Family

You never chose them and yet they are the only ones who will never leave your side. You get upset with them, bang the phone down, and yet on the next day you call up when frustration tends to grip at your very heart.

They come in all shapes and sizes; they come with unsolicited advice, they come asking questions you do not want to answer and yet you end up answering them. You add them up as you grow older and when some of them leave you behind, you realize how much you miss them.

Sometimes you believe that the friends you meet on the way can replace them and you take solace in witticisms which say you can choose your friends, not your relatives. And they truly are a great pillar of support as we had found out when we moved to Singapore. As we increasingly leave the cities of our birth, we let go of one of our biggest support systems – family. In the increasingly insular and selfish worlds of our cities, we never realize what we are missing. In a life spent travelling between cubes our horizons start to close in on us till all that is left is a phone in our hands and noises in the airwaves between us.

I guess there comes a time in one’s life when we miss our families the most. And growing up in a large joint family, my life in this metropolis feels surreal at time. Because, whatever be the situation, you just want to know that they stand behind you.

And when they do, you stand tall.