Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 81: The Boy I Was

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My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 81: The Boy I Was · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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My playful wife. And a child can feel that. A
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child always feels when he is being used to repair
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his parent, even when the repair is dressed up
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as devotion. He feels the weight of being somebody's
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cure, and it is a terrible weight, and it deforms.
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Kabir has taken to narrating the marigold to
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me. Every small change in it, a second leaf,
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a lean toward the window, a millimeter of new
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height overnight, is an event that must be reported,
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and the report always takes exactly the same
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form. He finds me wherever I happen to be in
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the flat, and he says, Papa, look. And I look.
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That is the whole of the ritual, and it is the
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thing I have been turning over in my hands for
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a week now. Unable to put down, because I have
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noticed something about myself in it that I had
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never had occasion to notice before. That I cannot
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not look. Whatever I am doing when the two words
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arrive, I put it down and I go. And I have begun
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to wonder why a summon so small should land in
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me with such an enormous, disproportionate, almost
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frightening weight. I have spent a good part
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of my adult life being suspicious of my own large
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reactions to small things. on the theory that
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a feeling out of all proportion to its occasion
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is usually a feeling that belongs somewhere else
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and has attached itself, opportunistically, to
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whatever is nearest. So when two words from an
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eight -year -old about a leaf could stop me mid
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-sentence and close my throat, I knew, in the
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way you know these things well before you are
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willing to say them out loud, that the leaf was
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not the subject at all. that Kabir's small green
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report had snagged on something much older and
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much larger in me and was dragging it, blinking,
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up into the light. I do not give him the adequate
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look. This is the part one have caught myself
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at. I do not glance up from the paper and say
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that's very nice, beta, and go on reading. I
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do not aim a half of my face at him while the
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other half stays with whatever I was doing. I
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stop. I go to the balcony. I crouch down to his
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height, which is the Sprout's height, and I give
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the small bent green thing the entire weight
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of my attention, as though it were the only event
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occurring in the whole of Delhi that morning,
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as though the newspaper and the phone and the
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deadline had all politely ceased to exist. And
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I would do it a hundred times a day. There is
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no version of Papa. Look that I have ever left
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unanswered or ever will, and the answering costs
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me nothing, and I would give almost anything
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I own for the chance to keep doing it. It took
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me an embarrassingly long time to understand
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why a thing so effortless should feel so much
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like the paying off of a debt. And the reason,
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when it finally arrived, arrived with the particular
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sting of a thing you have always known and never
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once let yourself look at directly. I answer
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as Papa looks so completely because it is the
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exact thing I spent the whole of my own childhood
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waiting for and never got. I have to say plainly
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that my parents were not cruel because the wound
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I am trying to describe is the specific kind
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that comes with no permission to describe it.
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Nobody hit me. Nobody starved me or forgot to
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collect me or drank the rent or raised a hand.
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I was fed well and clothed adequately and sent
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to a decent school and provided for in every
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way that can be itemized and totaled and shown
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to a neighbor. And if you had asked anyone who
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knew us, they would have said, without hesitation,
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that I was a lucky boy who wanted for nothing.
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What I wanted for does not appear on any list
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because the thing I went without leaves no marks
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and shows up in no accounts. I was not watched.
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My father was a busy and distracted man who loved
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me, I believe in the abstract, the way you love
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a fact about your life, and who almost never,
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in the concrete, actually looked at me. I remember
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the shape of it more clearly than I remember
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anything else about being small. The turning
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around a show, and the finding of a back, a recitation
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I had practiced for a week, and his eyes on his
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watch. A prize -giving where I scanned the rows
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of fathers for my own face and found it angled
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away, deep in conversation with the man in the
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next chair, so that when my name was called and
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I looked out into the audience for the one face
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that was supposed to be already looking at me,
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it was looking somewhere else, and I collected
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the little certificate and carried it home to
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a house where it was praised for four seconds
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and set down on a table and never mentioned again.
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And the peculiar cruelty of that kind of childhood,
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the thing that took me until middle age to name,
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is that because nothing was ever wrong, because
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I had everything, the hunger I felt had no legitimacy,
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and therefore no name. I grew up certain that
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the emptiness was a defect in me, a greed, an
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ingratitude, some grasping flaw in a boy who
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had a full plate and no business being hungry.
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It never once occurred to me that a plate could
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be full of everything except the one thing and
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that a child can quietly starve at a laden table
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if the one thing missing is the thing he most
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needed, which was simply to be seen. I have tried
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over the years to explain this to the very few
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people I ever tried to, and it does not survive
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the telling. It comes out sounding like ingratitude,
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like a well -fed man complaining about the pattern
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on the china. Physical neglect announces itself.
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It leaves bruises and records and a clean, clear
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story that a child can eventually stand up and
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tell. But the child who is merely unwatched has
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no story, only a weather, a lifelong, low -grade
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conviction that he is somehow not quite worth
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the turning of a head, that he must earn, loudly
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and repeatedly, a regard that other people appeared
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simply to be given at birth. You cannot press
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charges against a weather. You can only, if you
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are very lucky, one day happen to notice that
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it has been quietly raining on you your whole
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life. My father is alive still, old now, in a
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flat on the other side of the city, and we speak
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on Sundays about the weather and his knee, and
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I have never told him any of this, because there
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is genuinely nothing to accuse him of. He did
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everything a father is supposed to do. He only
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never looked up. And so I have come to understand,
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this past week of Papa, look, exactly what it
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is I am doing when I drop everything and go.
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I am answering two children. There is Kabir in
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front of me, holding his sprout up into the light,
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waiting to be looked at. And there is, standing
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just behind him and a little to the left, in
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the grey school shorts of 35 years ago, another
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boy of just about the same age, holding up his
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own small thing. A certificate, a drawing, a
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caught tadpole, a recited verse, still waiting,
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after all these decades, to be looked at too.
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And when I crouch down and give Kabir the whole
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of my attention, some of it, and I do not mean
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this as a figure of speech, I mean that I can
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feel it happen in my chest, physically, like
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a valve opening, some of it travels straight
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past Kabir, and lands on the other boy. the one
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I was, and he receives, forty years late and
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by the strangest and most roundabout route imaginable,
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the exact thing he was owed and went without.
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I am building for Kabir, deliberately, plank
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by plank, the childhood I myself did not have.
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And what I did not anticipate, what nobody warns
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you of, is that in the building of it the boy
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I used to be is quietly, retroactively, being
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housed. Every act of attention I give my son
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is also, by some accounting I do not fully understand,
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an act of attention reaching backward through
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time to a boy at a prize -giving who is still
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scanning the rose. I get to be, for Kabir, the
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father who looks up. And in getting to be him,
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I get, at last and secondhand, to have had him.
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There is a particular vertigo in this that I
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have not managed to find a name for. It is the
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sensation of standing on both sides of the same
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moment at once, being in a single breath, the
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father doing the looking and the boy being looked
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at, the giver of the thing and its decades -late
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receiver. But crouched on that balcony over a
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marigold seedling, I am briefly too. the adult
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who is fully, deliberately present to his son,
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and the child who is finally, dizzyingly, getting
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the very thing he stopped hoping for so long
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ago he had forgotten it was a thing a person
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was allowed to be given. But there is a trap
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folded inside this, a real and dangerous one,
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and I would not have seen it in time if Saloni
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had not seen it first. The trap is to make Kabir
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carry it. To watch him not for his sake, but
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for mine. To let the starving boy inside me get
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his hands on the boy in front of me and feed.
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It would be so easy, and so disguised as love,
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to need Kabir's papa, look, to require it, to
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lean my whole unhealed childhood against my son's
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small shoulders, to make his turning to show
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into the medicine for my never having been shown.
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until the looking stopped being a gift I gave
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him and became a thing I took. And a child can
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feel that. A child always feels when he is being
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used to repair his parent, even when the repair
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is dressed up as devotion. He feels the weight
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of being somebody's cure, and it is a terrible
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weight, and it deforms him because a child conscripted
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into healing his father is no longer free to
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simply be a child. So the discipline, and it
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is a discipline I have to practice it, is to
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attend to Kabir wholly and only for Kabir, to
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keep the boy I was entirely out of it, to give
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my son the look because my son is holding up
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a sprout and deserves to be looked at, full stop,
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and for no reason that has anything to do with
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me. The healing of the other boy has to arrive
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sideways or not at all. It has to come as a grace
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I receive precisely by not reaching for it, because
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the instant I reach for it, It curdles into appetite,
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and Kabir becomes a spoon. So I watch him for
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him, and the boy I was gets his look over the
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new boy's shoulder, only on the strict condition
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that in the moment of looking I am not thinking
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about the boy I was at all. It is the strangest
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of conditions, this rule that the cure only works
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on you when you are not seeking it, and I recognize
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in it the same paradox Selenie has been teaching
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me in one form or another since the day we married.
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The tenderness that heals a marriage cannot be
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extracted by demand. The grief that finally moves
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cannot be hurried along. The look that mends
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the old boy cannot be summoned, only given away,
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freely, to somebody else. Everything that actually
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repairs a person seems to arrive obliquely as
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the byproduct of an attention aimed honestly
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at another. Reach for it directly, and it dissolves
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in the hand. I am still, at my age, only beginning
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to learn how to stop reaching. It was Saloni,
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of course, who first looked at me the way I now
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look at Kabir. I had almost forgotten that this
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was where I learned it until she reminded me
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without meaning to. Years ago, before any of
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this, when I was a closed and sleeping man who
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had made a whole quiet career out of not needing
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to be seen, she looked at me. Really looked,
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the way she looks at everything, the way she
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looks at a pair of hands she is about to make,
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and something in me that had been waiting since
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the prize -giving stood up. That was the beginning
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of my waking. I know that now. She saw me first,
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and in being seen, I slowly learned that seeing
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was a thing a person could do on purpose, could
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give, could be trained in, and everything I now
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give Kabir, I am giving in her currency, with
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a skill she taught me. And she caught me, one
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evening this week, in a moment I had not meant
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anyone to catch, standing in the doorway watching
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Kabir show her the sprout, watching him receive
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her full attention, and finding it, for one ambushed
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instant, almost unbearable to watch, because
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his attended face showed me in sharp relief the
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exact shape of the thing I had gone without.
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She came and stood beside me, and she did not
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ask what was wrong, and she did not tell me it
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was fine. She just looked at me, threw it the
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way she does, and she said, quietly, you're allowed
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to grieve him too, you know. The boy you were.
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Just because nobody ever hit him doesn't mean
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he wasn't starving. And I understood that she
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was seeing, in her middle -aged husband in a
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doorway, the same unwatched child I had spent
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the evening building a childhood for, and that
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the chain ran clean and unbroken from her seeing
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me, to my learning to see. to my seeing Kabir,
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to the boy I was getting seen at the very end
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of the line, decades late, by a woman who had
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never met him and loved him anyway. I have thought
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since about what a strange and merciful thing
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it is to be loved backward like that, to have
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a woman reach clean past the man in front of
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her all the way to a boy she could never possibly
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have known, and gather him in two. She cannot
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go to the prize -giving and turn my father's
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head toward the stage. Nobody can. That afternoon
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is sealed and gone and beyond the reach of anyone
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now living. But she can stand in a doorway 35
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years later and see the boy who stood waiting
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in that hall and by seeing him now, late, from
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the far wrong end of a whole lifetime, do something
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to that old wound that all my years of turning
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it over never could. I wrote it that night in
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the sixth notebook. the marigold on the balcony
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holding its two brave leaves, both my sons asleep,
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the one down the hall in his bed, and the one
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thirty -five years back, at last, perhaps, able
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to stop scanning the rose. That you cannot go
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back. You cannot return to the boy you were and
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give him the attention he starved at a full table
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for. He is gone. that specific boy, uncollectible,
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and no amount of anything reaches him directly.
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But this is the secret, sideways mercy of raising
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a child when you yourself were under -raised,
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that when you give the child in front of you,
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honestly and entirely for his own sake, the thing
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you never got, some of it does reach backward
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after all, and finds the old boy and houses him.
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Every ordinary papa, look that I answer lands
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twice. Once, rightly and fully on Kabir, and
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once, glancingly, by grace, on the boy at the
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prize -giving who is finally, over his shoulder,
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getting looked at. I am reparenting myself, not
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by working on myself, not by reaching for it,
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but as the pure and unintended side effect of
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parenting my son well. The wound my father left
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by never looking up is being closed, forty years
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on. By my refusing to pass it down. By my looking
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up, every single time, so that the chain that
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ran unwatched from his father to him to me stops.
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Here, in a small flat in Delhi, at a balcony,
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at a sprout, at a boy who'll grow up never once
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having to wonder whether, when he turns around
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to show, someone will be looking. Then the working
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line. The sixth notebook open. The old boy and
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the new one both finally at rest. You cannot
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return to the child you were and give him what
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he starved for. That boy is gone and uncollectible.
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But when you give it, honestly and for their
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own sake, to the child in front of you, some
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of it reaches backward and finds him anyway.
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This is the sideways mercy of raising a child
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when you were under -raised yourself. Every ordinary
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look you give lands twice, once on the child
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before you, once on the child you were. Do not
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make your son your medicine. Watch him for him.
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Keep your own hunger out of it, or the gift curdles
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into appetite and he feels the weight of being
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your cure. Attend to him for him, and let the
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old boy get looked at, glancingly, by grace,
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over the new boy's shoulder. That is how a man
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houses, at last, the child that nobody housed,
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not by going back for him. but by refusing, here,
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now, forward, to pass the wound down. I capped
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the pen and went to looking on Kabir, and he
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was asleep with the growth chart on the wall
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beside his metro map and his own initial pressed
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into the pot out on the dark balcony, and I stood
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over him longer than I needed to, being, for
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a while, the father I did not have. watching
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the sleeping face of a boy who has never once
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had a skin a crowd for me because I have made
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it the whole business of my life to already be
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looking. And I thought of my own father across
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the city, old and diminished and blameless and
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never once cruel, who did every calculable thing
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and missed the one that cannot be calculated,
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and I found in myself, to my surprise, less anger
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than I expected, and more of something that was
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almost tenderness, because I have learned this
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year how easy it is to give a child everything
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except the thing, and how a man can love his
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son entirely in the abstract and still, somehow,
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forget to look up. In the morning Kabir came
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and found me at the table and said, Papa, look,
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and held out the pot with its two leaves turned
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toward the window, and I put down my cup and
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I looked fully. the way I always will, and somewhere
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just behind him a boy in gray shorts who had
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waited 35 years finally, quietly, got to put
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his certificate down. To be continued in episode
19:09
That was episode 80, One of My Playful Wife.
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