It is still safe to smile....!

“Dad, you will be back in 10 days, exactly 10 days, right?” the kid asked. The man smiled and nodded.

Inside the plane, a woman hugged her child and prayed silently: “God, please make him a normal person.”

“But what is a normal person?” the father asked.

“I do not want him to be so different that he becomes a target,” the mother said.

“But he is already different from so many others. His skin, ethnicity and faith, all these will bring him both friends and foes,” said the father.

“I know and that’s why I gave him a neutral name. His name does not reveal his faith or ethnicity,” said the mother.

“How neutral can he be? Some people will always find something to disagree with. We circumcised him, didn’t we? Now that makes him different from the uncircumcised,” the father said.

“But this is not a major issue, is it?” asked the mother, already scared.

“Well, when we were growing up, nobody looked for mourning marks on people’s bodies. Now they do. And circumcision was an issue in the not so distant past,” the father replied.

“O God, what shall I do? How can I make him totally non-controversial?” the mother asked.

“You cannot. Now even graveyards are controversial. People dig up graves and throw away bodies,” the father said.

As the other father overheard the conversation, he recalled what his son had said to him at the airport: “Dad, you will be back in 10 days, right?”

“Yes, I will but what shall I bring for you?” he asked.

“Bring something that makes our kids also love the country we came from. I want them to retain some desi flavor,” said his wife.

What shall he bring? A toy? What toy? Something as desi as garam masala or doodh patti. Perhaps, a cricket bat? But that’s British. Ghugoo-ghoray? Native Americans had them too.

What native games did he play when he was young? Lukka-meeti? But that exists in the West too. They call it tag.

“I know what was totally native, the game in which they all sat in a circle and quietly placed a handkerchief behind someone,” he thought.

But is it not like the game he saw some American kids playing in his backyard? “Who took the cookies from the cookie-jar?”

“If you really want our child to be neutral, teach him the sign language,” the first father said to his wife. “Having a mother tongue also compromises his neutrality.”

Unintentionally, the mother moved her hand in the air to see if her child would understand this meant they were in a plane and the plane was flying.

“We can teach him the sign language but he still has to wear clothes,” the mother thought. Although shirts and trousers were a universally accepted dress for men, there are some areas where it could be dangerous to wear them.

Then, she recalled walking in downtown Washington in shalwar-kameez days after 9/11. A man stopped his bike near her and shouted: “Here is a terrorist, catch her, catch her.”

She did not wear shalwar-kameez for weeks.

The child cried. He was hungry. She covered herself in a large shawl and began to feed him.

“But how long can she keep him on mother’s milk?” she thought. Soon, he will need solids and that’s when she will have to decide whether she should give him Western or desi food.

Some people in the West do not like the smell of the garam masalas and some desis disliked Western food. Some loved Chinese food. Some did not. So what to do now? “Will eating a particular food compromise his neutrality too?” she asked herself.

The man whose wife had asked him to bring back a typically desi gift for the kids looked out the window. The airport staff was busy removing snow from the runway.

“I should bring some sunshine. That would be the best gift to bring to this frozen city,” he thought.

“Yes, the sunshine,” said the mother who wanted her child to be “totally neutral.” “I should teach him to love the sunshine. Nobody can hate him for doing this.”

But the overcast sky did not allow the sun to shine.

She bent and kissed the child. The child smiled.

The other couple’s child began to cry as the father walked towards the immigration counters. He turned and hugged him. The child wiped his tears and smiled.

“That’s better than sunshine,” said he. “Keep smiling, son.”

“It is still safe to smile,” said the mother. “We need to learn something from them too. We need to learn to smile more often.”