We know a few lucky parents whose children have moved out, now that they are earning and can pay for their own keep. Empty nest syndrome? “Keep dreaming, love,” trilled Sarla, who got rid of her brood even before they’d deposited their first cheques in the bank. Other friends have at least been keeping up appearances, but they’re not exactly moping that their kids have moved from the spare bedroom to Skype, from where they’re unable to demand milkshakes or pancakes before you’ve been served even your first cup of morning tea by the cook.
Having cleared their cupboards, lined up their shoes, and untangled the wires for their laptops, iPads and BlackBerrys – and been shouted at because they now couldn’t find their dirty jeans (“Naturally not, they’ve been washed”), unwashed combs (“I threw them away”), or chargers (“Oh, no wonder they wouldn’t plug into the oven”) – my wife looked up and asked wistfully, “Where did we go wrong?” I knew exactly what she meant. Ajay and Madhuri’s son had invested in his own apartment; Naina’s daughter had rented her own place, while the majority of kids we knew had moved out of at least the city if not the country. Ours? They’re still getting their shoes polished by the help.
“We could try and starve them,” my wife mused. “Or I could change the lock on the front door and throw away the spare set,” I suggested. It wouldn’t help, we knew, because my son had purloined one of our cars as his own, and my daughter kept our credit cards, insisting she’d pay back what she owed us some time soon — a promise she’d failed to keep for at last a year. “Or we could move away,” I added, which was silly and hardly likely to achieve the result we were hoping for, which was their eviction, not ours.
Swallowing her pride, my wife called her friends to ask how they’d managed the unachievable, but it provided no comfort since their children seemed as keen to move away as their parents were to be free of them. “You’ve brought them up all wrong,” Sarla crowed, which hurt because it was probably the truth. I demanded that my son at least pay rent, but he only laughed. When my wife put forward that our daughter spend on at least her personal purchases, she agreed provided she could temporarily borrow the funds from us.
With all our efforts at nought, I advocated that the only way to eject our inconvenient tenants was through marriage. With our daughter still too young, we pinned our hopes on our son. Was he considering marriage? “Eventually,” he agreed. Wouldn’t he like a pad of his own till then? “This is all right,” he said, ringing the bell to summon a course of kebabs for his friends who seemed to have appropriated his room as an extension of theirs. Wouldn’t he at least like to live away once he was married? “Who’s going to look after you then?” he asked, genuinely puzzled that his loyalty to his parents was being put to test.
Matching words to action, he’s been property hunting since. I’ve been shown large apartments and penthouses and land on which we could build. “Really,” I protested, “I don’t think we need anything so large for when we’re old.” “Nonsense,” mocked my son, “How can I even consider marriage unless you have a place large enough for all of us to live happily ever after in?”
