Paternity leaves -- Are you telling the truth?

May 8, 2009. I’d forgotten my phone at my workstation and gone to the edit bay to help the video editor prune a sound byte. “Why aren’t you answering the phone?” Prasad, a colleague and a family friend, chided me after my wife, unable to reach me, called him. Though her due date was a week away, she’d had to be rushed to the hospital by my sister-in-law Kavita.

A colleague who overheard this exchange said with a smirk as I waited for the lift, “Ab aap paternity leave manayenge, haan?”

Anxious about reaching the far-off hospital as quickly as possible, I fought back the urge to respond with a ‘mind your own business,’. The organisation I worked for allows individuals a fortnight of paternity leave, which can be extended for another two weeks. 

We had decided to name her Tanvi. My wife was still in surgery when Tanvi was brought out. She needed a change of diaper.

Kavita wanted to help but I declined, asking her to guide me through the process instead. Once cleaned, the red face smiled up at me.

A visiting uncle once put an arm around my shoulder and said, “You shouldn’t be off work for so long. It is not as if you have given birth to the baby. Now that there are so many women to help, why are you hanging around? When your cousins were born I wasn’t even in the city. I arrived in the evening and went to the hospital to meet your aunt. I was back at work the next day.” He added, “You know, a man like you fussing about so much over maternity can put wrong ideas in women’s heads.”

Unaware of all this, my daughter decided that she was going to sleep soundly by day and howl if not picked up at night. You had to walk her as well. I remember the mixed smells of milk, talc and ajwain (bishop’s weed), as she snuggled at my neck, studying the back of my ankles with the concentration of a researcher. I still slip into the babble talk I created during those walks.

But what I think of as special bonding time is interpreted differently by others. Once a college friend clucked disapprovingly at my refusal to join him for beer. “Chal na yaar, celebrate karte hain.” I told him that I was required to stay home at night. “You should go back to work and normal life. If you start doing all this, what will your wife do?” the father-of-two asked me, laughing.

The former colleague, of unsolicited-comments-near-the-lift fame, has since been blessed with a baby too. I hope he’s cured. What can one say otherwise? Get well soon, maybe?