Daughters are gentle

While sons are brats. Or so goes the conventional wisdom (applicable to daughters and sons in the age groups 0 to 10. Or is it 15 ? 20? 40?). Anyway, let me explain what happened today. But before that I’ll take a detour and introduce you to the most important problem in life. Which is, of course, finding the glasses in the morning. Now, if you, like me, are not a particularly morning person, you will understand when I define morning as that time lag between the eyes opening up and the brain opening up (never mind that on some days the latter never quite happens). So, getting up to a dazed vision and ploughing through the maze of thoughts before realizing that the daze of the vision is actually due to lack of glasses and from there for the next thought to dawn that the solution for this is to get the glasses on and from there to figure out where it was kept last and from there to actually get down to the task of finding the glasses (without the glasses on, of course)…uff, tough life. Fortunately for me, Daivik, the darling he is, has stepped in. He has taken upon himself the onerous task of finding the glasses and has bestowed upon himself the honorific title of ‘glass finder’ (he is also, by the way, my ‘coffee maker’, a privileged task that involves pushing a button)(he knows that privilege part). Since then, my life has become infinitely easier, and the mornings pleasantly bright and startlingly, well, clear.

Now cut to today. As usual the battle between the eyes opening and brains opening was on. Akshara, the gentle daughter, the early riser, had made sure that whatever little pleasure that exists in those extra five minutes in bed remains firmly in the realms of stuff that dreams are made of. I was stumbling my way out of the bed when I saw her walking in. Daivik came running past her with an excited tone. “Appa, appa, look, Akshara, look, she..”. He was choked, he could not complete the sentence. I thought something had happened to her. But through my glassless perspective, she seemed fine, she was approaching me with a typical toddler gait and as she came closer the brightness of her smile came into focus and indeed it started brightening up all the things around her. I smiled too, but Daivik tried again. “Appa, look, Akshara, look, she…”. She was still walking in, still smiling and as she closed in, she raised both her hands as if offering me something. That is when I saw what Daivik wanted me to see.  On each of her raised hands were my glasses, ex-glasses rather, neatly split into two pieces. With a full smile on, she was urging me to take the glasses.

Daivik found the words. “Appa, see, she broke your glasses”. I wanted to laugh, but this was serious matter. I looked at Akshara and told with a stern voice (I think), “Why did you break the glass?”. Perhaps she realized something was amiss and that she was in the center of it. She  lowered her gaze and very carefully placed the glasses on the edge of the bed and with the head down and eyes averted, waited. After a few seconds, she rolled her eyes up without moving the head and finding me still waiting for an answer immediately averted her eyes and very slowly, very purposefully, walked away. Daivik was still dumbfolded. A glass that was never broken in his lifetime was suddenly broken. “Appa, see, she broke your glasses”, he said again. And suddenly overwhelmed with an enormous amount of care, added “oh, how will you see again”.