When my old friend spotted us at the club, his face lit up. He came by and, with more warmth than would normally accompany a pleasantry, said: how nice to have your son with you at the club. I thought I detected a tinge of regret in his voice.
My friend is the envy of all of us friends. His children have gone places. While his young daughter is already a smart, well-established academic, his son is a star performer. Leading school and college in India, leading university in Europe, leading business school in America, a stint on Wall Street and then in the city in London — he is now in India, minding the Indian operations of his boutique investment firm. You can’t ask for more, can you? Except that my friend shares with all of us a common feeling: he sees too little of his son who, while being so successful, is also a pleasure to be with.
We similarly see little of our daughter, who is chasing a post-graduate degree in Delhi. But we are a bit more lucky in the case of our son right now. He came to town for a film shoot and is hanging around looking for some more work before going back to Mumbai, where work is difficult to come by for youngsters trying to make it in the film industry. When the economy is down and, for businessmen, a quick big buck is hard to come by, investment in films takes a hit. Fewer new projects mean the last to get in, like our son, are the first to be left out.
Our son readily accompanies us to the club while he is in town for several reasons. He is still a bit like an impecunious college-going youngster for whom going out with parents means a huge good meal. And while he looks for film work and earns small sums doing copyediting work for an academic publisher, he has enough time to join us for dinner at the club as often as my post-retirement wallet permits.
I look back philosophically at my decision to support his courageous decision to try and make a career in film direction and ask myself if I should have put pressure on him to choose a more conventional and less uncertain career. Not that such pressure would have mattered. So determined was he to join film school that he made sure he flunked the few entrance tests for conventional postgraduate studies that the wife and I were able to get him to sit for.
Compared to our son, my friend’s son is at the other end of the spectrum. When recently I enquired about him, I was told he was away at head office for the week, head office being London. When he got transferred to Delhi my friend and his wife were quite excited. Earlier it had to be a couple of weeks in a year to London or New York for a holiday with the son (one international trip a year was a big-ticket item enough) and then wait for him to find the time (that is the most scarce commodity) to come to India and Kolkata to catch up with Ma and Baba.
But Delhi was round the corner, and you could afford several visits in a year. Except, in the few months that he has been officially located in Delhi, he has hardly been there. The investment bank has stakes in firms in major Indian cities. He has to keep visiting them to keep a tab on what they are up to. So he keeps travelling and if he is doing so virtually every week, then my friend and his wife can hardly visit him in Delhi.
Life for the wife and me is currently enjoyable in many ways. Her normally low interest in the kitchen has been raised several notches by the presence of our son and the need to ensure that meals at home are respectable, if not sumptuous. As for myself, I am subjected to a constant barrage of names of authors. He keeps running into their work and their criticisms on the Net at a pace that I cannot keep up with.
A little while ago, he held forth on Woody Allen as an author. He is probably a greater author than filmmaker, and managed to be so without using any big words, I was told and nodded impressed, as I hadn’t had a clue. The empty nest is a fact of life for most old people, but some nests are emptier than others and sometimes there is a painful trade-off.
