The Way We Are...

I often thought of my family as a dysfunctional one. Oh, make that a clan, or better still make it a tribe. Discussing family issues are few and far off. Sometimes, we even use outside mediator to convey messages. But dysfunctional… well, that sounds a bit cliché.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. But I cannot help if we, the Zomi, are absolute minimalist when dealing with our family. However, saying that wouldn’t be entirely true though. We are a much more complicated lot especially when it comes to expressing our emotions.

Say, when it comes to love, intimacy, appreciation, etc. we don’t use physical or vocabulary expression at all. For instance, whenever I returned home to see my parents, I missed them so much I wanted to hug them, but an awkward hand-sake is all I got!

Even a mere hand-sake is not used commonly. When I was in college, I mumbled so many times to my friends ‘why we have to shake hand every time we bump into each others’ that it became my by-line. Even today, I still can’t pick-up that habit and often caused me quite a number of awkward situations.

There was this joke circulating in our village about a man who returned home from Delhi and every morning when he wake up, he shook the hand of everyone he pass by, that includes his brothers and sisters and parents. His families were so embarrassed that they kept someone to guard him so that they can rush outside the house as soon as he woke up!

On the other hand, when it comes to grieving, our women cried a lot and loudly so (the men are, of course, not suppose to cry. (If you do, you can be an exceptional case)! In fact, some women think it as a duty and seemed to enjoy it. Sometimes one cannot help wondering if they are giggling or crying. I knew of a certain woman who saw it as a good excuse to let-out their emotions. I’m not sure how relieving that would be!

As I said before we are a society that’s intimacy shy. Our conversations are bared to the minimum. Of course, there are people who talked like a machine gun, but when the topics hits closer to home, the machine gun tongue comes in slow motion. If you are eavesdropping on in a family that you never knew, but the following conversations between the brothers make sense to you, it’s only that you never knew them before;-

A. “I’m getting married”,
B. (As he leave the dinning table) “What for”
- End –

The above conversation doesn’t need any analysis and you don’t need the brain of a rocket scientist to know where it is headed for -for it already ends. And the content is self explanatory enough. By the way, if you wonder what will follow the above conversation, well, the role of a mediator will come to play between the brothers or ‘A’ will get drunk and ransack the house. …simple! But this family is in no way dysfunctional!

It’s not surprising to find so few lawyer and good debater among us. If you insist that we do, I might agree; they are called women; and if this is true, there indeed are few women even among our women! (Well, my friend here suggested if it is a ‘he’, he could be a CC. But I think that would be rather outrageous).

One thing about the mainlander that never fail to amuse us when we first arrived is that that they talk so loud and when they have problem; they argued, they shouted, they pointed fingers, but the punches never come. Among us, it’s the reverse; punches come first than the problem! What I meant is, they talk too much, too loud, unlike most of us.

Another thing is our food habit. A relative once amused me with ‘ganda machli’; of course, it’s what they called ‘ngari’ in places like Shillong. But just think of what it translates to in English! Our food habits are amusing to others, though it sounds lame if we compare to the Chinese’s but most people don’t know what the Chinese eat. Still, I think it’s a good idea to shut our mouth about ‘uisa’!

Another thing that is amusing to others is our big extended family. I once read in a national weekly about a restaurateur in Delhi describing how he happened to employ north-easterner only. He said he employed a north-eastern girl, who has a cousin, and the cousin has another cousin and so on (…or something like that)! That’s so true. Around here, anyone from the north-east is a relative, at least to casual enquirer.

Well, there are plenty of amusing things about everything, and they are not that amusing after all. And to go back to the dysfunctional stuff, I mean the family part; I think it’s more of a universal phenomenon among us, the Zomi, and not just my family.

For instance, my father is a good debater, but he’s not a woman though. My mother has a sharp tongue and we have lots of fun when we are together. But when it comes to resolving family problems, we too feel the needs of a mediator. So, what else will explain the existence of the ‘tanu’, ‘thusa’, etc. system among us?

(Abridged)