Bye Bye Bambocionni

Kids who refuse to leave the nest

“Can you imagine? My son asks me after every meal if I have taken my medicine. And he insists that only he will take Mamma’s blood pressure…”

“My daughter now joins us for dinner every time we are eating at the table. She may be in her night suit but she comes down…”

“The twins let me clean their cupboard. Earlier they would never let me even peer inside…”

“Poplu has taken to farming in our orchards. He will grow red mangoes through a Brazilian technique that fruits only once in five years…”

I nod with a patient smile when I hear this from my aunts, friends and folks in every other living room. After all, this boy slammed doors in her face, not one call from college in four years and a no-show at his father’s sixtieth. It is not a small feat that the girl who barely stuck her hand out through the door crack to accept her dinner plate, who they saw fortnightly, is now joining the family to break bread. These are miracles in the eyes of these parents. My ovaries are exploding at these heartwarming tales. Misty-eyed parents, each sharing the devotion of the child who has given up an important part of their life to live with them, in what they describe as an act of supreme sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is the perfect scam. The accused is an entitled, shrewd little scamster who plays the vulnerable victim, caught in generational parental guilt, to win lifelong board and lodging without as much as promising good behaviour. The license to live free of cost for another year, no job, no educational pursuit, no household responsibility, has been bought with as little as a polite enquiry about blood pressure.

Now let me look in the mirror. I have two daughters. One I am happy to report is in another city, in a job. When she first spoke of the relocation, my Indian mothersome heart immediately belched, “why don’t you try a job in Gurgaon so you can come home for weekends, or commute from home.” Thank god she was unable to do as requested. The distance has made her a bigger woman and us less needy. The little one is now leaving for her masters abroad. I am training myself to let her go and she is training herself to be a Barista to earn on the side. Every Monday I want to tell her to forget it since we can cover her tuition and stay. But then, every Tuesday I rap my knuckles and check myself.

Which is to say, I understand exactly how the scam works, because I have been one bad week from running it on my own children.

The problem begins with us, I’m not sure what we are called now, but the current midlifers. We grew up under parents who enforced rules. Most of us also got routinely whacked. This gave rise to a strong desire to be better parents when the opportunity arose, and hence we swung too far left in allowing everything. We spared the rod, spoke in whispers, did little to hurt the bugger and stretched ourselves like a ten paisa rubber band. This brought forward children with fragile emotions and the resilience of wet tissue. The world outside can be intimidating to such a child and staying within the warm, fuzzy cocoon is a natural choice. That it may destroy his sense of self-worth is sometimes not evident. The cost is camouflaged. It returns much later, with interest.

From most Indian parents’ point of view, this situation is sometimes almost welcome. A starved mother is happy to read love in a query about her medicine. In this world of youngsters drunk on screens, parents struggle to participate in their children’s lives. An offer to help settle a cupboard is a mother’s version of sharing a part of her child’s life. Marriages later in life are making children seem younger than they are to parents, thus making the delay into adulthood permissible.

In households with a family business, the lines blur further. The parents are keen to have the next generation nurture what they built. The presence of the scion on the bed munching chips, or turning up after three reminders to accept the ‘best whatever’ trophy alongside the father, is taken as evidence of involvement. The third-level managers do the heavy lifting. The heir-apparent sits on the office chair occasionally, just to get a photograph for the matrimonial circuit.

The phenomenon is by no means exclusive to Indians. ‘Extended adolescence’ is the academically accepted term. Every culture has its own name for this phenomenon, invented by parents who finally sobered up. The Italians call them Bamboccioni, the Germans have Hotel Mama, the Japanese label them parasite singles, the Americans have boomerang kids, the Australians have the kangaroo generation. Indians had the quintessential Kunwar sahibs, but today women are as much a part of the mix. Let’s just agree to call them Baby and Baba.

But this is where I sign out. It is with sweat and blood that parents raise and educate children. It is difficult and often at the cost of large chunks of their youth. The losses are not merely financial. Unless plagued by grave misfortune, our next generation needs to take on the responsibility of becoming adults. And the midlife mourners deserve the chance to recalibrate from being only parents to being people again.

Else, to misquote the Beatles, they will still need you, will still feed off you, when they are sixty-four.