Off The Cuff: The A that divides karma and Karama

Affluent parents use their money to help their children scale the career ladder. Those on the lower rungs employ a device called 'sacrifice'.

Mr. and Mrs. Trivedi have been blessed with two really intelligent daughters, but there's the dual onus of educating them first and then accumulating enough money, come marriage time. Dowry's an ugly word and they don't use it. Still...

The couple began saving the moment the midwife announced the birth of the first girl. The intensity of their 'going without' doubled when the second child arrived. They live in Karama, shop at Lulu and walk in the park on non-humid Friday evenings.

Mrs. Trivedi watches Channel 33 on a second-hand television, shunning a satellite dish. The dish on the dinner table takes precedence. She is four people in one: worker, wife, mother and maid.

Mr. Trivedi rides the bus to work, and his mobile telephone is a gift from his boss. On Friday mornings he helps the girls with the washing, observing how even the rough skin on his hands turns soft and wrinkly under the intense soaping. One day he hopes to buy the family a washing machine. But that, like so many other things, has found its way on to a 'procrastination list', items whose purchase may be deferred.

The Trivedis wait for seasonal shopping sales to buy clothes, scanning the papers for the latest updates. Mr. Trivedi brings the papers home from work each evening. So they generally tend to be roughly eight hours behind the average informed person at work.

Mrs. Trivedi writes snail mail home once a month, to her mother in Chennai. A single sheet torn out of an old unfinished exercise book, with news informing that all is well.

The envelope is sealed with a lick. Glue is expensive, an unnecessary luxury. A two dirham seventy-five fils stamp ensures that Mrs. Trivedi's news has permission to fly. Air mail.

'Geeta and Sneha are doing exceptionally well'. 'Sneha says she wishes she was born in your time, mother, so she could just concentrate on being a successful housewife.'

'Geeta's board exams are just around the corner'. 'Geeta's wanting to study genetics in Bangalore.' 'Geeta's trying to get an A in every subject'. 'Lakshman says we must save even harder now, put away some money for the capitation fee.'

Mr. Trivedi pushes his trolley of shopping and tells me about these little snippets from Mrs. Trivedi's letters, which he reads before the envelope is licked shut.

He tells me about Mrs. Trivedi's hopes for her daughters. She's a great mother and a terrific motivator, he says proudly. She leads by example. But in her spare moments, when we are alone, she worries about the strain the education system is placing on children these days.

Some colleges are cutting off admission at 92 per cent. Brilliant students are being driven to suicide not because they failed but because they didn't measure up to some unrealistic standard, he says.

I know I'm being a bit patronising when I tell Mr. Trivedi I'm sure he helps motivate his girls in his own special way. Mr. Trivedi reflects for a moment or two then leans across conspiratorially.

My Geeta is determined to get an A in every subject, and I know she will too, he says, but just to help her keep that focus I've put up a little saying of my own on the wall at the foot of her bed. It says: "There's an A that separates karma and Karama." Whatever happens after that is destiny and cannot be altered.