The reason I'm not home right now

Some of us are unlucky in that we should love our families and indeed, our race, ever so much as to have them constantly hurt us. The point here, however, is to simply define the tip of the iceberg that is my relationship to home, to finally state one of many ways in which some Indians REALLY get it out of me.

When I speak to Indian girls that have the 'family' written all over their faces, or 'husband' written all over their bodies, when i can see most plainly their vain virtuousness and pretentiously successful airs, I want to slap them so hard they should be compelled to examine beyond and within their smarting skin in the mirrors for once. How inordinately it gets to me that one could take on a self-promoted superiority just because they, like good girls let others make decisions for them; and let logocentric euphemisms like "milestones" and "achievements" refer to the hoops they jumped for the world! . . Are these women even real, or do they just exist to make me feel bad about myself?

Who is it that I speak of : Simple-minded middle-class women that stare at you like you're some crazy bitch that cut them off on the road if you mentioned romantic love was just as full of shit as arranged marriages, the dreamy-eyed 90s teenagers that attended college only to meet and settle for some worthless man-child. Years wouldn't change them: from silly barbie dolls of well-to-do families, they have become self-important mothers cloaking themselves with the most overrated axiom: "there's nothing more important than the family." Its not the 1950s. It's Indian bourgeois life as we speak.

Sexual double-standards (not saying this is exclusive to India of course) have shaped these women's lived reality, and oddly enough they revel in this supposed superiority of class and gendered position. I really intend to survey and conceptualize them Betty Friedan-style someday. . . Next, there are the male friends that 'tolerate' your complaints and passively castigate you for not being more thankful to your situation (as upper class Indian). What gives them the breezy right to so dismiss any claims for an authentic bourgeois feminism? Notions of class never obstruct public notice when it comes to men; but the very idea that elite women can have problems, is what, contradictory? Irrelevant? Here I stop, much before I originally intended, but more to come.