Faith in Upbringing

          Soma & Sakti were an understanding couple and blessed with two daughters,  Padmasana and Lalitha.  They were content with one child till their daughter began to miss the love of a sibling.  Lalitha was born a good ten years later.  Eventhough theirs was an arranged marriage and despite the fact that they did not converse with each other before their marriage,  they understood each other well, mainly because both of them believed in the same set of ideals.  Since they believed in realizing their ideals, they took great care in bringing up their children in the way they wanted to.  The couple feared God, spoke the truth (even if it were bitter), respected elders and treated others kindly.

          The couple had a special attachment with Padmasana, who was very sickly in childhood.  She was a brilliant child, regarded as ‘Ekasantaagraahi’ (one who would grasp anything on hearing just once) but was prone to frequent ill-health.  The family stayed in Visakhapatnam and lived very close to the sea.  Whenever a cyclone approached the coast, the girl would be down with tonsilitis. Some other day, the child would be down with viral fever.  No summer passed by without the child falling sick.  The rigmarole of going to the doctor, fetching the medicine (yes, those were the days when there were only two or three pharmacies in the entire town), was gone through by the couple with a lot of affection.  Not once did the parents express any frustration at the state of her health.  They would set the  alarm clock and wake up in the dead of the night (in those days, if the dosage of a medicine was 6-hourly, it had to be given at that interval, even if it were in the night).  Sakti would prepare some sweet lime juice or horlicks (depending upon the nature of sickness), wake the child up and then Soma would hold her even as she would not be stable and feed her with it, administer the medicine and put her to sleep.  The child soon realized that she was kept healthy by her parents. 

They would also monitor the play time of the child lest she should  overstrain herself and fall ill again.  They even talked it over with the school  authorities to let her absent herself from school after the second  bi-monthly examination till the start of the final examinations.  There were a couple of classmates of hers in her locality and she would collect the school notes from them and study.  In fact, she was much ahead of the school when it came to syllabus coverage, simply because Sakti taught her the entire syllabus and also made the answers for the questions given in the text-books.  So, the final exams were a cake-walk for her and she invariably walked away with the General Proficiency prize, except if the class teacher tried to play a game of favouritism and enabled some one else.  The parents taught the child to take it in her stride, by telling her that she was studying  for the sake of knowledge and not for the ‘rank’.  She accepted whatever her parents told her, because she had a strong  feeling that  they were ‘all-knowing’. 

She was not conventional unlike those times.  She was not even aware of her caste till she was in 4^th standard.  Whenever her family  would pass by a church, the sight of the crucifix would move her to tears. ‘How can people nail a person, even if they don’t agree with each other?’, she would ask.  Her parents did not object to her buying  a picture of Jesus Christ and placing it in the drawing room.  The parents fielded questions about their rumoured ‘conversion’ with a smile.

 In due course, the girl turned out to be an ideal child that each parent dreamt of.  When her sister was born, she could not think of staying without her mother, so she kept away from school for three months even as her  father collected the school notes, copied them (photo copiers were non-existent then) and snail-mailed the papers to her, so that she could be up-to-date from her grandmother’s place which was a good 800 kilometres away.  No wonder that  Padmasana had every reason to believe that she would have been a non-entity but for her parents.

On every birthday,  till she completed 12 years of age, Soma would carry Padmasana on his shoulders, take her to every room in the house and make the people at home pay obeisance to his ‘princess’.  This privilege was limited her only since her fiercely independent sister did not allow her father to do that.

On one Sivaratri, a fasting Padmasana came home after playing with a neighbour’s child, and announced that she intended to keep awake the whole night.  While Soma disliked the idea of fasting (which he never did anyway), the very thought of Jagran shocked him.  He called his daughter over to his lap (she was just 6 or 7 then) and found  out why she wanted to keep awake the whole night.  She replied that the neighbouring Annayya (elder brother, common place in A.P. to call the children  of neighbours older than themselves as such) had challenged her to do both fasting  and keeping awake, to prove her ‘worth’.  There was some stake involved too, Rs.5.   Soma tried to explain to the child that one should not be betting in first place, but the child was adamant, insisting that no one could treat her lightly.  Then, the father tried to entice  her into giving up Jagran- he offered to pay her Rs.10 if she slept.  The child replied that her word was at stake and more money did not matter to her and she could not go back on her word, since she had already accepted the challenge.

                   Finally, the child kept awake in the children’s bed room of the neighbour (which meant that the Annayya who challenged her did not get his sleep because of the cacophony created by the rest of the lot) and  triumphantly  returned  home the next morning and slept during the day.  Soma was happy for two reasons – one, his child was determined and two, she had not traded her word for enticement.  He disliked the concept of ‘betting’, but felt that his 6 year old will understand it in due course.  He anyway told her that betting was not a desirable thing and that she should not get into it in future; it was unconnected with proving oneself.

          In due course, Padmasana became a teenager.  Her fondness for her parents remained as it was, though she realized that her father was maintaining a distance with her, physically that is.  With teenage she got some cranky ideas too, and wanted to experiment with one such idea on her father.  One hot summer afternoon, Soma returned from the library, had lunch, and relaxed.  Padmasana went up to him and asked for Rs.100.  Her expectation was that Soma would ask reasons for demanding such a fat sum of money (in the 1980s, it was a princely sum)  and then she would retort, “Nanna, don’t you have faith in your daughter?’. She came back to the present when Soma told her, ‘Take it from the safety locker (where money was kept) dear’.  She was keen to pick up an argument (if not a fight), so did not relent.  She asked him for the money, once again.  This time, Soma did not say a word, got up, walked up to the safety locker, opened it, took out a 100 Rupee note and gave it to her.  The girl was overcome by guilt and sought forgiveness of her father and, with tears in her eyes,  told him why exactly she asked for the money. Soma replied, “ Yes, I have faith in my daughter, so I gave you the money.  However, I also have faith in my upbringing, so I knew my daughter  would never ask me for money to waste it.”

Padmasana had learnt one more lesson from her ‘all- knowing’ parent!!