You may have seen some fathers helping their young daughters to appreciate the magic of a rainbow or brood over its colours, but certainly not someone ride roughshod over his daughter for her fascination for the arc in the sky. You may have come across some fathers not encouraging their daughters to study instead of doing household chores, but not someone who rips his daughter’s school project work to pieces just because she didn’t respond to his call in an instant.
A daughter negotiating such unpredictable behaviour of a significant other may react in many different ways – she may try to outdo the father’s brutishness or she may try, as a protest, to nurture and strengthen the good values left in her which such ruthless acts try to annihilate.
‘My Cries and My Triumphs’ is a memoir of a young girl face to face with such ghastly behaviour of a capricious father, which is counterpoised by the love and care of her mother and maternal grandparents. The writer’s steadfast determination to negate the crippling effects of her circumstances finally sees her through in realising her dreams and makes her case so ‘special’. Her story of resilience could inspire many others who are fighting odds in life.
These days it is not unusual to read about disadvantaged and deprived children achieving stellar positions in entrance examinations like IIT or jobs held in high esteem by the society like IAS. But in most cases, the disadvantage encountered by these bright children is economic or social. Here is a case in which the malaise goes deeper to ravage the emotional bedrock of a child. Every time she cries out for love and a normal atmosphere at home, her miseries pile up. Her asthma and poor health make the situation worse. Yet what makes her story so special is her ability to wipe out her emotional scars as she goes along.
‘My Cries and My Triumphs’ is the coming of age story of a girl with dreams in her eyes, growing up in a stiflingly oppressive and stratified coal mining town in Odisha, Rampur, in the late seventies. Like any other normal child, she is enchanted by a rainbow or the flow of a river and is eager to explore the hillock by climbing it. The father, wasting away in his middle-level office job in the mines, is supposedly bright having studied in Delhi. The father’s frustration is born out of the mismatch between his academic credentials and the dreary atmosphere that he finds himself in. He takes it out on the daughter and his wife, who shows streaks of ambition, enrolling for a teacher’s training course in her hometown. He oscillates in his ambivalence between passivity and violence, between acceptance of his family and rejection. While he seesaws between the two extremes with alarming regularity, it dries up all the yen for domestic bliss in others and they walk out.
Once free from the oppression, the child puts her learnings from life and the resultant resolve to best use. She achieves what a normal middle class Indian girl normally aims for: an engineering degree, a foothold in the Tech capital of the world, an understanding life partner and a couple of adoring kids. All hunky dory at the end.
This book is written keeping American readers in mind, going by the surfeit of American terms used to depict Indian situations, for instance, program for course, dorm for hostel, and so on. Terms like dowry have been explained for the uninitiated. While the intended audience will understand the story, what they will not appreciate fully is the system of dependence and expectation of the old parents and siblings on a male income earner. This is an old tradition for an earning member to take care of the education of younger brothers, meet the expenditures of the sister’s arranged marriage and keep the old and ailing parents with him. This particular tradition has turned out to be the cause of much marital discord because society is still at a crossroad of traditional values and modern aspirations.
If I must give credence to these sociological forces behind our relationships, I have to play the Devil’s advocate here for the deviant father. The young householder, with an extended family to take care of, a wife who gets on so well with her parents and his career frustrations to boot, fails to bring himself to peace with what is at hand. He doesn’t know what is right: taking the spiritual route or the family responsibility; turning vegetarian or remaining a non-vegetarian; staying separately from family or together. He experiments all these, over and over again, but doesn’t find an answer. He gradually turns into an abuser of his wife and his kids, forfeiting any chance of sympathy for his cause.
Did he have a version too? We have no way of knowing from this memoir, as the cancelled father disappears from the narrative midway. Did he finish the book he was writing? Did he go up in the religious order that he had joined and once administered? Did he do well in his job where he had once shown efficiency? Where did he go? These questions will always bother me when I think about the book.
The narrative is full of candour and directness as it comes straight from the heart of a victm. ‘My Cries and My Triumphs’ proves that from the ruins of our unmet yearnings we can still build a mansion of contentment.
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