Yogesh Pawar

My heart was heavy with anxiety with less than twenty four hours before my two-year-old was off to pre-school. My mom, the mom-in-law and most neighbours and acquaintances were heaping advice on us on how to deal with her crying when we leave her at school the first few days.

As I watched my wife take mental notes and nod her head when such advice (much of it unsolicited, might I add?) is coming her way, I wanted to imagine that this is not happening and little Tanvi will never go to school.

My worry, you see stemmed from a completely different kind of concern. What if the tyke (as is her won't) just didn't cry? Suppose she just ran in to look at the toys and play, without a backward glance at us, without as much as a flicker of attachment?What would it do to me? Would I be able to come to terms with how easily I'd outlived my utility?

My friends with grown-up kids said its silly but I realised that in just 25 months I am more dependent on her emotionally than the other way round. I have come to hunger for the times when I reach home and she's being tucked into bed, when she tosses everything aside and leaps into my arms. All the day's hard work of her mom - being slave to every desire is forgotten in a trice and she is inseparable from Papa.

Happy to be picked up by anyone and generous in her display of affection she does not miss the missus or me as long as people around give her attention and chocolates. Would I be able to deal with being passed over?

Mom's told me to recollect how she and Dad dealt with sending off my sister after marriage. "At least she's coming back in two and half hours. And this kind of being by herself will inculcate independence," she advised and added for good measure like a hardened matriarch, "do you want her to grow up to be clingy?"

All the years of living away in boarding school myself wasn't making this easy for me to digest. While Dad clucked sympathetically, his insistence that I inherited my worry-bug nature from my mom's side led to arched eye-brows and a glare from my Mom and a giggle from my wife. "Come on Mummy, let it be now," the bahu said.

Like all good daughters-in-law she seemed to think Mummy's advice was good and went with it. But as the hours slipped away I kept sighing with mounting anxiety unable to let little Tanvi be. "If there's anything just tell the teacher and she will call us. We'll just come in a jiffy and pick you up," I reassured her.

On the assigned day, the whole family went to drop the decked-in- new-clothes Tanvi to school. At the school, sure enough, she leapt out of my arms and ran into to check out the toys and the large painted giraffes on the walls. "Beta say bye," called out her Mom but an excited Tanvi only half turned waving (at the wall) and began running around the place gurgling.

I kept telling the others to leave but they insisted and we all waited till her play-school session got over. Many kids had cried but not her. "She's been chattering non-stop showing everyone her shoes and water bottle," said a help at the playschool as my Dad laughed and gathered his grand-daughter in his arms. Over his shoulders she looked at us, eye-brows knit in a frown. "What happened beta?" her mother asked flicking a hair strand from her eyes. "I want to go home," she said and looked like she was going to cry.

In the car while all of us began comforting her I asked, "Do you think she's embarrassed so many of us came to drop and get her?"