| When my son came home for his vacation last month, he said he had had an extremely busy semester, so if I didn't mind (and I suspect even if I did), could I please let him be for a few days, he really needed to rest. This seemed like a simple enough request, and I told him he could sleep, or listen to music, or chat all he wanted on the computer, and we would spend a little time together when he was done with that. |
| "Sleep?" said my son, looking at me unbelievingly, "what I really want is for you to give me your car so I can go visit my friends from school and catch up with them." I thought that was a strange way to rest, but I did not want to appear an old fuddy-duddy, which is how I found myself without a car, begging cab drivers to take me home at the end of work, and dropping a fortune in fares in the bargain. Still, I thought, this is the way kids chill, and we would soon find the time to bond with each other. |
| The subsequent week, he seemed to rush off to the neighbourhood gym in the mornings (in my car), and by the time he got back, I had left for work. And when I returned, he was ready to leave for a party at a friend's, or to check out a new lounge, so we did manage to greet each other, and I knew whether he had shaved or not, and that he still wore his jeans precariously low, but we didn't make any more headway in the direction of one-to-one conversations. But then, there was still a long while to go before he returned to college. |
| However, in a few days my son said he wanted to leave for Jaipur, where two cousins were to be married (not to each other), where he wanted to make himself useful to the families. It was a very fine gesture, so of course I let him go, though reports don't suggest he did anything more than enjoy himself "" which doesn't seem like a lot of work. |
| But since my wife and I were also to be in Jaipur for the weddings, I hoped to spend a little time there with my son. So, it was a pity that when I was attending functions in one family home, he was at the other, and if I hoped to catch him at the latter, why he'd have left for the former. |
| We returned together to Delhi, though he slept through the drive instead of relieving me of the burden of chauffeuring the family. |
| A day later he was en route to Chandigarh where my mother, who had gone with my father to attend a few battalion reunions in the Shiwalik foothills, found herself under the weather. He earned brownie points for fetching them back by road, and now my brother, who is still a little kid at heart, went on strike, complaining I was monopolising my son and not letting him spend any time with the rest of the family, so he was taking him home for the night. |
| He didn't return home for five days, and then when my parents, who were recuperating from their revels, were to leave. And now there are only a couple of days before he goes back, and we still haven't had the occasion to sit and talk, or share a bottle of beer. And I know he has a party to attend tonight, and he wants a haircut and a pedicure, and to go shopping for clothes, for all of which he must make time, so maybe we'll talk the way we always do "" long-distance, over the phone. |
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