There goes my everything...

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

"Everything's ready, certificates in this file, travel documents here, suitcase all packed, so's my hand luggage, down to toothbrush," says my friend's daughter Nisha. She would be boarding the aircraft to an ivy league college in the U.S that very night. She reminds me of my child's leaving home with the same tremulous grin.

It all started with applications. "Oh Dad, please courier these papers for me," my daughter said one morning. She held out six lopsided packages with crows' feet tracing addresses to universities from Massachusetts to California. "What about good ol' postal service?" my husband growled. A long lament blamed everyone from teachers to photocopying centres for the delays which made it impossible for her to send the stuff by ordinary mail.

Once she got admission, I thought things would change. But no, practice sessions with her rock band, a last play with the local Oliviers, auditions of endless waits at unlikely hours for ad jingles (to raise cash to cut a once-in-a-lifetime-disc with pals), marathon phone sessions with those she was leaving forever on this side of the hemisphere...how could the girl find time for mundane shopping and packing? Shoes? Of course she had to make a weekend trip to B'lore for them, you didn't get the right ones in Chennai.

"I don't have to worry," I heard her announcing blithely into the cordless. "My Mum will get my stuff together in a jiffy." She forgot to add that Mum didn't know what to pack, and didn't have the wizarding skills to get her daughter's entire library (from complete works of Shakespeare to ditto Agatha Christie) that had to get across the Atlantic. If you asked how to make room for them a bored voice suggested, "Take out the toilet case. I can buy soap and comb out there!"

As the count down reached the last weekend...the child was leaving home by Sunday midnight...her room looked as if the CBI had raided it. Clothes, papers, books, CDs, trifles from hairband to a plate under the bed with remains of last night's dinner, all in a quake-torn heap waiting to be sorted into pack-junk-n-give away piles...

"Let's get cracking," I said, happy that the girl had got up early. "Yeah, but after my last walk on the Chennai beach," she said and vanished. Visitors through the day ensured a tortoise pace, not-to-mention frantic searches for mysteriously disappearing travel documents, new shoes, and the walkman without which my daughter was sure she couldn't breathe in any part of the globe.

I gave up messing with the jumble, thinking okay, we'll do it tonight. Undisturbed. But guess what, come evening and the child emerges from the bathroom, hair a blow-dried cloud, in a mist of eau-de-parfum, spaghetti strap top swinging above pants that seemed to have gone through a shredding machine. A host of friends arrive in a storm of mobikes, ready to race to a rock concert. "My last," your child whimpers, tragedy queen style.

A crash of thunder and you know the herd is back, well past midnight. "We're going to do a singalong till dawn," a goatee announces, his single ear-ring winking in the moonlight.

"NO!" you shout in a voice that rises above the bike blast. Your child stomps into her room where, with her sulky instructions you push whatever you can into the luggage, praying that nothing vital is left out. Before you know it you are at the airport. A crushing hug, a breathless kiss, a final wave, and your girl disappears into the doors. A last glimpse through the glass, you see the lanky child in floppy shirt, swinging her handbag ("Careful! It may split open..."), glasses slipping down the nose, gliding in slow motion along with strangers...

You return to the empty home. What you have is a debris of discards, the remnants of merry, carefree youth, when there was always someone to pick up the pieces with you... after you... for you...

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