Neat little boxes

I bought a bedspread last week. Not quite the one I wanted to, but something decent enough nonetheless. The advert by the lift said: “Bedspreads: 1 gorgeous black with intricate needlework and 1 purple and blue handwoven cotton”. The couple who were advertising were moving out and selling them cheap.

By the time I got to their flat, the black one had gone. The handwoven one seemed good enough and keen to get back to cooking and cleaning before The Lady’s visit, I grabbed it and stuck out my 10 quid. However, the little Indian chap who was selling wasn’t about to let me go so easily. We’d bumped into each other on occasion this past 12 months, and I’d never been in a mood to talk. He’d always struck me as being an on-the-go sort though, one of those invariably cheerful men who’re always bouncing around and appear to walk (and talk) twice as fast as everybody else.

Feeling a bit guilty about my reserve, I forced myself to talk this time and sure enough, he was likeable. I stopped grunting and soon found myself smiling. As we talked, he struggled to figure out what I did for a living, as I tried my best to explain. He finally decided that I was “studying”. I considered this, and figured that this least significant aspect of my professional life was the one that held at least some familiarity for him. Especially so since we lived in a place where everybody had to be a student of some description (aren’t we all?). He then made the mistake of asking me what The Lady did. Curious to see what he’d make of it, I gave this a patient shot. By the time I finished, what he’d homed in on seemed to be the fact that we no longer lived together. Shifting uncomfortably and looking a bit bewildered, he smiled politely, “A lot of movement, then and a lot of continents, actually. So when are you guys moving back to India?”

I laughed out loud, “Movement, yes, that’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. And moving back, I dunno, though she’s moved back in a sense, no? And I am going back on sabbatical next year. Neither of us tends to make too many plans, anyway. So, who knows?”

Just then, a door opened somewhere behind me and an intelligent-looking woman appeared, hair tightly pulled back, chic Chanel spectacles perched on a decidedly nice nose, wearing jeans and a hoodie. She smiled in friendly fashion, so I stuck out my hand. This didn’t go down very well, but by the time I noticed that she was uncomfortable with the idea of shaking it, it would have been rude on my part to pull it back (such is life). To make matters worse, her husband then promptly took it upon himself to explain our “complex” living arrangements to her. At this, she visibly shrank and promptly ceased to make further eye contact with me. Since all this seemed a bit too much for them, I quickly left.

Vaguely amusing as the whole incident was, there was nonetheless some déjà vu surrounding it. When TL had informed people about her move, it had elicited a decidedly awkward response from my old friend A and her Nordic fiancé. A became so flustered that not only did she forget to congratulate TL but spent the rest of the evening trying to discreetly establish that I was only pretending to be happy with such an “inconvenient” turn of events. This discomfort has persisted since; now that A is revelling in post-nuptial domesticity, it has led to all sorts of awkward incidents. These seem to be built around the assumption that I “need to be taken care of in TL’s absence”, when in fact, my rajma is decidedly better than hers (oh yes, it bloody is).

But woe betide those who try to walk away so easily from such "issues". An old colleague of my mother's, a retired Professor of Comparative Literature no less, waylaid me in a corridor at my mother's old Indian University last week, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of this "odd" couple.

"Where's TL?" she demanded.

I told her.

"But what's she doing at XYZ? She's not an economist. Isn't she a ...?"

I explained, patiently. Evidently unnerved, she retreated to more familiar ground, "Any issues yet?"

This threw me for a moment. Then realization dawned. "Issues", I remembered, sprung from one's loins rather than one's mind on the subcontinent. "I have loads of issues, Auntie. Which ones would you like to talk about?"

She laughed at this, but the edge had gone out of her manner. Needless to say, no more questions were asked.

I’ve got similar responses over the past few years whenever people ask what line of work TL is in, a phenomenon that has become more generalized as she drifts further and further away from her original profession. I now try to explain this using a term I heard Anthony Giddens use to describe Richard Layard; I say that TL’s an “inter-sectoral professional”. Curiously, this neat little box that serves to categorize the uncategorizable seems to satisfy a lot of people.

All of this brings me to my question, my five nice readers. I understand that we have a need to categorize and classify everything, including people. This is even useful to me in my work, be it diagnosis or statistical analysis, and I appreciate its practical value. I am even willing to see the funny side when people write pseudo-scientific, stigmatizing gibberish about “blogger personality disorders”. However, from another perspective, many patients are uncategorizable and doctors respect their difficulties no less because they are so. And as someone to whom this has never mattered in an everyday social sense, I wonder why perfectly sane people turn so awkward (and even hostile) when they encounter someone who can’t be parked in a neat little box.