Am I an agony aunt?

It’s happened to me on many occasions. A gathering starts off as being a predictable gathering; people meet and greet, enjoy sips and bites, indulge in banter, swap nostalgia — the average litany of stuff that systematically unfolds in social ecosystems. But somewhere in the middle of it, I get pulled in by somebody or the other to become the sounding board of ‘personal’ matters — aka, relationships and/or domino effects (rabbit holes, the pessimists would say) created by relationships.

At one such gathering, I’d barely met someone and it turned out he and I had a common friend — more an acquaintance for me — and he suddenly started telling me his life story vis-à-vis her. On auto-prompt. While that story unraveled, he also disclosed his innermost turmoils and deepest insecurities.

The third person with us, a dear friend who had introduced us, was utterly flummoxed. “I know this guy for a really long time, and he’s never ‘exposed’ himself like this — how do you do this?” he asked once the venter made himself scarce.

“Hey, I didn’t do a thing!” I expostulated. “If you noticed, I was trying to change the subject.”

“I did notice that,” he admitted. “So what is it about you that makes people open up?”

Maybe I look like an agony aunt, I offered. You know those people who offer solutions to curveballs life offers from time to time. They offer it on paper; I do it in person. “And maybe people mistakenly assumed I’m a really good listener… maybe I have that kind of a face.”

A couple of decades ago, I worked for a magazine that had an agony aunt column — which was, by all accounts, pretty popular. The backlog of emails and physical letters we’d receive was immense. One day, out of the blue, the agony aunt — a seasoned ‘socialite’ — pulled out of the column, and since the page couldn’t be discarded, I was asked to be a stop-gap agony aunt.

I began to notice there was one particular writer — a woman, or at least seemingly a woman going by the name — who had issues about her family, and feelings of being unappreciated.

Most families are dysfunctional but are in denial. I, on the other hand, grew up in a family that admitted to being dysfunctional and took guard with that stand. What transpired, therefore, was an uncanny ability to call a spade a spade and keep on shovelling. That’s precisely what I did to this woman who wrote in.

She continued writing in, broad-basing her range of grievances. After her third letter, we decided to give her short shrift: we had already answered too many of her queries, and it was beginning to look a lot like favouritism… or, worse, laziness.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com