In all the time I've known them, I've never seen my parents kiss each other. Nor peck each other playfully on the cheek or nuzzle each other's necks, ruffle each other's hair or any of those tactile things couples are supposed to engage in. Yet, I've always known that this was a couple deeply committed to and in love with each other. There were just little clues left here and there for us children to pick up on. Like my mother pacing in the verandah of the house if my father was late coming home or the fact that my father never took a single decision in the forty-eight odd years they've been married without consulting my mother.

This was a generation that never read any psychology books or even heard of the self-help section at the local bookstore. My mother's only point of reference for what constituted an ideal marriage must have been the Mills & Boons she read so religiously. Yet, her reality was never coloured by fantasy. She was so grounded in what actual relationships were, she would have laughed her head off if Dad had suddenly presented her with a bouquet of flowers let alone ripped off her bodice in a mad, passionate frenzy. They had no idea of concepts like compatibility, theirs was a world that only knew adaptability and adapt they did to each other. It was as if they knew instinctively that a long-term relationship would require of them to learn each other anew every day.

Again they were just little things but they went a long way in keeping their relationship alive. Like the way my mum learnt to take an interest in politics so that she could sit late in the night with Dad and watch the World News, making some comment or the other which both of them found amusing. My Dad always thought Yassar Arafat looked like a squirrel. He was very much a product of his generation, pro-Israel without really knowing why, save that they were a Jewish nation. Years later when I grew up and my own politics was decidedly pro-Palestine, I never argued with him or tried to set his politics "right". The man had after all inculcated a natural inquiry of the world in me, for which I was eternally grateful. His politics grew on my mother just as her love for the Church and Church activities grew on him. In time, she got him involved in Church work which has kept him involved with the community now that they are both retired.

Then there was us, the three children, the entire focus of their lives. They never knew anything called "me-time" or a vacation away from the kids or being overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Their lives were seamlessly intertwined with our lives. They were not just our parents, they were the creators of our dreams and the nourishers of our hope. Even when I showed no aptitude for needle-point or piano or cooking or any of those niceties which Goan girls are to become accomplished at if they are to find good husbands, my mother never said anything. Even when I had betrayed all her ambitions for me, she held her tongue and opened her purse strings to buy me books. She had an innate understanding of who I was as a human being. On those occasions when she simply failed to let go of me and tried to weigh me down with the weight of her own expectations, my father stepped-in and severed the umbilical cord of co-dependence and set me free.

I see so much pain now, broken homes, depression, dysfunction amongst children coming from such homes. Looking back, at those quaint old notions my parents generation hung on to of self-sacrifice, of responsibility of persevering because of the kids, somehow they had got it right, somehow as the Americans would say, they did good.

Then again, perhaps my reality is coloured by fantasy and I see only what I want to see with my rose-tinted glasses of yesteryear.
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[ED: If you want to see the video clip of Selma in an interview with Frederick Noronha talking about her upcoming book. click here.