The things families don't do anymore

There was a time when families did not have to schedule time together. People simply came home. Talked, worked, studied, ate, laughed and cried around each other. They might have cribbed, complained and quarrelled, yet they hung together much more than they do now. It was a family thing.

Fathers came home from work. Mothers were already in the kitchen, often having spent a good part of the day there. Grandparents sat in their usual places. Someone's cousin or relative was invariably visiting. An aunt could arrive without warning, complain that nobody ever visited her and then stay for the next upcoming meal, and she wasn’t unwelcome.

Nobody had sent a calendar invitation. Nobody had checked everybody's availability. Nobody had said, “Let's find a slot that works for all of us.” Family simply happened. Today, of course, families still love one another. They may even be in touch more often than ever before, courtesy of WhatsApp groups, video calls and photographs sent within seconds. Yet something has changed.

We have become constantly connected — and, in many ways, less together. Somewhere between smartphones, streaming platforms, traffic, tuition classes, work deadlines, social commitments and the increasing need for privacy, many of the small rituals that once filled family life have quietly disappeared. Not with a bang, but just gradually.

One day, everyone stopped eating together. Nobody has the time for it anymore, nor schedules, and sometimes neither patience, for a shared meal or people. Another day, children stopped playing outside. Then relatives began calling before visiting. In the same way, the television stopped being communal. And before anyone quite noticed, cousins who once spent entire summers together became people who occasionally liked each other's Instagram posts.

Until Maghrib

Children returned from school, threw their bags somewhere inconvenient and disappeared until they were summoned for tea or dinner. Kids walked unaccompanied to the nearby store to get candy. They would step out of their homes to gather around the ice-cream vendor and fuss over popsicles. There was a deadline that generations of Pakistani children understood perfectly. You could play outside until Maghrib. The street belonged to children.

Apart from cricket, there was pithhoo, hide-and-seek and endless variations of games whose rules were passed down orally and altered according to the number of children available. Children returned home dirty, sweaty and hungry, but at the appointed home time. Today, many streets are no longer safe enough for that freedom. Traffic has increased. Cities have expanded. Parents have understandable fears. Gated communities and apartment living have changed neighbourhood life. Screens have also provided a more convenient alternative and the child is indoors, relatively safe and occupied. Hence, childhood is now mostly spent behind closed doors.

Weddings you could walk to

Weddings by the way were much smaller affairs attended by the whole family because conveniently enough, most weddings were held in shamiyanas or gorgeously coloured marquis pegged up in the nearest open space. Few weddings were held at hotels and clubs, wedding halls and lawns did not exist.

Dinner used to be an event

Perhaps nothing illustrates the change better than the family meal. There was a time when dinner meant dinner. People sat down together. Or at least, as many members of the household as possible did. There was conversation, interrogation and occasional argument. Someone complained about the food. Someone else complained that nobody appreciated the effort that had gone into preparing it.

Children were asked about school. “Why did you get these marks?” “What happened to that boy/girl who was always calling you?” “Why do eat so much baigan (aubergines) all the time?” “Why aren't you eating?” “Don't sit like that.” “Finish your sabzi (vegetables).” It may not always have been sophisticated conversation, but it was conversation. People spoke, others listened. There were no phones at the table.

Today, the dining table increasingly competes with the screen. One person is watching something on a phone, a parent or grandparent watching something on TV. Another is replying to messages. Someone has already eaten or will eat later. Teenagers may be in their rooms. Parents are catching up on work, phone calls, messages or are out.

Perhaps what is being lost is not simply the meal but the daily exchange of information that families once took for granted. You knew what was happening in everybody's life because, every evening, everybody was more or less forced into the same room. Family dinner was not quality time carefully created by a parenting expert. It was simply dinner.

One television, one family

Then there was the television. For those who grew up before every bedroom acquired a screen, watching television was a collective experience. There was one television and that meant negotiation. Dad wanted cricket, mom wanted the drama, children wanted cartoons, but the adults had already decided. There were arguments over the remote long before anyone used the expression “screen time.” When a popular drama was on, an entire household watched it together.

Sometimes, an entire neighbourhood did. The next day, people discussed the previous night's episode at school, in offices and over tea. Television created shared references. Everyone knew what everyone else had seen. There were no Netflix or Hulu snobs. Today, a family can sit in the same drawing room while watching four completely different programmes on four different devices, because streaming has given us choice.

It has also taken away the power or perhaps the tyranny of parents and, perhaps, the pleasure of compromise. Nobody has to watch something they don't like anymore, and they don’t. Nobody has to sit through someone else's favourite programme, or get to share a favourite programme either.

Just turning up

In the old Pakistani and subcontinental family universe, relatives did not necessarily require appointments. You thought of visiting, and you went. An aunt's house was not a destination that required a carefully planned visit. It was simply somewhere you could turn up. “Chalo, phuppo ke ghar chalte hain [Let’s go to phuppo’s house]”.

And off went everyone. No messages or checking whether she was busy. No asking whether Sunday afternoon between four and six would be convenient. The doorbell rang, the children were dispatched to open the door and suddenly the house was full. Tea and samosas appeared. Then someone decided tea was insufficient and that everyone was staying over for the next meal. Perhaps lunch was served. Why not dinner too. The inconvenience was built into the system. No one really resented it, nor was anybody schedule deeply destroyed. Today, our homes have become more private. We call before visiting. We message before calling. We apologise for dropping in. “Sorry, I hope I'm not disturbing you.” The spontaneous visit has become almost an act of aggression, but there was something deeply comforting about knowing that some doors did not require an invitation.

Summer holidays at nani's

For many children, summer holidays were not a carefully curated programme of camps, classes and activities. They simply meant nani's house. Or dadi's. Children arrived with suitcases and often stayed for weeks. Cousins slept in the same rooms, fought over beds, shared secrets and ghost stories, fought again, played games, and ate too many mangoes. Stayed awake far later, than they were permitted to at home. There was always somebody crying after being told off for something by an elder. There was almost always an adult saying, “Bas, enough now!”

Today, families are smaller, schedules are tighter and distances are often greater. Cousins may live in different cities — or different countries. Holidays themselves have become shorter and more structured. The modern child may have more activities, but perhaps there are fewer opportunities simply to get bored together.

Ahh, the luxury of getting bored. And boredom, it turns out, was underrated. A lot of the time, it was out of boredom came games, arguments, inventions, secrets and memories.

When the roof was a bedroom

Summer evenings had their own rituals. In homes with ac cessible rooftops, families dragged charpais upstairs when the heat became unbearable. Mattresses were laid out under the open sky. Mosquitoes were swatted. Conversations continued long after dinner. Children stared at the stars, while grown-ups discussed relatives, politics, neighbours and household problems.

Someone invariably told a story, an incident from thirty years ago. Everyone including children listened, without appearing to listen. And in this unstructured way, family history travelled from one generation to another. Today, air-conditioning has made life more comfortable, but it has also moved us indoors. The rooftop has become another abandoned room in the house.

Doing nothing together

What families have lost most of all is the ability to do nothing together. Now, we meet now for a reason, for instance a lunch, dinner, a birthday, a festive occasion, a wedding, a meticulously planned holiday. But older family life was full of purposeless proximity, where people sat together because there was nowhere else to go, and no one cared that it was so. Nobody was fretting about mental health or needing therapy. Children lingered around adults and adults lingered around other adults. Grandparents were not visited as an activity. They were simply there. Stories emerged accidentally, just like advice. No one had to build a premise for a “talk”!

Family history mattered. Children knew who migrated during Partition, who had lost a fortune, who had eloped, who had been a terrible student, and who the family’s greatest scandal was secretly! These family stories were not documented, they were absorbed. Today, many of us know the entire online lives of people we have never met while knowing surprisingly little about our own grandparents' lives.

Carrom, Ludo and the family argument

Before phones became the default answer to boredom, families played. Carrom and Ludo boards appeared after dinner and the games lasted hours. Cards were played. Children cheated and grown-ups accused them of cheating. Several generations could occupy the same space for an entire evening.

Today, gaming is still immensely popular. But increasingly, everyone plays separately. The game may connect you with thousands of people around the world. The person sitting beside you remains silent.

Letters, cards and waiting

Then there were handwritten letters. Birthday and Eid cards carefully selected from a shop and sent weeks in advance. Waiting for the postman was part of life. Presently, a message reaches someone instantly. A photograph travels across continents in seconds. Technology has made it easier to remain in touch with family, but is speed the same thing as intimacy?

A handwritten letter required time and thought. An Eid card had to be chosen. A message was not dashed off while simultaneously watching television, scrolling through social media and munching crisps. The effort was visible. And perhaps effort itself has become one of the things we miss.

The flip side

Of course, nostalgia is selective and emotional, and must not be confused with a desire to return to a time when everything was supposedly perfect but perhaps we can admit that something valuable has disappeared without wanting to recreate everything that came with it. Not everything about old family life deserves to be resurrected. The joint family could be suffocating and privacy in those days was often non-existent. While women carried an enormous burden of cooking, cleaning and entertaining, relatives could be intrusive, judgmental and controlling. People tolerated behaviour that should never have been tolerated simply because “family is family”.

Ofcourse, children had fewer choices. Modern life has brought freedom and women have much more independence. Young people have more privacy, and people are more aware about children’s needs and protection.

We don’t need to throw away our smartphones, cancel streaming subscriptions and move back into joint-family homes. Perhaps we could use one dinner a week with phones away, a Sunday lunch where nobody has another commitment, spending a few days together without every hour being planned. Throw in a game of Ludo now and again, look through old photograph albums, asking grandparents questions while they are still here to answer them, or going to visit someone without needing a special occasion isn’t such a bad thing, is it!

Putting down the phone long enough to hear what the person sitting next to us is saying, can make families be more like a family, instead of people living in the same house. We still love and worry about our families and gather for important things or events, but perhaps we have stopped doing many of the ordinary things that once made us feel like a family on ordinary days.

Years from now, our children may not remember every holiday, every expensive gift or every photograph uploaded online, but they may remember the evenings when everybody sat together, the debates and arguments, the stolen nap after lunch at nani’s and the sound of family elders talking late into the night. The ordinary moments that, without anyone noticing, become the things we remember most.