s ability to turn down matches that their parents make for them, but he doesn’t subscribe to “love marriages”. “This boy and that girl, they fall in love. That is the easy part. But what do they really know about each other? They don’t know if this person is a good person or if they come from a good family. The parents have been married a long time. They know. They can look for all the things that make a marriage work for their whole lives.”
Basically, kids are young, naive and stupid. Let the people who have been through it try to weed out the potential mistakes. I see where he’s coming from.
Still, we have met several “love marriages” where the couple fell in love and then asked their families to agree to the marriage. Arpan, one of our guesthouse owners is very proud of having a love marriage, which I suspect is less common in Jodhpur than in major cities. They now live with his parents, brother and sister-in-law.
At Keraleeyam, we met an Indian couple from Delhi a few years younger than us who met in college, fell madly in love and convinced their parents to agree to the marriage even though her family is Brahmin (top caste) and his family is mixed-caste. She said her parents were pretty cool with it all, especially when they met him. I’m sure it helped that he is part of a professional and very successful Delhi family and was studying architecture to join and inherit his father’s architecture firm.
More interestingly, this modern, educated, urban couple lives with his parents – kinda’, sorta’. They have their own upstairs floor of the house which is like an apartment, complete with kitchen and separate entrance. There is no front door, but they happily assured us their bedroom has a door. They both can walk in and out of the parents’ apartment freely at any time of day or night – as if they were all living together. In reality, they stop in maybe once a day and have family meals just once or twice a week.
This couple has used a hybrid of Western and Indian approaches and amazingly subscribed to, and created boundaries. They say that media and western influence are changing Indian viewpoints and lifestyle – at least in the cities.
Isn’t it interesting that at the same time people get to marry for love, they also erect new boundaries to create smaller, nuclear families?
It makes me wonder – are passion and togetherness enemies? Is the large, extended family piled-in together only good when couples don’t mind the distraction from each other? Or do Indians conflate the Western ideas of choosing love and having personal space? Do we have to put up barriers to protect our romantic love and coupledom? Perhaps in a way, there’s some baby in their bathwater…
It may also be the natural and understandable impulse to have some boundaries and personal space when you can afford it. Maybe inside – even among people who expect to live together forever – everyone has a little rage and wants to chase a cow out of their sweets shop.
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