Alert: Rambling post with excessive mush

As I saw my son walk out of the examination center with his friends my heart was filled with a strange emotion. I thought it was anxiety. But it was so pleasant that it couldn’t quite be that.

Paiyyan and his gang have been together since kindergarten. I remember them in palm-length shorts, blowing their noses and weeping on their LKG teacher’s shoulders. I can recall them going on their first excursion, to Guindy Park, waving madly from the school bus, as if they were boarding a flight to Hawaii. I remember them entering high school and wearing full-length trousers for the first time, looking dwarfed and quite lost in the ocean that’s their high school.

And here they were, walking out of the exam hall, doing a post-mortem of their question paper, looking horrified and delighted in turn, generally being 15-year-old boys.

I get a similarly strange feeling sometimes when Paiyyan calls me “Amma”. Coming off a human being as tall as me – and close to becoming taller than me – it sounds funny. I can’t quite believe that I’ve produced such a fine specimen of my species. I suppose I’m sounding like a swine showing off her litter but then God made us mothers alike.

Soon, Paiyyan & Friends will lose some of their happy boyhood to IIT coaching, or lose their IIT opportunities to happy boyhood. Then will come the smuggled cigarettes, beer and maybe girlfriends. I hope he’s a good boy beyond that. I hope. I pray. As a parent, I can do only that. One of my kids is no longer a kid. He’s a young man. As a child he has his freedom and as a parent I have my limitations.

It’s good to have children. I’m not saying it’s awful not to have them. I do know couples who’re perfectly at peace with not having kids.

But I am convinced that kids give meaning to life. We don’t need them to care for us in our old age or to light our funeral pyres. We need them so that we have something to look forward to tomorrow.

I suddenly understand why people queue up at fertility clinics and why there’s such a huge global adoption business operating in various shades of grey. I understand why my local poo-kaari (flower seller) is selling her solitary pair of gold earrings to tug her alcoholic husband along to this temple.