The Ethics of Kinship by Faubion James;

Author:Faubion, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1331681
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

marriage

So finally, Deepa, you will be part of our family

When the news is out that Shrikanth and I intend to be married, I go to visit his aunt whom I have known well for some years before. “So finally, Deepa,” she says to me, putting her arm around me, “you will be part of our family.” It is a happy moment, of course, but I cannot help but feel just the slightest twinge because I have to realize at last that there is no such thing as fictive kin. I do not intend an absolute generalization of course, but mean only to say that kinship does on some level describe and circumscribe a set of formal relationships, and for as long as you say “She is like my own daughter” or “He is like a brother to me,” the relationship remains—like the language used—a simile, a stand-in: always a comparison, and never the real thing.

I wonder, what is it that prompts my cousin, many years my senior, who knew me first as a baby in Assam and then very briefly as a teenager, determined not to study computer science, to attend my wedding specifically because she knows my mother will likely not be there? What is it that urges Malathi Akka to make the long journey from Trichy to Bangalore with her two sons and husband though she is ill with cancer, urges her brothers to take it upon themselves to talk to Kousi Chitti in Toronto, tell her, entreat her to go to India because her daughter is to be married? To explain all this by merely invoking the obligatory duties of kinship would be to reduce my cousin’s actions to something far less than they were. To explain all this by invoking simultaneously many levels of closeness, obligation, affection, loyalty, and duty would be more accurate, more acceptable. But then do I begin with the story my mother tells me of how she falls down a staircase in Kallidaikurichi, and how Chandra Periamma (Malathi Akka’s mother), who loves her younger sister deeply, rushes to her side in a panic and uses the cloth of her new silk sari to bind the wound on my mother’s forehead? Perhaps I should start instead with the many hours Malathi Akka spends sewing little frocks for me, with her friendship with my father, who drives her and her husband from Digboi to Shillong for their honeymoon. I have little assurance, however, that once I tell all these stories and analyze them in great detail, I will have established the exact nature of my cousin’s closeness, obligations, affections, and loyalties. I think I shall have to take the easy way out: not by suggesting that Malathi Akka comes to my wedding merely because she is a relative, but by pointing out simply that my closest friends send wedding cards to us in Bangalore that summer because they are in Calcutta and Madras and Benaras taking care of their mothers and fathers, making sure their children are spending enough time with uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

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