Radhika and Shirish Khot (59 and 62) are busy turning their second bedroom (which they had put up on Airbnb) back into a room for their son. After four years in the U.S., Pranav, 34, is headed home. The feelings about his move are mixed on both sides.
Mona, 44, moved in with her father Shekhar G., 75, five months ago, after living in other cities and countries for over 20 years. They are not doing well at all together. At first it seemed like a good idea for the ageing father and now-single daughter (with a child away in college) to live together, but things quite quickly turned difficult.
Govind and Sarita K. (60 and 56) are preparing to move in with their son, his wife and four-month-old child. The younger couple want to resume careers but don’t want to put their child in day care till he is at least two. The older couple had planned to remain independent, financially and socially, and provide support when needed, but this ‘lock-stock-barrel’ move, as they describe it, was never discussed. Now, they feel it would be churlish not to agree.
Examples of this kind abound. Many urban Indian families are experiencing a new pattern, an unexpected and unplanned re-ordering of families and living arrangements. Families that have been fairly nuclear for over five decades, perhaps over two generations, are now looking at living under the same roof for extended periods because of a variety of changed circumstances.
Traditionally, two, and even three, generations of Indian families have always lived together, but the last four to five decades have seen a shift to nuclear family units in most urban centres. For instance, Radhika and Shirish left the parental home to form their own unit in suburban Mumbai a year or two after they married in 1977. Before them, their parents too had moved away from their ancestral homes in the Konkan region to central Mumbai.
This is how it was, all over India, in the 50s and 60s, with one or two young people from a family moving to urban centres to study, qualify and seek jobs. They would then marry and set up house there. The generations would get together during holidays, visits, festivals and weddings, or when the older couple became too old to manage on their own. Nuclear families had become so commonplace that many families are not quite prepared now for what they feel is a bit of a backward leap. And sure enough, fault lines have begun to appear.
But first, what are the circumstances in which grown children stay on with parents or return to live with them? In some homes, it is because the young adult takes up extended periods of education, training or internship, and cannot afford to live elsewhere. “My son graduated in architecture, then he interned, where he was paid a pittance, then he got a job on which he could not afford to live on his own. Now he is doing a Masters after working for a few years,” says one parent. “He is going to be around for a while. We don’t mind, it is our duty. But it’s difficult… our timings, food habits, everything is quite different.”
Job instability and slumps in certain industries have seen young adults reluctant to take on home loans or rents, and they prefer to stay with parents. People are getting married late or choosing not to marry at all; and staying at home becomes quite the natural way to go. With many marriages not making it past the third or fourth year, many young people simply return home after a divorce.
Equally, some parents want their adult children to continue at home, particularly if they are not married. “Times have changed, the cost of living is high; if they are on their own, they don’t eat well, they fall into odd company… we moved away from our own parents. But those were different times,” says Ayesha Lalwani.
Even in these situations, co-habiting is not easy. As Ayesha admits, she is often told firmly by her 29-year-old daughter not to interfere when she questions her eating out too much or ordering too much stuff online. “There is no space anymore in her room and her things are overflowing into the passage and front room,” she complains. “And what about saving for the future?” Yet, she still baulks at the idea of her daughter moving out.
What are the areas that become shaky when a grown child returns or continues to live in the parental home or expects parents to ‘collapse their lives’ into his or her unit, as in the case of Govind and Sarita? The usual stress points are finances, space and lifestyle choices, including meal times, eating out, social drinking, perceived micro-managing, and so on. The issues that crop up can lead to anything from awkwardness to outright conflict. And, paradoxically, it is perhaps the more democratic nature of the nuclear family that leads to problems.
In the classic joint family, hierarchies or lines of command were well-etched. The patriarch decided on how money would be spent, salaries were handed to him; decision-making was centralised. The matriarch ran the kitchen. In this dispensation, lifestyle choices, including what to wear, what to eat, choice of entertainment and other pursuits, were easily and centrally decided. People may not have been very happy with this, but there was no ambiguity and not much scope to overturn the order. In families with some degree of democracy, grown children were sometimes consulted.
What people are dealing with now is a nuclear family that has to suddenly accommodate, willy-nilly, a wide range of often conflicting habits and lifestyle choices. The parents cannot, and often do not even want to, set down rules. But the granting of autonomy to the adult son or daughter and the expectation that they will respect the parents as “people with their own lives to lead,” as Govind puts it, is also a rather blurred boundary to negotiate. It is a far more complex situation than what the worn-out phrase ‘generation gap’ covers.
Pranav, the Khots’ son, wonders about day-to-day things like food (“I can’t eat Indian food every day”) as well as larger issues like privacy and boundaries about his relationships. His parents worry about whether they can pursue their own passions. They both retired recently and had a full second innings, as they call it, planned out. Now, they wonder if they will have the freedom to do things like “simply shut down the kitchen” on some days, go on holidays. As for sharing of expenses, neither parents nor son have brought up the subject yet. It remains in an invisible zone for now, but is bound to become an issue if some ground rules are not set early on.
Mona gets annoyed because her father watches four hours of TV every evening (“crappy serials and comedy shows at high volume, no news channels”), and the slapdash housekeeping that he “lets the maidservant get away with”. Her father is aggravated by her sacking the old domestic help and making what he thinks is an unwarranted ‘big deal’ about hygiene in the house. But in his book, a father must offer a roof to a divorced daughter. Mona thinks her father’s house must be ‘taken in hand’ and his entertainment choices modified if he is to remain mentally alert. Govind and Sarita are upset. “While we enjoy the company of our grandchild,” says Govind, “my wife and I are not at all happy to leave our home and live with our son and take full responsibility of the baby during the day. We hope to carry on till the baby is a year old and then see if other arrangements can be made.” After three decades of working and bringing up children, they want to travel, socialise and relax, and not — as one of their friends describes — “become chauffeur and nanny, free of charge”.
The clash areas are many — money, division of responsibilities, habits, lifestyle choices, privacy and boundaries — in the uneasy arrangements made by these families. However, a few of them do manage this new ‘loosely-jointed’ family rather well. Perhaps 82-year-old Debojit Sarkar has found one of the best solutions yet.
Sarkar and his wife have lived on their own since their children grew up and left. A couple of years ago, they began to have health problems; so his son and daughter, both in their late 50s and whose children have left the nest, decided that they would sell off their apartments in other parts of the city and buy apartments in the same complex as Sarkar. “For some reason,” says Sarkar, laughing, “the kitchen is the epicentre of all troubles.” So each of them has their own kitchen but “one makes breakfast, another provides lunch, and the third makes dinner.”
“We manage to annoy each other minimally,” is how Sarkar describes it. And that, finally, might just be as good as it gets.
(All names have been changed for privacy.)
Gouri Dange is a writer and family counsellor. Her fiction and non-fiction books and features cover a wide range of human relationships.
