The Misfit

If ever a term has described me aptly it's a "misfit". Lets start from the beginning. Since, my Grandpa had lost all in the move from Pakistan to India during the partition, it had been an uphill ride all along. They were a conventional struggling Punjabi business family till my mum came along. She came from a service class family from small town UP. She was a Punjabi too but a modest, strict and extremely conservative upbringing in that small town made her very different from the family she married into.

My father was struggling very hard with my grandfather to build a business back in the 1980's. So he was mostly at work at all sort of hours and there was never a Sunday at our house. The only event we looked forward to in the week used to be a Monday night supper when we would go out to a restaurant to eat. Its not like he wasn't a part of our lives, he would help mum in the kitchen whenever he was home and we would go for short vacations at least a couple of times in the year but he was missing from the smaller everyday things. So our upbringing was like that of small town UP conservative girls rather than the Big bad Delhi that we lived in. It was always full of contradictions. We could wear shorts and skirts but not talk to boys. We could attend loads of activity programs in and out of school, all co-ed but not have any friends of the opposite sex. No 'boy' classmates could come home for a birthday party or even call to ask for homework. My mum expected us to live like we were in a government run school in her town rather than a public school in south Delhi. Another thing was the choice of school. We went to this school because it was convenient to get admission through a contact and it was close to home. My mother was too ignorant and father too occupied to rethink the choice of school even after our circumstances improved many fold.
So basically I was a misfit in school as most kids were from different kind of families than I was ( financially and culturally). And I was somehow always a little older (not literally) than the kids around me. Or at least I behaved like one. Being the elder sister, at home i was forced to be more responsible and not child like. Also my general nature of being aloof and introvert didn't help either. What I regret about those times is that no one was around to guide me. To talk to me and tell me that its important to be open in life, to make friends, to do as much as you can and not just sit in a corner and read. Anyway all of this made me quite anti social and probably because of being in the wrong school, my parents never approved of any of my friends and as a result there is hardly any friendship that I cherish from those all important school days.
I was always a misfit as most school mates were not good enough for me according to my parents and other playmates in the super posh colony where we lived were too good for me and quite intimidating.

Then came college, due to total lack of knowing what I wanted out of life and no guidance at all, I didn't end up in a great place. Though I did meet some good people and even became a part of this great group of friends and that was fun. I believed that we were great friends for life but it didn't last too long after we left college. These friends again came from diverse family backgrounds than mine. The truth was that I had more privileges than they had, my car had become the only source of commuting for everyone and somehow i used to be conveniently left out when the car wasn't needed. But I was too innocent to think about all this then, the concept of money being a criteria for friendship did not exist for me. In fact that's why i was a misfit as i used the privileges I had without realising that people around me could not have them. My parents had never made us feel that we were quite well off. We mostly lived a modest life so we didn't fit in with the moneyed crowd and somehow were excluded from the non moneyed ones. All this really struck me when I left college and me and another friend got married just about an year after that. I married below my parent's expectations. I did not marry money. This friend married much above everyone's expectations. She married money. And suddenly most of the college group ignored and left me high and dry and stuck to the other girl. That's when I realized what had been happening all along. Now all this is purely based on what I think. I have never confronted anyone. This is another flaw in the way I live my life. I let friends go rather than confront them. And somehow till now (when i find myself with no friends), I thought this was a great idea.

Then came work, I joined an IT company. I was good at my work but somehow initially judged by my family. The manager thought that since I drove my own car to work and my family was well off, i didn't need the job so he assumed that I was not responsible enough. I worked very hard to break this perception and finally quit and joined an even better company. Here I made sure I underplayed myself till i had won every one's confidence and admiration for my work. But I didn't fit too well here either. Most of my colleagues were from small towns and had a very different set of ideas. I, in no way mean to demean anyone in this post. When I say 'not well off' or 'from small towns' , I simply want to highlight the differences in basic living and thinking that exists due to difference in exposure and circumstances. I know its not impossible to get along with people who are different than us, I did get along with most people around me at all points in my life but I never could make true friends who understand and really know me. Its not easy to understand or enjoy the same things if there are a lot of deep rooted, basic differences. I was always afraid of being judged for who I was or who I wasn't, so i never really trusted anyone enough to be real with them. Maybe I never really tried. But now all I feel is regret for all those growing up years when people make friends who last them a lifetime, I don't have any that I can call to cry my heart out to in the middle of the night.
Marriage made my social situation even worse, the husbands friends were a world apart from where I came and didn't do much to help me adjust. As a result we drifted apart from them too.

I know that this post is miserable and badly written. It has no definite direction. I don't know how to control my emotions to tweak this post to make it look good. I'm writing this only to get all of this off my chest. At the risk of sounding foolish or desperate or crazy, I will still publish it. Isn't that the whole idea of blogging?