Children, in all stages of life, from birth to school to college to marriage, provide intermittent shocks to their parents. Parents experience these when their children engage in activities such as falling from trees; getting into fights and receiving cuts and bruises; stealing from the library and getting caught; biting the class teacher; inserting objects into their noses or ears; and yes, even attempting to taste bodily excretory products.
A college-going child may come home smelling of cigarettes or worse, alcohol. These days, parents will suspect their children of something more sinister if they come home slightly tipsy. ‘Where have we gone wrong?’ is the question that most parents ask at some stage of their children’s lives. However, such discomfort rarely stays beyond a certain period, as time finally heals many a wound.
Some of my friends used to go to extraordinary lengths. One would cut pages of a thick textbook in the middle and place a cigarette box in the space created. Why would anyone want to do that? Those were the days when private spaces were very public, and both parents and children could freely invade each other’s spaces—read letters, go through books, rummage through cupboards, and so on. Hence, children were always creative in making inaccessible spaces for their parents to peep. There were no password-protected smartphones, and parents knew what their children were reading and watching.
In the good old days, parents often experienced a particular shock when their adult son or daughter brought home a person from a different country, region, class, language, religion, caste, sub-caste, or sub-sub-caste and sought their blessings. This situation was undoubtedly a parent’s worst nightmare. The passage of time has now created a scenario where everything is acceptable, provided the future spouse is of the opposite gender. Perhaps the future will diminish such fears, too, when marriage itself becomes an ancient relic, and it suffices if the progeny belonging to any of the fifty genders even declare their intent to marry.
Scaring parents can take various forms, ranging from a mild gentle shock to a rude jolt that is dangerous, leading to questioning one’s own existence or discovering, too late, the importance of contraception. I have had my share of delivering shocks to my parents intermittently, but the most unique one was many summers back when my mother had gone to her place and I was alone with my father in the house.
A neighbour’s son had run off from home after a good spanking from his father for failing an exam. He meandered for two days and came back hungry to the welcoming arms of the emotionally drained parents. My father grumbled in the night about the neighbour’s son, a good friend of mine, for troubling their poor parents. I gently nodded my head.
Both of us were sleeping in the same room, and before saying goodnight, he extracted a promise from me that I would never do such silly things that would break the family reputation. I crossed my heart and said never. The wind was gently blowing in the quiet summer night. I was neck-deep in my studies for the entrance exams to professional colleges. There were now two doors opposite each other in the room. One opened inside the house and the other onto the balcony. One of the doors was a little loose, and the wind was causing it to move and make a repeated and irritating noise.
The noise was troubling me badly, though my father was sound asleep. I was sleeping with a thick physics book by my side, and it also happened to be the period of kite flying that month. The ‘phirki’, or the kite-string roll, was lying under the bed. In the deep middle of the night, I got up to silence the irritating sound of the flapping door. The brain was numb, or it was filled with physics, but I still do not understand why I thought it was a brilliant idea. In the dark of the night, without switching the lights on, so as not to disturb my father, I tied the powerful kite string to the handles of both doors and hung the open physics book (a thick Resnick and Halliday) on the string to give a gentle gravitational pull to both doors. The sound stopped immediately, and I slept peacefully.
I thought it was a wonderful idea. My father did not think so. Bleary-eyed when he woke in the morning, the first thing he saw was a book hanging in the air, as the string itself was not visible. He clutched his heart with extreme fear, and he was shocked into an open-mouthed, open-eyed state. He fearfully got out of the bed and then saw the elaborate mechanism. He believed that I had played a trick on him as punishment for his abuse of my friend. He woke me, and a little hell ensued. But the incident was certainly the strongest shock I have personally delivered to my dear father.
In contrast, the in-laws are effortless to impress, especially if they have given their daughter to you. I grew up in Ahmedabad, where the electric supply was almost uninterrupted, but it was also extremely costly, with the highest unit charges in the country. In my growing years, I received many a physical spanking and verbal scolding to switch off the lights and fans while leaving the rooms. It became a reflex mechanism that whenever I saw an empty room with the fans and lights on, I immediately switched them off.
Immediately after the marriage ceremony, the new son-in-law in an Indian household typically sits stiffly on the sofa while everything around him moves at a rapid pace. People all around hurry to provide comfort to the new son-in-law. My experience was no different. The only place they allowed me to go unaccompanied was the toilet. As I was going towards the toilet, I saw a room with fans and lights on, but there was no one inside. My long-trained reflexes immediately activated; I entered the room and put off all the switches rapidly. My mother-in-law saw the scene, and tears came into her eyes.
We are all aware that the most boring conversations a person can have are when a mother-in-law starts sharing stories about her most wonderful son-in-law. This is the first story she shares with everyone. Even today, despite my wife repeatedly trying to tell her otherwise, my mother-in-law is convinced that I am the most responsible person in the world. If I could care so much for the non-living environment, how much better would I be looking after her daughter? My wife keeps telling her that this is perhaps the only act of responsibility I show due to long Pavlovian-type conditioning or the tremendous reflex itch that afflicts the fingers on seeing lights and fans with none around.
But no. My dear mother-in-law is not convinced. To top it off, my dear mother-in-law experienced some pain during the post-operative period after her surgery. I was the only person around, and I handed over a tablet and a glass of water to her. That completely sealed it. Today, she is firmly on my side in my fights or disagreements with my wife.
Anyway, impressing the elders is easy and so is scaring them. And the cycle returns when an adult finally becomes a parent or a parent-in-law. Today, an unsuspecting listener is bored to near death by stories about my son-in-law even as we intermittently receive jolts, thankfully mild until now, from our only dear daughter.
RANDOM MUSINGS 