I suspect my wife and I may not have been very good with the birds and bees thing, preferring to defer the subject and hoping things would simply resolve themselves as our children grew up. But being slightly more new age than our parents, my wife suggested that I take the lead and sit them down for a frank discussion on the matter — which is easy to suggest, harder to consummate, so I chose the coward’s way out by leaving a few suggestive titles about the house. Sadly, it didn’t pique their curiosity, though I did find the domestic staff giggling over some of the illustrations, and was obliged to confiscate the books, and stash them away. No doubt, when we’re getting on, or incapacitated, the children will find them secreted in some loft and think their parents were a dirty old couple.
Soon enough, we found that the children were just as panicked about teaching us the facts of life when, in their teen years, they wondered how many of their secrets they could share with us. Their friends were in “relationships” — they exchanged significant glances, wondering whether we knew what that meant — and hooted with laughter when my wife said she knew it meant they were going out with somebody. “Going out!” my son jeered, “Seriously, is that what people used to do when you were young?”
To be hip, we laughed nervously (when, in reality, we were shocked) because Rahul dumped Shalini, who took up with Rocky, who was two-timing Sonia, who didn’t care for either Rocky or Rohit, who was Shalini’s ex, though that had been on a rebound because she caught Vijay cheating on her, as a result of which she stopped speaking with Mahima, who couldn’t give a damn anyway because she’d found solace in Rahul, which is why he’d dumped Shalini in the first place — and all of this not over a lifetime, or a year, or even a week, but in the course of just one day!
When some of those Sonias and Mahimas started to flit through our house, so much so that we could hardly distinguish one from the other, I knew I needed to have a talk with our son, but pinning him down proved somewhat more difficult than I’d anticipated, a conundrum my wife resolved by cornering him over breakfast one morning to pronounce, “Rule IV of the house, sub-clause (i): Absolutely no girlfriends”, and pointing out that the punishment for flouting the decree would be an immediate cessation of his allowance.
Which is when he asked for the Kingfisher calendar of girlie pictures in itsy-bitsy swimsuits, then in its first edition but creating quite a buzz because it was difficult to lay your hands on. I might have protested as a parental function, but organised it for him nonetheless — that year and the next — accompanied by a signed letter from Vijay Mallya himself, no less. It added to his cachet in his peer group, but I couldn’t fathom why anyone would want a calendar of girls in bikinis on the wall when a print by an artist might be so much more desirable. “You won’t understand, dad,” my son sighed, “it’s a guy thing.”
This year, though, maybe because his girlfriend banned it, he didn’t want the calendar — not that Mallya was handing them out like confetti, having turned, inexplicably, more tight-fisted than usual where copies of the calendar were concerned. But the insistence that I procure a copy anyway came this time round from my daughter who said her friends would think her dad was cool if she could get a calendar for the guys. “You won’t understand,” she said when it finally exchanged hands, “it’s a guy thing.” Really? What do my children think I am?