You cannot find a mother in a motherboard

I fight a lot with my mother. Mostly it’s about love. At 56, no woman deserves this, she says. “There is nothing more painful for a woman than to see her child’s heart broken,” is how she usually likes to end our discussions. My mother has seen me fall in love numerous times and every time she has had the sense that love is no longer what it used to be.

It has taken me a while to understand what my mother means. I think emotional capitalism worries her. She is unable to hide her annoyance every time I talk about the romance of investment, growth and return.

Emotional capitalism is the cult of love and ‘letting go’ is the path to salvation.

The message is loud and clear: Fall in love. You have one life. Let go and reclaim your being. To settle for less is not an option. Aim high but be very careful as well. Every relationship is an investment and emotional capitalism promises returns on sound choices. The idea of investing one’s emotions is alien to my mother. You have never learnt to let go, I tell her. “That’s because I don’t have a credit card like you.”

Usually the argument is my fault because I start on the topic of love. But I end as soon as my mother rests her case. She then asks me if I have been eating properly and whether I am coming to Delhi anytime soon. At some point my father speaks from the background and my mother hands him the phone.

My father patiently listens to me talking about work. I rant against the combine for ten minutes or so and hang up. As a rule of thumb, I don’t discuss matters of love with my father because he is a simple minded man with a large organ of caution and a small organ of hope.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 16 but was too shy and anxious to do anything real and practical about it. So I did the next best thing: I wrote. One evening, when I was out playing, my father discovered my diary. His excuse was that he was looking for my exam results that he suspected I had hidden. My father displayed the answer sheets with red marks all over as exhibit number two (my diary was exhibit number one) and confirmed his suspicions.

Two years later, when I had a real girlfriend, my father got our phone tapped to check why the telephone bill was so high. He suspected I was responsible and the evidence proved him right. I don’t blame my old man. He retired as a detective. Worse, he worked with the government.

My mother, on the other hand, is a sensible woman who understands the subtle distinction between an encounter and a police encounter which is why I have long and more animated discussions with her when I am home (I cannot hang up on her in my father’s house).

The romantic ethic of my generation depresses her, she says, because there’s no room for devotion, care and sacrifice.

“Emotional capitalism is a paradox”. It demands you believe and not believe in love at the same time. “You can either let go or hold on. Faith and doubt can’t co-exist!” I have no answer to that. In moments like these I so wish I could embarrass my mother.

“What about sex and free love?” I say in my mind. “Another paradox.  Like a suryanamaskar at midnight,” a voice retorts in my head.