The truth about the empty nest

A few years ago, when our nest became empty and many a tear was shed silently in distress, staring into a black mass had become nocturnal mores for us. One such night, when all the sighs drifted up to become a cloud of uncertainty, we said synchronously: “Let’s have another baby.” We then burst into laughter and exchanged the same pinch.

“I’m not kidding,” I said at the end of the titter.

“Neither am I,” she quipped.

“Imagine bringing up another kid at this age. Wouldn’t it be great fun? With so much experience in our kitty purse, we won’t repeat the mistakes of our twenties and thirties. We could be perfect parents.”

“Let’s not be. Let’s make the same mistakes to feel like young parents. Let’s miss the vaccination dates. Let’s miss the school bus. Let’s buy pink clothes and Barbie dolls for our baby boy and vice versa.”

“How about a dash of mascara and a pair of ear studs for the boy? By the way, are you healthy enough to bear a baby?” I queried.

“If there’s a will, there’s a baby,” she shot back. In the following days, we individually dreamed up another parenthood. We did the math of bringing up and educating a baby in the modern world with the reality of a retirement knocking on the door day and night.

“Ever thought who would take care of the child if something happened to us, God forbid?” she asked.

Such talk came up time and again before it became water under the bridge, and a call came from our daughter in Chennai.

“Dad, I’m positive.” I was taken aback as India was still reeling from the Covid pandemic.

“Are you sure? Did you do RT-PCR?”

Vava kept chuckling, trying my patience. “Dad, you know what? I’ve conceived,” she sounded shy.

I should have been lifted to the zenith of happiness but as I hung up after congratulating Vava, I kept wondering why I suddenly drew a long face. It was not the sudden change of my status from dad to grandad. It’s not that I am unable to give her a physical hug. It’s not that I am worried about the medical course she was about to join.

“Aren’t you happy now? You are going to be a grandfather,” wifey asked me that night.

“Of course, I am. But we wanted to be new parents, right?”

“This aborts all the dreams we have been conceiving,” she said.

“But is there a taboo on grandparents becoming parents again? How many septuagenarians in showbiz have become parents?”

“True, but we live in a different world.”

In the following months, we braced ourselves to be grandparents, in the way Vava and Sarath would have groomed themselves to be new parents. We bought up all things prefixed baby, with organic being the new shibboleth, in the way Vava and Sarath would have done in Chennai. We were excited, in the way Vava and Sarath would have been.

On the third day after Zayne came to the world, I held him in the way I carried Vava 29 years ago in my hands. I photographed him in the way I did Vava in our Dubai apartment in the ’90s. Zayne’s cute, as was my daughter. He stared into my eyes and gave a snortle in the way Vava did as a baby. I coddled and pampered Zayne in the way I did to Vava. The emotions were the same. The ecstasy and beatitude were the same.

Today, as we share our little world in Dubai, I feed him, burp him and cart him in a stroller through the afternoon breeze from the creek, feeling like a father. I croon the same lullabies I sung to my daughter as a young parent. Zayne and I have such a bond that I understand his likes and dislikes from his eyes. The boy has instilled in me the awareness that every grandparent is a parent born again.

In the past few weeks, I dusted out my baby care skills like changing diapers without a frown, making milk in the right formula and, most importantly, being a baby whisperer. He seemed to beckon me to giggle and holler like him. He seemed to tell me to live life big like a suckling. He seems to tell me to call the shots like babies do. Once upon a time, we were all babies, and progressed to be babies yet again as we aged, pretending to be amaranthine in the continuum. Life’s like that.

Zayne giggled at me from the mat he was struggling to crawl on, as if he could read my mind. Leave your philosophies aside, and enjoy my league, he seemed to say. As Vava filled the diaper bag and Sarath prepared the stroller, I scooped the baby up and asked my daughter: “Can I adopt this baby?”

“All yours, dad,” she said, before thrusting the baby into my chest and driving off to go shopping.

suresh@khaleejtimes.com