Amitav Ghosh is a favourite author, and I find it difficult to answer in my own head which of his works is my favourite. I hadn’t expected The Glass Palace to be equalled, but The Shadow Lines, which I read recently, is quite the competition.
One of the characters in the book is the narrator’s grandmother, a strong-willed person with her own sets of ideals and ideas. A description of hers that has stuck with me long after the book had been finished is “her fear of accepting anything from anyone that she could not return in exact measure.” I can completely relate to that! Sadly so, I’d add. The corollary to that is expectations from others when one is the giver. It wouldn’t be right to label it as a transactional approach, because the expectation is not in terms of quantity, but more in terms of thought, consideration, acknowledgement and so on. Yet, the expectation exists. And thus a vicious cycle is born. In many ways, it is a subset of the ‘judgment’ theme.
I have seen at least three ‘levels’ in the way I treat this. The largest set consists of those from whom I am uncomfortable taking anything because I know I cannot/do not want to return it in any measure, let alone exact. The second set is those from whom I can accept things, but would feel guilty about not being able to give back. The last set consists of those with whom I don’t feel the need to keep track. It’s almost a mirror image when applied to ‘giving’. There is a comfort in dealing with the last set that is very gratifying, so I’d obviously like more folks there.
And hence the questions – where does it start? In the taking or the giving? Are the first two sets a manifestation of my ego – “I don’t want to be seen as..” What of the expectations of others? I intuitively know that it starts with giving, the trick though is letting go of the expectations that come with it!
