Kids

I had dinner at Jus’ Paratha’s today. It’s a restaurant at L B Road in Thiruvanmiyur that specializes in stuffed parathas, though they also serve regular North-Indian food. They’ve got this bell at every table, with a wooden handle to the tongue. We decided today (for no particular reason) that the bell must be intended to get the attention of the waiters, since they sometimes tend to ignore you. So we rang it when I wanted a refill of my glass of water. A little girl at the next table looked at us mischievously when we did that, as if to say, “Ha, now Daddy is going to scold you!” She’d probably been forbidden from ringing the bell before we reached there. Quite cute, that kid. She kept stealing glances at us all the time, smiling widely every time we managed to catch her at it. As I was getting up to leave, I rang the bell one last time just for her. She game me a wide smile as I left.

She reminded me of the movie Matchstick Men (I saw that a week ago). It’s got Nicholas Cage and Alison Lohman playing a really endearing father-daughter duo. The movie is around a year old but only just reached Chennai a couple of weeks back, I guess. And my friends in Bangalore and Bombay don’t even seem to have heard of it. Anyway, the movie is a must-see. The bit before the end will leave you… well, why don’t I just let you watch the movie?

By the time I walked out of the movie hall, I knew why I wanted a daughter. It’s something I made up my mind about a few years ago, and movies like this only reinforce that desire. Of course, considering the fact that my paternal grandfather had three sons, and those sons had six sons and one daughter, and it’s the guy’s chromosomes that count with respect to the child being a boy or a girl, I’m probably going to be disappointed.

Yes, I know, a lot of you are going, “Kids? Don’t you think you have a long way to go before that?” But let a guy dream, will you?