Being ‘Thaththi’

“If I said that I loved you,
If I said that I need you,
If I said that I want you,
What would you do?”

My daughter ‘Masha’ sings in tune with the young lady singing on the radio, her twin sister ‘Shasha’ looks at her with a grin on her face, I smile to myself as I look at them. At five-and-a-half years, I am sure Masha does not really comprehend the meaning of the words of the song in the context of which they were written, but as I look at her, my mind races back to 2000.

The month is December, and I am standing with sweaty palms and anxiously beating heart, as my wife is wheeled away into the delivery room of the hospital. My mind is in a whirl, and I do not know if I should sit down, stand or walk. So I do all of the above alternatively. She looks at me and smiles; as always she is a lot more composed than I.

My brother-in-law, a doctor, comes by and grabs my shoulder to reassure me that everything will be fine. I am glad that he will be at her side during the operation. Our mothers smile reassuringly at me, but I can see the strain etched into their faces.

My wife is about to give birth to twins by Caesarian section. We found out that we were going to be parents to twins only seven months into our pregnancy.

Questions shoot through my brain. Did we take enough nourishment for both babies? Will they be normal? How will my wife stand up to the surgery? I shake my head to dispel these foreboding images and thoughts that whirl endlessly through it. Luckily we have an excellent surgeon who will be in charge of the operation.

My mind goes back a few years. It had not been an easy time for us. Both of us love kids, and we longed for a child of our own for several years. I remember the long days we prayed for a child, the long nights when we both cried and wondered why we had not been blessed so far. We tried all sorts of medical procedures; we had the experts who told us conceiving a child was ‘impossible’ for us.

Then one glorious day a lab report proclaims the pregnancy test is ‘weakly positive’. I don’t think either of us saw the word ‘weakly’ at all. We were so ecstatic at seeing the ‘positive’, after endless treks to the lab and coming back heart-broken and disappointed.

“Putha, putha,” I hear someone calling me from far away, and I realise that it is my mother. “Are you okay?” I realise that my mind has been far away. I assure my mother that I am fine.

I look at the clock. It is 6.55 in the morning. Suddenly an inner door of the theatre opens. My brother-in-law comes up to the outer door in his theatre clothes and looks at me with a broad smile. “Ayya, you have two beautiful girls, and Akka is doing fine” he says. To me those words mean the world. Within a few minutes a nurse brings my precious daughters out of the theatre, and hands them over to my wife’s mother, who is herself a nursing sister at the hospital. I see her wide smile of relief and joy, as she shows the girls to us. I see my mother wiping the tears that stream unabashedly down her face.

That day in December 2000, life came full circle for us. All the years of heartache, all the endless days of despair, of disappointment were gone. At 6.49 and 6.50 that beautiful December morning, God blessed us with two precious gifts, for which we had longed for so long.

The days and months race by. I watch as my tiny children grow. We keep a very watchful eye on them, as they were both underweight at birth. Each night we took it in alternate turns to stay up and watch these two tiny creatures. Sleep was a luxury that was easily put aside (it still is sometimes). We moved out of the house where we lived in close proximity to Colombo to the suburbs, to where the mosquitoes do not outnumber humans 2000 to one, and where the air is a lot cleaner, and we have pure fresh water from our own well.

During the past five-and-a-half years I have watched as our tiny morsels of life have grown to become two beautiful young girls, with a penchant for Barbie and Winx club dolls. They have now got to learn to share and care for their younger brother ‘Shav’, who we were blessed with much to our surprise and delight when we did not expect to have any more joy bestowed upon us.

I look at my son and my two daughters, and as I do so, I feel pleasure and pain at the same time.

The pleasure derived from all the little acts of love that we as a family have shown each other over the past years. The pleasure in seeing their eyes light up when they see me and their mother coming back from work. The pleasure in the kisses and hugs and the little endearments they shower on us. 

The pleasure when they say “Ammi and Thaththi, we love you”. The pleasure from seeing them grow and acquire preferences. The pleasure in seeing the same delight, even if we buy them a very expensive toy or a chocolate for five rupees, when that is all we can afford. The immense sense of pride I feel when I see my daughters dressing up for school in the morning (grade one has been such an adventure for them).

The pain comes from the knowledge that I have sometimes been unable to comprehend the fact that my family is the most precious and invaluable gift in life. The pain that comes from being unable to understand that material wealth fades into oblivion in the face of true love, and the bond that exists between parents and children, and within the framework of a solid family. The pain for having wasted a few years of my life, and theirs, in search of worldly treasures, which have sadly left me none the richer, but definitely a lot wiser.

I thank God that I was able to see that my family and my children are the most important things I can get in my life, before I had wasted even more time.

I think of what George Moore said, “A man travels the world in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.” It is so, so true. I have been there and realised that on my own accord. We may be facing the hardest time yet in our lives, but with the love of our family to raise us above all the trials and tribulations, we will pull through. We will prevail.

I worry every day that I may not be able to provide them with all that they need. Then my children remind me that what they need is US. They need their mother and father. To them everything else is secondary. As Masha, Shasha and Shav remind us everyday,“We love you and need you, so please don’t grow old or go away.”

I look at Masha again as she continues to sing, tossing her head in tune. She has now been joined by her sister, and my son is clapping his hands with his customarily huge grin on his face.

I realize now that to them the most important role I can play in their lives is “being Thaththi”.

( This article appeared in the Sunday Times - Plus features section on Sunday June 11, 2006 -  http://sundaytimes.lk/060611/plus/Features.html )