I had always been very close to my children and had been through hard times bringing them up alone after my husband and I separated. I did not want to put a strain on their relationship with their father, wanting always to be fair and honest and just, wanting them to develop as ethical, compassionate human beings. This was often a difficult line to walk. How much freedom is too much? How much experimentation with relationships is too much and when must I intervene?
But Anahita and I stopped talking to each other. I could feel only hostility and disapproval when she was in the same room. Perhaps she felt the same. I felt I couldn’t breathe in my only safe space, my own home. Finally things came to such an awful stage that I had to ask her to leave – I felt strangulated by her presence in my home, and I couldn’t continue living that way.
In 2002 my son Revanta left to do his Bachelor’s degree in dance and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and was away for four years. When he came back he wanted to learn choreography and creative arts, so he left again to do his Master’s in performance and creative research at the University of Roehampton in London. He stayed on in London after his degree to work for a while. At some stage during this period, during one of his visits home, he said to me that he felt his father was very lonely and needed looking after so he wanted to move to his house for a few days. He had also mentioned a few times in earlier years that our apartment, situated within the Darpana premises, on the first floor of the building, was like living in a fish bowl, always being watched for who came in and out and when. The long and short of it was that he moved out, permanently. It was never discussed with me. I was never told. It happened.
In Revanta’s absence, my daughter Anahita, younger by five years, and I bonded even closer. She came out as gay when she was fourteen and that was fine by me and the rest of my family. Then she started being with older women, design students who were twenty-one and twenty-two years old, and I didn’t quite approve. I worried that in their company, she may start doing drugs. She didn’t like my disapproval, but we were close enough to be able to talk about it.
In 2009 she too went away to college in the US, and would return twice a year. In her second year there she developed a serious back problem, and missed a year spending it at home, trying various therapies. Through all of this, we remained very close.
Then things started going wrong. I date this to 2016, but she to much earlier. My relationship with my partner was a problem for her. She also felt I favoured Revanta, when in fact my family constantly chided me for the exact opposite. She seemed to dislike the way I spoke to her about her needing to lose weight if she wanted to dance professionally with us. She thought I treated her friends rudely or brusquely. With every absence, the bond was breaking. We both said and did things to hurt the other. We stayed under the same roof but our individual bedrooms became the place to retreat to, far away from the other.
But Anahita and I stopped talking to each other. I could feel only hostility and disapproval when she was in the same room. Perhaps she felt the same. I felt I couldn’t breathe in my only safe space, my own home. Finally things came to such an awful stage that I had to ask her to leave – I felt strangulated by her presence in my home, and I couldn’t continue living that way. My ex husband, who was very close to her, tried to intervene and we had, or tried to have, one last dialogue. She denounced me, or what she felt I had become, as a mother. And moved in with her partner. I was broken. I couldn’t breathe. I felt suffocated. I couldn’t sleep. I was anxious. This went on for a few months and nothing seemed to help. Finally I decided that no one except me could solve this, that I had to get hold of myself.
My son had, some years ago, dated a young girl he grew up with, and whose mother I had known over the years although never as a close friend. I knew she had been involved in healing movements and was a seeker. One day she dropped by to see me, and my dam broke. She listened to me calmly, making me feel calmer, and then spoke to me of NVC – Non Violent Communications, founded and developed by Marshall Rosenberg, and inspired by the strategies of Mahatma Gandhi. She sent me links and videos of how it worked. She spoke of how we can become aware of certain buttons or words that derail conversations, how we can learn to choose not to use them. Something in what she was saying seemed like a glimmer of hope so I started a serious study of it.
The ultimate aim of NVC is to develop societal and personal relationships based on a restorative ‘partnership’ paradigm and mutual respect, rather than a retributive, fear-based ‘domination’ paradigm. NVC holds that most conflicts between individuals or groups arise from miscommunication about their human needs, due to coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, shame etcetera. These violent modes of communication divert attention away from problem solving thus perpetuating conflict.
I started seeing a pattern in what I said and what others said that led to anger and conflict. I learned to ask myself what I wanted to achieve at the end of a negotiation – to feel I had the last word? To make the other person feel diminished? To fill a need of mine? To come to a conflict resolution?
My rift with my daughter has not healed. But all the introspection has led to my being able to separate myself from an issue or hurt, and to be able to distance myself from the trauma.
Excerpted from In Free Fall: My Experiments with Living by Mallika Sarabhai, published by Speaking Tiger Books.
From the heart