His friends remembered to call him only after midnight, so my college-going cousin – who had been reminded that very day by his visiting mother of his frequent AWOLs from his boarding school that cost him his last term there – decided to sneak out of home at 2 a m, hoping to be back before my aunt roused herself in the morning. Imagine his shock – and hers – when he found, on tiptoeing back in, that she’d woken earlier than usual, and instead of in her bedroom, as was her norm, was having tea in the living room. Shock gave way to lamentations, then admonitions, and expectedly his grounding. Ever since, she’s been accompanying him to his college, to the gym, and keeping vigil outside his bedroom. While he and his friends are hoping she’ll return to Shillong sooner rather than later, she’s confided in us of extending her originally intended stay of two months in Delhi to three.
Though commiserating with my cousin’s plight, it’s difficult not to sympathise with my aunt — having ourselves been at the receiving end of our children’s nocturnal misadventures. Would our son be back after his Friday night out on the tiles? “Leave the key under the doormat,” he’d advise, “I’ll see.” It made sense to sleep over at a friend’s when it was too tiring to drive back home, but anxiety over lack of information would lead one of us – usually my wife – to begin calling him by 6 a m (“No one’s picking up the phone”), and then at regular 15-minute intervals (“Call the police”; “Check the hospitals”; to, finally, “I’m calling his friends”) — which last would result in an exasperated call back from our son, “Can I sleep please, it’s Saturday morning?”.
I’d insist on our daughter texting us when she left for home from wherever she was out clubbing with her friends. Because she knew we wouldn’t sleep till at least she was on her way back, she’d taken to writing “Leaving in 15 minutes” a full hour or two or even three before she intended to return. Embarrassed because of her mother’s frequent calls, she’d switch off her phone on the pretext of “low battery”. I was out of town when a bunch of her girlfriends and she failed to return home, having decided to sleep over at their friend’s instead of asking him to drive them back in an inebriated state. The next morning, all hell broke loose when the parents of our daughter’s friends discovered they’d spent the night under “a boy’s roof” – so what if they’d been chaperoned by his parents – and found themselves being taken home “in disgrace”.
Words were exchanged between our daughter’s friends and their parents, privileges were withdrawn, escorts forced upon them to accompany them to their workplaces and back, and my daughter – who alone among her friends was not similarly confined – found she had no one to go out with, or to, in the evenings, leading to her own reluctant incarceration. It’s been a while since she went out, apart from a few mandatory appearances at engagements and weddings, causing her to view her parents’ outings with disenchantment. “You’ve been coming back late,” she said waspishly a few days back, “it’s disturbing my sleep.” Maybe she could slip the key under the doormat, I suggested. She relented, provided we were back by 1 a m, after which it was “no longer safe”, and we would be better off sleeping over at our hosts’. One way or the other, like my cousin, we’re all grounded — for now.