“Want to play house-house?” Leena asked me. She was seven and possessed perfectly round breasts pressing dangerously at the seams. One was blue, the other was white, both differently sized and stuffed inside her blouse.
“Give back my balls,” screamed Laksh, he was eight and didn’t want any part in “girlish” games. He just wanted to play cricket and smash houseflies against the wall with his bat. But his sister was forever stealing his things and putting them to misuse.
As their only next-door neighbour of similar size, I loved this most about my Saturday afternoons. Playing house-house with Leena, who always convinced her brother to play the “daddy”, and we took turns playing “mommy” and “baby”. Various bribes, mostly her share of candy, bought him around to the idea.
He was bad at it, but he was the only boy in the neighbourhood, and he loved candy.
All Laksh had to do was sit in the middle of the “living room” and drink the tea we brought him, eat the cake we baked him, and lie on the bed we made him. Then he went out to work, which was basically to smash flies with his bat in the backyard.
One day Leena announced that Laksh won’t be playing with us anymore. “Why?” I asked, quite baffled.
“Well, he was being quite mean, and we had a fight, and we can very well play without him.”
“How? Who will be the daddy?”
“Maybe we don’t need a daddy, just a mummy and a baby will do.” She said, her chin up defiantly.
“But how?” I wasn’t convinced. She was, so we went ahead with the cooking and the cleaning and the coddling. In fact, I remember that we laughed more and had extra fun that day, without Laksh’s incessant grumbling and bossiness.
All this was many years ago.
That afternoon stayed with me in some long-forgotten corners of my memory, until it was yanked up by a fork in the road called life, so to speak. I was married and divorced and in shambles. The “shambles” part, a hyper-independent man cannot know. One whose life remains untouched by matters of the heart, and this thing called love is just an accidental slip.
I will not attempt to describe the next five years that followed. They were ruinous.
Women in love are stupid and dangerous. But on second thought, it’s something else, really. Young girls are bred to carry upon their shoulders, the weight of social expectations in ways that can never be quantified.
How many million times have I heard my mother tell me, “When you marry, all will be well…” or something along those lines, that all else was directed at this one sole event that was supposed to redeem me. After years in court, when my father held my divorce documents in his hands, his eyes still dilated with disbelief when he said, “Are you sure you still can’t make it work?”
But how do you make it work with someone who for one fantastical second thought he could play house-house and then go back to his life’s purpose of bashing flies in the backyard?
And the woman he left behind was groomed to walk this path since she was a little girl, and what’s worse, she chose it like the fish chooses water.
Now, at the altar of shambles, all the meaning in this world was demolished and I was supposed to create my own?
It had to be done, that or shame. Now what?
Maybe we don’t need a daddy, just a mummy and a baby will do.
Now what..now what..now what?
It happened one day when I was taking a stroll with my mother on the streets I grew up as a child. I didn’t think that evening would change everything.
Our old neighbour, Vani aunty was approaching us on the opposite side with her daughter. The very same aunty who said I’d amount to nothing when I’d broken her window three times playing ball, some two decades ago.
Now she was coming at me, to mind my business, with her married daughter upon her arm.
After some yada yada pleasantries, she came straight to the point.
“How’s your husband? I don’t see him at all? What does he do?”
She might have as well held a pellet gun at me.
I got straight to the point too, but without my permission.
“There is no husband,” I proclaimed, “I’m divorced.”
Suddenly everyone was awkward as hell, especially my mother, whose face evidently collapsed.
“I’m so sorry,” the daughter said.
“Nothing to be sorry about. It could have been worse.”
It could have been worse. Just like that, thirty years would have gone in being deeply disregarded and a consuming grief of lost possibilities.
But not me, I was here, albeit collaterally damaged, shaking a finger at fate, and looking Vani aunty in the eye while I set myself free. Hearing myself speak the words out in public, the ones I’d dreaded speaking inside the privacy of my head, did something drastically life-changing. With it, the shame and blame around the situation thawed to the point that I speak of it before my son as if it was the most normal thing in the world, because it is.
He’s six and he will never see me even remotely flinch at this particular topic of conversation, while so many children in this country are forced to lie that their father or mother “has gone abroad”, or change the topic, or laugh it off like it were some kind of an irrelevant joke at the comments surrounding their “broken home” situation. I know of one teenager who avoids making friends with the kids in his apartment building because he didn’t want to face an inquisition on any level. He learnt this from his father, who would not address the boy’s confusion and grief around it, let alone the curious questions of others.
And like this, the children bear the weight of the decisions made by their adults, even suffer it alone.
Our lives are entirely decentred now, in the way that truth is held and told. I’ve heard it been said, one should be ashamed of only the harm one has done, but never about what had happened to them.
There is so much to be done still, schools must understand these children better, policies must make room, support systems must spring up, and all this must begin in the earliest and intimate space between the girl child and her parent, who teaches her that her life is hers alone, to be shaped, solely by her choices.
