by Nikita Singh
The phone rang for a minute before being picked up. In his nervous stupor, he hadn’t realised that she must be sleeping at this late hour. Not that it mattered. He couldn’t handle it alone. He needed help. Mom and dad just had to choose this time to go on a trek to Kailash Mansarovar. Their being home would have been such a big help. He was clueless alone.
His sister’s voice crackled on the phone. ‘What? The labour has started? But wasn’t she due in a month? Chal don’t worry, children are God’s gifts. They don’t come via FedEx that you will know exactly when they will arrive. Take care of Komal. Stay with her. Keep her relaxed. More importantly, you also stay relaxed. Take leave from office for a month and tend to your family. Work can wait.’
Anmol couldn’t help laugh, waking Komal from her semisleepy state. A month’s leave meant certain career-suicide for him. He would not get that promotion. Somebody else who could work harder and longer would come along, and everybody would forget Anmol. He might as well jump from the top of their forty-floor apartment complex.
‘What’s so funny?’ Komal asked, a hand gingerly placed on her stomach. The pain had eased up somewhat.
‘Nothing, baby.’ He kept a hand on her forehead, comforting her. The hospital was still ten minutes away. ‘Soon we’ll be at the hospital and you’ll be alright.’
‘Did you find out if they’ll allow you in the delivery room? In the US, they allow fathers inside. I wouldn’t mind holding on to your hand while the baby tears up my insides.’
‘No, baby. They don’t. India works very differently from the US. They won’t let anyone inside. But don’t worry. The doctors will take good care of you.’
He was lying. He hadn’t bothered to find out. Even if they permitted, there was no way he could get himself to do it. He was worried about passing out himself, which wouldn’t help matters at all. Besides, he planned to make a quick trip to the office while she was in the hospital. He had to complete that presentation. Even if he couldn’t actually meet the CEO the next morning, he wanted to be able to send the slides and hope to be excused for not making it to the meeting. The CEO was a finicky man who had once fired one of his assistants because he was wearing a red tie, the colour he abhorred, as it reminded him of his unfaithful ex-wife. Nobody at work had worn red after that day.
Anmol would see off Komal into the labour room, change into work clothes and rush to the office, which was luckily located not too far from the hospital. He’d get his work done and be back before the baby came out.
‘I am scared,’ she said, holding on to his hand as he steered the car with the other one. ‘Promise me that you will be there for me.’
‘Of course, Komal. I’ll be right there. We are in it together. Everything will be fine.’ He said, keeping an eye on the road, driving carefully to avoid any potholes.
‘Thanks, baby. I love you.’
‘I love you too, sweetie.’
To say that Anmol was scared would be an understatement. Going by what he had seen and heard so far, raising a baby was no child’s play, and he was terrified. Ever since news of his wife being pregnant had spread in the office, people had been sharing advice with him.
‘Make sure you baby-proof your house. You wouldn’t imagine how the most innocuous of things can be a hazard for little babies. If it is something they can put in their mouth, they will do it. If it has a hole in it, they will stick a finger in. You can’t have any exposed electricity sockets. You can’t have any mosquito repellent or rat poison in sight. Make sure you sterilise anything that gets in contact with the baby. Make sure there is no glass object that can break and cause harm.’ This had gone on for months now. What resounded in Anmol’s ears was ‘Make sure you don’t expect to have a life anymore…’
Yadav from the finance vertical had his own story to add. ‘Make sure you don’t buy any local toys. They have lead in the paint. One of my neighbours had a child who developed an allergy to wheat all of a sudden. The doctors said sometimes lead can cause such conditions. Kids these days have the strangest of diseases. You can just never be too careful.’
Yadav was just jealous of his success. Five years older to him and still languishing at the manager level, mysteriously happy in his mediocrity. Anmol couldn’t understand what he kept smiling about while leading his miserable existence. Maybe he had also inhaled some lead as a child. Nothing else explained his happiness with his life. He did keep talking fondly of his children, but how could his son learning karate or daughter playing the guitar make him so happy? Anmol couldn’t care less about Yadav, that loser of a man. He had even rejected taking on a massive project last year as it would involve a lot of travel, and he wanted to be close to his family. That project would have got him promoted to Senior Manager, but the idiot didn’t want it. Anmol rolled his eyes thinking about him.
Yadav or no Yadav, Anmol was terrified of what was going to happen. He was reminded of scenes from movies where death row convicts were being walked to the gallows. Soon he would be a father. In a few years, he would be doing the rounds of schools, begging for his child to be admitted, and then pay as much in fees as the amount he used to make in a year when he started his career. He or she would perhaps go on to have affairs. They’d probably sneak out of school for a romantic liaison or two. Hopefully no MMSes would be made and sent out on the Internet to the eternal shame of the family.
Anmol had sacrificed a lot to get to this position. He had slogged like a pig, working weekends, staying up late, sometimes working overnight in the office, just so his bosses could be happy. When people were busy gossiping about the cricket team or the latest Salman Khan movie over hourlong lunches in the cafeteria, he had eaten lunch at his desk every single day. When people went out to watch movies or to shake a leg on Friday nights, he had stayed in the office, working on presentations and business cases. Now so close to his target, he felt like it had been a lost cause.
Komal had been obstinate. They had discussed waiting for later, but she wouldn’t even hear the a-word. She had also been a career woman, strong, confident, eager to grow. But now she was willing to drop everything and take a long leave from work to be a mother. His parents too were excited to become grandparents to another child, and Anmol had no choice but to play along. His fears and concerns had gone unheard, but he had lived in terror the last eight odd months. Not that it had stopped him from continuing to spend long nights in the office. Komal hadn’t complained much, trying her best to manage as well as she could.
Parenting was going to change everything. He would no longer be able to go to those lovely beach resorts. Instead they’ll have to hunt travel websites for ‘family-friendly’ resorts that had play-areas, kiddie pools and high-chairs at the restaurant. The occasional glass of wine he used to enjoy would be out of question; now he would be busy requesting milk bottle refills.
He wondered what all of this would do to his relationship with Komal. Their love-life was pretty much finished already, so it probably couldn’t get much worse. He was reminded of a family function they had attended last year where one of his cousin sisters had a massive argument with her husband over something he said or did to their baby. Perhaps it was that he gave the child a glass of Pepsi to drink and she freaked out at him for being so irresponsible. He couldn’t remember the details, but it had been embarrassing to watch. He had heard many people say that children did this to couples who would start off arguing, move on to sleeping in different rooms, and eventually become strangers to each other and drivers to their kids.
They were at the hospital. Komal was calmer now. The staff at the Emergency efficiently ushered her to the maternity ward on a stretcher, where the doctor on duty examined her as Anmol waited outside, walking about the corridor, taking breaks to check his BlackBerry for any new emails from the US team.
He noticed a little child nearby, sitting in the lap of an older lady, perhaps his grandmother. The boy was maybe three or four years old; Anmol couldn’t really tell. He was very patiently looking on, watching his father running
around, getting admission formalities done for his wife. The boy was going to get a sibling, and seemed rather excited.
Intrigued, Anmol sat down on a bench close to where they were seated.
‘Daadi, when will the baby come?’
‘Very soon, beta. Don’t you want to sleep now? It is so late.’ ‘I don’t want to sleep Daadi. I want to meet mommy. I want to see the baby.’
His daadi smiled and kissed him on his head as he clung to her tightly, like a kangaroo baby secure with his mother. She started singing a lullaby to him. Five minutes later, Anmol could hear him snoring, deep in slumber, his teeny fingers clasped around his grandmother’s arms.
He had to wait for the doctor’s update before he could head to the office to get his work done. Bored, he sat in front of the TV, hoping for some entertainment. He hadn’t watched television in ages. At one time he used to watch the occasional comedy show like Friends or 30 Rock, but he had given that up long ago. TV was just a silly waste of time that could be better used securing new projects for the company and getting ahead of his peers in the rat race.
They were showing a music reality show on the television. A six-year-old boy was singing melodies originally sung by veterans of the Bollywood music industry, with no sign of stage fright or lack of self-confidence. Anmol’s thoughts went back to a debate he had contested in school as a teenager. He had got so nervous that his voice had started faltering and he had forgotten half of the speech he had painstakingly memorised, much to the amusement of the assembled audience. His classmates had teased him for that fiasco for the entire year. This boy was a prodigy of some sort.
He wasn’t the only one. One after the other, the show featured equally talented young boys and girls. Interspersed with their performances were shots of their anxious parents watching on as their progeny sang with effortless ease. Amazingly, the children looked relaxed while the parents seemed jittery, ready to burst into tears at a moment’s notice.
Was this going to be his life? He knew his sister used to talk of starting some activity classes for Pari and Parag. Was he going to become this parent who shuttled his child from one class to the next, in a never-ending competition to make the child win contests and leave others behind?
The door of the ward opened and the doctor came outside looking for Anmol, still watching TV intently.
‘Congrats, Anmol. Komal is indeed in labour. You’re going to be a dad soon.’ The words hit Anmol like a cold slab of ice. He suddenly felt dizzy. This was it.
‘Don’t you worry. She is fine and in good hands. For now, she is comfortable. We don’t know when the delivery will happen, but there is time. God knows, could be as long as twelve hours. You should make yourself comfortable and get some rest, because she will need your support soon.’
The good doctor Priya patted his shoulder as she left. Thirty years ago, she had likely done the same to his father when she delivered Anmol. Anmol wondered if his father had felt the same emotions he was feeling right now.
They were now showing a commercial on television, featuring an anxious mother watching her daughter shooting basketball hoops unsuccessfully, egging her on, keeping a close eye on her failures, her severe face reflecting disappointment and sending a message that the girl wasn’t going to get out of the court till she managed it. Anmol sighed.
Unable to watch any more of the depressing TV, he whipped out his phone and started browsing Facebook. He hadn’t talked to any of his old buddies in many years but thanks to Facebook and LinkedIn, he knew exactly who was where and at what role. He had been one among the pack at college, but broken out in his own league in the professional space. Today he was making more money than any of his classmates. He was married to Komal, who was prettier than any of their wives. He was the topper now.
Anmol started going over his Facebook time line. One of his colleagues who got married last week and was currently on his honeymoon had shared some pictures. Him and the bashful wife having lunch together. Him and the wife snorkelling together. Him and the wife in a private pool in their suite together. Luckily, no pictures of him and the wife doing you-know-what together. Anmol checked out all the photos. She was hot, but not hotter than Komal, even though she hadn’t been particularly sexy in the last few months.
Then there was a picture that Yadav had uploaded. It was his daughter holding up a picture she had drawn of the family, with a caption saying, ‘Look at the beautiful picture my four-year-old daughter drew of her family. We should change her name to Picasso.’ Anmol smirked. The painting was terrible. Where there should be faces were poorly scribbled shapes, there seemed to be no sense of symmetry, Yadav was drawn with only one leg and his wife had a moustache. Twenty people had liked it already with comments gushing over the creative genius of the child.
Anmol added a comment saying, ‘LOL Yadav ji, looks like you broke a leg :-P.’
His time line was sprawling with updates about babies. Someone had become a parent and posted pictures from the delivery room a few minutes after it happened. Someone was celebrating the fourth birthday of their daughter with a Doraemon cake. Someone had posted pictures of a brand new suit ruined because their child ran a scissors through it. It was like the whole world was just producing babies. No wonder we have such a population problem, he thought. To Anmol, there seemed to be only one really happy guy on his time line and he was still a bachelor, enjoying life travelling across the world, scuba diving in Singapore, pub-hopping in Sydney, going on Jamaican cruises with his American girlfriend. He wondered if he had rushed into getting married at the young age of twenty-six.
Anmol decided to head for office. He changed into the formal clothes, walked to his car in the massive hospital parking lot, got in his Fortuner and started the drive towards his office. It was already close to six in the morning. He would be gone a few hours and be back by noon. The hospital anyway had his phone number in case they needed to reach him.
The drive was thirty minutes long. He turned on the radio, hoping for some good music to kill the time. As luck would have it, it was Children’s Day and the RJ was talking about children and parenthood. One woman was describing her experiences and how motherhood changed her life. She talked for five minutes about how she thought that her child was God’s gift to her and how even a glance at her made her heart feel warm. Anmol turned the radio off.
‘We will name him Parikshit if it’s a boy, and Naina if we have a daughter,’ Komal had announced, after spending about two months researching names. She had been euphoric all through the pregnancy, while Anmol had spent sleepless nights tossing and turning in the bed.
His mind just kept going over what was going to happen next. One day she will start going to school. Maybe she will be disciplined and studious. Maybe she will be a tomboy like her mother. What if she gets into fights with boys? What if boys chase her all the time, taking rounds of our apartment building hoping for a glimpse of her? He knew he had done this with Komal, albeit when they both were in college.
What if it’s a boy? Girls are still easier to manage. Boys tend to be difficult. What if he’s a womaniser? What if he doesn’t want to study at all? I won’t hesitate to smack him if he misbehaves.
What will they do when they grow up? Engineering? Medicine? Regardless of what people may say, these are still the best possible career options. If he has to do engineering, we need to get him into a good coaching class from class 10. No, these days they start from class 8. God, who knows, maybe they will start from class 6 by the time he gets there. Poor kid. No, it will be tough on us too. What if I have a presentation to make the next day and he needs help with physics or organic chemistry? The competition would be terrible by the time they sit for the IIT JEE. Ten, maybe twenty lakh students taking the exam. How will our child even have any chance? What will he do? Maybe we will just send him abroad. Harvard, probably. Yes, I need to start doubling my saving if we have to send him to Harvard. There is anyway no future in India.
What about marriage? What if he comes b
ack saying that he wants to marry an American girl? Will she want to live with us desi people? Will Komal and I end up spending our last days in some old age home while our boy spends his time with his American wife? Oh my God, no no, he will take the IIT JEE. We will find a nice Indian girl for him on shaadi.com.
‘Bride wanted for handsome Punjabi boy. Caste, creed, no bar. Seeking well-educated girl from good family. We don’t believe in dowry.’
He drafted the matrimonial ad in his mind.
His phone rang. It was his sister.
‘Anmol, how is Komal? What happened?’
‘Hello Di. Komal is in the delivery room. The doctor confirmed that she is in labour, but it might take some time.’
‘Achha, okay. You must be in the waiting area? Are you okay? Feeling excited?’
Anmol blew his horn at a car coming towards him from the wrong side. It went by, missing him narrowly.
‘Anmol, where are you? Are you driving?’
He sighed. ‘Yes, just thought of going to the office for a quick break. Had some work to wrap up.’
She shouted so loudly that Anmol had to move the phone away, lest his eardrums rupture.
‘ARE YOU CRAZY? YOUR WIFE IS IN THE HOSPITAL ALONE AND YOU ARE GOING TO THE OFFICE?’
‘Relax Di. She is in good hands. Besides, I was getting bored there. I had nothing to do.’
‘Anmol, this is just not done. You need to stop behaving like a stupid child and take care of your wife and child. Now go back and call me when you are at the hospital. I don’t have anything else to say to you.’ She slammed the phone down.
Anmol slowed down, but kept going. He used to call his sister a drama-queen and was quite used to her outbursts.
He was driving next to a park now. The sun was almost up and there were people walking about, out for their morning exercise. He noticed a father-son duo nearby. The boy was a little older than the one at the hospital, maybe six or seven years old. He was learning to ride a bicycle. Anmol decided to stop for a minute to watch.