I heard that the French government has recently applied to UNESCO for French haute cuisine to be placed on the World Heritage list. That list has up to now been restricted to some geographical locations ( old city centres, places of natural beauty). Now that pressure is building up to have this list extended to intangibles such as gastronomy, I’m wondering whether the Indian government should not also apply to UNESCO to have the saas-bahu relationship included too.
In every culture, mother in law and daughter in law take a dim view of each other, but in India this reaches the level of high art.
We could also do like the Japanese, who declare their calligraphy or go masters to be National Living Treasures. We could have a national hunt in India to look for the best ( or , rather, worst) example of saas- bahu.
I imagine the “dream”, or rather “ perfect nightmare” mother in law as a mountain of flesh. Her arms, especially, strike one as huge, cascading down her shoulders in ripples of flesh. Her face is leathery and covered with innumerable star-shaped wrinkles. Her eyes are sunken, revealing only briefly, during quick sidewards glances the white of the pupil. Mostly, they seem to glisten in liquid darkness, like the surface of
water seen deep at the bottom of a well. Her hair is greasy and perfectly black, with a bluish tinge. Her smell is both rich and foul, like a bed of leaves and moss rotting after the rain.
Her presence is both aloof and overwhelming, like a walking sacred mountain. Her orders are brief, cruel and often absurd. Her apparition inspires a mixture of dread and longing to be punished by her, to have one’s hair pulled and one’swrist twisted by her terrible hands. Black magic and poison, even broken glass in the food have no effect whatsoever on her. She distributes favour and punishment according to a pattern which one always feels one can almost start to understand – and then it changes. The punishments she usually inflicts are simple and physical: beatings, starvation, hard labour.
She is awful and unknowable, like an Aztec god.
The “perfect” daughter in law is an altogether more earthy creature. She radiates sex like the sun in Africa. She is the ultimate snake-woman, seems to glide on the floor when she walks. She sometimes sticks her tongue out of her month as she utters lie after lie. Sometimes in repose her eyes harden into a shiny, glistening stare. She is impartially evil to all, including those who are kind to her. Her plots are elaborate and may take years to unfold.
A long time ago, men started speaking of “good” and “evil”. It must have been during the same period as that during which they invented the first mathematical operations such as addition and abstraction. Numbers are actual vast simplifications of a complex reality. We say “two” trees but in fact no two trees are exactly the same. The simplification which numbers represent enables us to perform complex calculations.
It is the same with “good” and “evil”. In fact, “good” and “evil” each represent a vast array of possibilities, most of which probably beyond our comprehension. The “perfect” daughter in law described above represents one “essence” of evil in its crawling, slithering form. The “perfect” mother in law on the other hand represents an unknowable force , maybe beyond good and evil, the kind of power the primitive people and the Aztecs had an intuition about, and to which they offered their human sacrifices.
By the simplifications represented by the words “good” and “evil” we have been able to construct great religions. But maybe we should go back to our beginnings and to try to sense the diverse , complicated forces which shape our universe. Of course, most of us are too modern and desensitised to do that. Only the shamans and witch doctors still have the power.
