Waiting for 16. And dreading it

On entering someone’s home, you can more often than not tell if there is a child in the family. In our case, you can’t. Or at least, you can’t tell if you are in the living room, which is where you are on entering our flat.

On entering someone’s home, you can more often than not tell if there is a child in the family. In our case, you can’t. Or at least, you can’t tell if you are in the living room, which is where you are on entering our flat.

HT Image

From the time that our daughter, now eight, was very small, we had a rule: you can’t leave things lying around in the living room. Her response to this diktat was considered and clever: dump everything in The Room In Which Anarchy Reigns. Which is to say, hers.

In That room the other day, I was suddenly struck by how its accoutrements have changed over the years. I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed this before — or why I hadn’t in quite this way.

When did the rattle and the teddy bear and the tricycle and the plastic cricket bat morph into books and more books and DVDs and hair bands and adult-looking shoes?

On the floor-to-ceiling-across-the-wall bookshelf that I once used to think of as mine, I noticed that The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters had been wedged in between The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature and The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul; I saw how 1000 Wonders of the World — intimidatingly thick; so many wonders, such a wide world — lay flush on top of the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Renaissance and Baroque Art.

Perhaps it was because of the nature of the week — a week in which, at the publication event in Mumbai for my new novel, I’d spent a lot of time making the distinction between this weekly column (memoir) and the novel (which revolves around a father and his daughter but is, patently, fiction).

Perhaps it was something to do with the time of the day — late at night, she sleeping, me there like an interloper in the space that seemed like a sanctuary after an annoying, exhausting day at work.

Perhaps it was nothing but that my mind, unfettered from the drudgery of the day, was working in a way it hadn’t for hours. So her life flashed before my eyes (now roll that cliché around your tongue and promise yourself to never use it).

I remembered very recent incidents. “She’s got great poise,” a dear childhood friend visiting us for a day had said. He hadn’t seen her in years.

I had smiled, self-satisfied, as though I was the one being paid a compliment. “Just wait till she is 16,” a colleague had said when I’d told her that I played the good cop to our daughter in the good-cop-bad-cop routine at home. “It will change.

When girls grow up, they get closer to their mothers. Their fathers are too possessive. They worry too much.”

Well, I am waiting. I am dreading it. And I am waiting…