Geetanjali Krishna: A new type of joint family

At the dawn of the new year, the media is full of stories of new beginnings and recaps of the year gone by. As always, however, I find myself drawn to new takes on time-worn traditions; novel ways of looking at the same old things that we've been seeing year after year. Earlier this week, when I was stuck in Mumbai's slow-moving traffic with cabbie Laxman Prasad of Zila Phoolpur, Allahabad, he showed me how it's possible to discover new meanings in old ways - if one chooses to imagine them differently.

It all began when I commented that the cab smelled of the familiar charred aroma of chokha, the garlicky brinjal dish so beloved across the Indo-Gangetic Plain. "Nobody makes chokha the way my mother does," he said. "She slow-roasts the brinjal studded with chilli and garlic over burning cow-dung cakes." Sensing a simpatico ear and seeing the traffic grind to a halt, he settled down to telling me his life story. "My father died when my two brothers and I were young. He made us pledge on his deathbed that we'd always stay united. And here we are, 20 years after his death, all married with children but still in a joint family," he narrated. He lived in a chawl in Ghatkopar and plied two taxis in Mumbai. The chokha smelled too strong for me to think of much else. How did his mother manage to roast brinjals over cow-dung cakes in a crowded chawl, I asked curiously. "She doesn't live in Mumbai," he said. "I returned yesterday from the village and carried it with me." I was confused. Didn't he tell me he lived in a joint family with his mother and brothers? "I do, of course, but it is a different type of joint family," he said.

It turned out that Prasad had lived with his nuclear family and an ever-changing corpus of brothers, cousins and nephews in Mumbai for the last 20 years, while the rest of the family lived in Allahabad. "Like many others, I was compelled to migrate when my family needed cash. But because we were restricted by the promise we'd made to our dying father, my mother said I could go on the condition that I contributed every penny I earned to the household - just as I'd have done if we had lived together," he said. Since then, every month, he kept only his living expenses and sent home everything else. "Also, like other joint family homes, mine too is open to all family members who work in Mumbai. Currently, my brother's sons are living here and driving our other taxi."

This novel "joint family" arrangement had worked well for them financially. "The family land gives us all the food we need. And the money we've collectively earned in these two decades has enabled us to buy two more taxis in Allahabad, which my brothers operate," he said. "Today, all our children study in good schools, wear good clothes and eat well, thanks to this consolidation of family earnings. Most importantly, since we don't always share a roof, the women of the family haven't had the opportunity to fight - the single reason why so many traditional joint families break apart." In their village, he said proudly, Prasad's family was known for its unity.

"Had we remained 'joint' in the formal sense of the word, we'd all have been either poor in Phoolpur, or poor in Ghatkopar," he said as we neared my destination. Thanks to this practical redefinition of the joint family structure, Prasad and his brothers had actually made tradition work for them. As I paid him, he looked ruefully at his tiffin box, "I miss her fresh chokha though."