Sunday, August 26, 2001		Life Ties

VAIDEHI was intelligent, beautiful and successful. Yet there was something horribly wrong with her life. The pressures at her workplace threatened to push her to breaking point. Relationships on the personal front were fraught with misunderstandings with her kith and kin barraging her with accusations and callousness. People with whom she had formal contact such as neighbours, business clients and acquaintances were unable to ‘figure her out’. There were too many gaps in her appearance-behaviour-action which got converted into question marks, giving her a dubious public perception. While no one doubted her calibre or her being in a position of authority or for that matter her good intention, they however couldn’t take her for what she was.

They dismissed her positive traits and blew her inadequacies out of proportion. If they felt shortchanged with her contradictory behaviour, she certainly felt let down and cheated while receiving what she perceived as grudging love, half- hearted appreciation and reluctant sincerity. She felt she was giving her 100 per cent to everything that she undertook, investing emotions and feelings only to receive a pittance in return. It wasn’t fair taking the brunt for everything that went wrong. She surely deserved better.

It took Vaidehi’s plain-speaking cousin Rohit to make her see things logically from others’ point of view.

He had seen her through childhood and was familiar with her pattern of behaviour. He also knew that she was a genuinely warm-hearted person who loved her family and friends unconditionally. The innocent manner in which she surrendered emotionally to them made her expect the same kind of love, help and understanding from them. Instead, much to her horror and confusion she managed to inadvertently trigger negative emotions in their mind leaving her to brood over her bad luck. Rohit felt if she honestly and willingly analysed her actions, she could identify specific reasons for rubbing people the wrong way. After which it would be up to her to seek remedial action.

According to him the root cause of all her relationship and work-related problems pertained to her honourable intentions failing to get converted into opportune action. When this happened with an eerie regularity people, even those she professed undying love for, stopped giving her the benefit of doubt. And, when she did do something nice it would be taken for granted and when she didn’t, get bloated out of proportion. Going over some of the recent hurting episodes he tried to get her to see if it was divine intervention or something of her own doing that made people turn away from her.

Vaidehi’s current tale of woes pertained to her in-laws’ who she felt were being insensitive to her feelings. She felt they were insulting her in full view of the extended family by superseding her offers of help and advice preferring instead to route their work through obliging relatives.

They were making it a point to politely decline her offer to drive them, arrange finances, fix up appointments and negotiate favourable deals opting to do things on their own.

Vaidehi was left nursing an injured pride, loss of face and a sense of rejection. Agonised, she asked Rohit, "is it a gender thing ? Maybe because I am a woman they don’t think I can be of any real help. Or since I am after all a daughter-in-law they feel I wouldn’t have their best interests at heart.

Maybe this is one way of getting back at my parents and me who, they are convinced, don’t match up to their sophisticated status.

Rohit chided her for jumping to improbable wild conclusions, distorting her entire perspective on a set of in-laws who were most understanding, non-interfering and incapable of harbouring such notions. They loved her and were proud of her but there was something which had made them wary of her. He told her to go back slightly in time to see if they had always sidetracked her offer of help, bringing in ‘outsiders’ to do their bidding. In the initial years of marriage, she eagerly offered help. Whether it was taking her father-in-law for a medical examination or calling up an investment banker friend to advise on property and financial matters or taking her mother-in-law to a sound jeweller she shared their concerns and bent backwards trying to see how she could help them best. They hadn’t expected this assistance from her. It was only when she voluntarily offered and convinced them that she was not putting herself to undue trouble that they relented and let her take charge. If at all, they were impressed with her network, willingness, enthusiasm and passionate concern.

Tentatively things would be tied up, dates set, programmes planned down to the minutest detail.

As they settled down to wait, Vaidehi herself would get caught up with other important things.

There was always something urgent that demanded her immediate attention. Desperately juggling tasks, she would lag behind deadlines as she re-scheduled appointments, asked for grace time, apologised for cancellations and rushed from one place to another. Her mobile and office lines never stopped ringing and half her time was spent in undoing the damage created in her enthusiasm to please all the people all the time. In a frenzied overdrive, she would be too busy to talk, eat, relax or sit and sort out the mess she found herself in.

Her good intentions, howsoever genuine and well-meaning, would get relegated into the background as she acquired the reputation of being unreliable, disorganised and ineffective. Like her in-laws, her friends and colleagues too learnt that it was better not to take her offer of help unless they were prepared to waste an entire day on tenterhooks.

Did this chaos and state of constant busyness make her feel important and wanted or could she function only under crisis ? Rohit reminded Vaidehi that most of the times she created expectations around herself by offering to run everybody’s errands. With the same dexterity, she dashed their hopes to the ground. Her inability to prioritise tasks, to say no and to effectively manage her time led to confusion. This created the damaging impression of her being disorganised. What was sad was not this perception that people held of her but their dismissal of her warm and helpful nature. She had to accept that she was no superwoman. Also, if she was unable to be ‘of use’ to others she would not be failing in her duty towards them. The love that she was likely to receive from them was not directly proportionate to what she could physically do for them. Her eager- beaver attitude had to be backed with practical considerations of "when and how am I going to do it ?" or "let me see, what do I have on my day’s agenda, before I take this on as well". She had to realise that in the absence of any practical hard core thinking, she was left with a dozen odd difficult situations demanding her immediate attention. What made things worse was her inability to accept that the task at hand was going to be time-consuming and that there was no way she would be able to extricate herself.

With the result, she kept people on hold. She made impossible promises to salvage things. It was only when they got completely out of hand that she would be forced to see that she had goofed-up. To make matters worse, she would either go underground and be unavailable or launch into a long explanation of why she got held up. Either way, people were left fuming. What hurt them was not that she could not be there for them. They were understanding enough to know that emergencies do crop up. What upset them was her ruining their entire day and then treating it casually. When this pattern would get repeated, which it did, they would silently wash their hands off her. Since the relationship itself demanded a modicum of cordiality, most of them maintained a façade of polite tolerance but deep down they knew they could not bank on her. They remained guarded and kept their affection on hold. Which is why she always felt that even though she loved them to distraction, they had rarely reciprocated.