My Kids

“Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.” Sam Levenson

Indian conjugal obligations always includes having kids. It is about as fundamental as oxygen is to breathing and chocolate is to surviving. Nine months after the wedding, relatives start asking ‘Is everything is alright?’ Ten months into the marriage, not-so-subtle hints are dispensed whether a visit to a fertility specialist is in order. By eleven months, they suggest alternatives such as adoption.

It was a good thing I was eight thousand (seven hundred and six) miles away for inquisitive relatives to worry or care or poke their noses into my business. When I gave birth to a girl, an aunt wrote me a condolence letter with a ‘Better luck next time!’ message. Needless to say the bitch does not figure in my family tree and pendas were not delivered to her house when I had my son.

There were a lot of things I did not know about children. What I did know came from my father. He said children were God’s Gifts and that the three of us were perfect kids. Of course we were perfect for the two hours that we saw him every evening. He never asked Ba and the servants how ‘perfect’ we were for the other twenty-two hours.

So I thought I would have perfect little offspring. Hah!

They whined. They cried. They pooped. They threw tantrums. They said No! a lot. They were hungry when there was no food in sight, thirsty when only Perrier was available for the price of our hotel room. They needed to ‘go’ at the furthest point away from the bathroom. I remember a beautiful, (rare) sunny day in London when my sister and I had taken all the toddlers to Hyde Park for a stroll. My nephew Nikhil suddenly froze and yelled ‘Mamma! Chichi coming!’ I doubt whether Florence Griffith Joyner could’ve beaten my sister back to the hotel. This is when we fondly remember the motherland, when we could tell the kid to just ‘go’ behind a tree. It was very tempting to do the same here, leaving a shitty surprise for the incidental walker, who rightful in his indignation, would rail against the cursed dog owners who do not pick up after their pets. Though it would’ve given me great satisfaction to retaliate (in my own small way) for the two hundred years of shit Indians had to put up with during the British Raj.

If, being an Indian meant I HAD to get married, and I HAD to have kids, my contractual requirement as a mother did not include me HAVING to take them on vacation. But I did, because my father had said Travel was the Best Education. And hoo boy! Did I learn a lot!

By the time they hit their teens, they had already seen twelve countries. Most of the memories were pleasant and I wish I could say the bad ones were permanently erased, like they say about labor pains. But I should be so lucky. I remember booking tickets in Japan to Gion Corner for a concert. The kids slept through the whole thing, in spite of the repeated jabs to their sides and short of keeping their eyes open with toothpicks, there was nothing much I could do except kiss goodbye to the wads of cash I had spent. (Japan is so expensive. A banana comes wrapped in cellophane with a pretty pink bow and costs as much as Beluga caviar.)

The wads of cash however pales in comparison to what I spent to take them to Europe. Since I had already been thrice to France , it was obvious I was doing this purely out of a fervent desire to show my kids the Eiffel Tower. My daughter, however, had her eyes glued to the ground, furtively looking left and right. Look up! I said. Cool! she replied with a quick glance at the latticed iron tower (the one two hundred million have viewed with more than just a quick peek) and ... went back to counting cigarette butts. In Rome, my son fell asleep in the Colosseum (if he tells you otherwise, here is the photo to prove it). It was enough for me to wish the lions were still around – yes, I was that miffed. He woke up and we resumed the walking tour. While the group was taken with the fountains and the Forum, my son was fascinated with the variety of poop on the streets and repeatedly asked me for classification and identification. (Where were those damn lions?) So I brought them halfway across the world to see the two things we did not have on California sidewalks … cigarette ends and animal excrement.

In India, when I would have liked them to sleep more (so I could leave them with Sheilabai to go shopping), they were always wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, because this is where they had the time of their lives. Apart from all the love and attention they got and gave to the million relatives, I was hoping for them to imbibe a little Indian culture and learn the language. Hah! again. They roamed around in a chauffered Mercedes, drank filtered water, ordered take-out Dominoes Pizza, and played tennis at Willingdon Club. As for the language, the extent of my daughter’s Hindi is how to say ‘Ek glass thanda pani le ke ao’. And (in the car) ‘AC thoda kam karo’. My son gave up after mixing penda with Pandu (as in the servant), jaadu with jhaadu (as in the desi broom he brought back to the States), papad with thappad (which he got with regularity), bouddhi with buddhi (the brains he put on lay-away while on vacation.)

When my daughter left for college, I took her aside , much in the way Karamchand took Gandhi aside before he left for South Africa, and gave a pep talk on the evils of alcohol. (Someone should have warned Karamchand that liquor would be the least of his son’s problems). When I told her not to drink, she looked at me in disbelief. “Mom! I’m going to UC Santa Barbara! Would you tell the Pope not to pray when he went to church?”

I thought I would appeal to my son and knocked on his door. “Whaaat up, Dawg?” he yelled out. I took the ‘Matru Devo Bhave’ frame off his wall and walked out of the room. The ‘Dawg’ was easy to handle. A simple walk down a path would make me cringe. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!” they would cry and they hopped and jumped along the sidewalk. They were a bit late with the prediction. Carrying two babies the size of four bowling balls for eighteen months had already broken my back.

My daughter has always claimed she is ‘tough as nails’ and is a ‘survivor’. What does that mean for a girl who went to private schools, had her own room, and her own (brand-new, moon-roofed, leather seated) car for her sixteenth birthday? I got a frantic call one day from college that her bike didn’t work. Her mother who has no concept of tough love, drove the two and a half hours up north, to heave her bike in the trunk, to drive the four-hundred meters to the repair shop. The man took a look at the bike, took the handlebars, twisted them around and said, “That will be thirty-five dollars, please.” I’m not entirely sure he said ‘Please’, but I am positive about what I wanted to do to my tough, able-to-survive-on-my-own, daughter.

My son always wanted to be a doctor. From the time he could talk and was asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ he would reply ‘Doctor’. (Personally, I loved the idea of a cardiologist in the family - been overdoing the chocolates and cheese.) So he enters college, changes his major with every Monday night football game and ended up graduating with Geology. What kind of rocks and minerals he planned to find in the human anatomy is anyone’s guess. (And the closest a body can get to an earthquake is after indulging in street pani-puri in Bombay.) While we were in Guatemala, he tried to get us to climb one of the three active volcanoes to take some samples back for his class. The name ‘Fuego’ should have tipped us off as to its clear and present (explosive) danger. With thirty-three other dormant ones, he had to pick one involving fire, ash and toxic gases, viscous magma, flows of searing lava, chances of burning off the soles of my feet and frying my eyebrows at a minimum, and becoming desi grilled-kebab at worst. I told him the extra credit just wasn’t worth it.

So the doctor phase didn’t last long, although it ranked high amongst the ones I approved of. A statistic says that by the time a boy is twenty-one, he has spent a thousand hours playing video games. Hah! yet again. My son was sixteen by the time he had racked up the thousand playing Counterstrike. Then he went through the Elvis phase, the ‘I want to do up my room in Christina Aguilera phase’, ... and oh yes! the Poker Phase. My husband and I prayed a lot those days. But there was no counterpart of Lakshmi we could pray to, because we wished fervently for him to lose money, to ‘teach him a lesson’. Even though he did win enough to pay for a year of college.






So, even if my children aren’t perfect, they are perfect for me. And if they aren’t, they will have to be when they read this blog.

Or else.