14 Feb 2023- A Valentine Message.
Today, you were a little baby wearing your orange T shirt and khakhi shorts, enacting the usual ritual of not letting go of my hand at the school and laughing at the watchman. Today, you read two books in the morning, ate two oats idlis, smiled at strangers from the car window and demanded your current favourite song : a semi-classical Tamil movie song, to which you danced with abandon.
Tomorrow, I wonder what you will be.
Will you be the one fitting in to all your friends’ groups seamlessly and being the life of the party? Will you be one hanging on the sidelines and hoping you’ll find your space, eventually? Will you be hoping your friends remember your birthday, or will you have cut 2 birthday cakes by 11 AM?
Will you boldly ask questions in class, without wondering if you sound too dumb or too smart or too anything? Or will you write down the question and linger back after the class, eventually relieved that the opportunity doesn’t arise?
Will you be curious about science? Literature? Maths? History? Art? Insects? Dinosaurs? Obscure facts from pop culture? Celebrities?
Will you take a lot of selfies? Will you pout or frown or stare expressionless for them or follow whatever the new trend is at the time? Will you be posting undecipherable future jargon on future social media channels?
Will you be able to play when you have nothing at all to play with, except a friend (real or imaginary)? Will you know how to tear a piece of paper into four, mark them as king, queen, police and robber and make the game last an entire summer vacation? Or when you don’t have paper even, will you be able to play endless iterations of games like Mother May I and Chinese Knot and Queen of Sheba, where rules get addeds on the go?
Will you be the one who is never late for school? Will you have to be dragged our of your bed on weekends, or will you be eager to go kick a ball on the beach when the sun is barely rising? Or will you bury yourself in a book for hours as the food gets cold, because ‘just one chapter more’? Will you like reading about dragons, or about midnight picnics in a coastal English boarding school, or about politically aware tweens, or about natural history?
Will you choose a chocolate cake or a lemon tart? Will you like unusual combinations of food like guava ice cream with chilli powder? Will you avoid shops when you travel or want to buy that one really pretty wall hanging as a souvenir ? Will you be irked when the yellow of the pillow case doesn’t quite match the ochre of the bedsheet, or will you wait for the pillowcase to become an indeterminate brown-yellow-green-white before realising it needs a change?
Will you be afraid to drive a car? Will you be want to ride a bicycle through coastal roads with the salty air tickling your hair and a mad rush of adrenaline?
Or will you rather sit and merely watch the sea and dream? What will your dreams be?
What will you be o little one?
