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| Geetanjali Krishna: The dad who dropped out... |
| Geetanjali Krishna / Feb 04, 2012, 00:18 IST |
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In winter, I often walk in Delhi’s Nehru Park during lunch time. Every time I go there, I see a little girl in school uniform playing with her father. They eat oranges, loll lazily in the sun, looking as if they have all the time in the world. How does the man find time in the middle of the day to play in the sunny park with his daughter? I wonder about this, as he certainly doesn’t look unemployed. What sort of job would give him such flexibility?
A few days ago, the child caught me looking at them and smiled at me. I smiled back. Yesterday, I threw a ball that had strayed from them in my direction. And today, we finally sat on the rocks and had a little chat. They must enjoy the park very much to come here so often, I said. The father nodded: “We love coming here. There’s no park near where we live and Guddi enjoys playing here while we wait for her mother to get free,” he said. The child’s school was next door, as was his place of work, a private business in which he was an accountant. How, I asked curiously, did he manage to leave his office everyday in the middle of the day when most good people were at work? The story that the father, Satyendra Dubey, told me showed me how if we dig underneath the surface, even ordinary people’s lives can seem quite extraordinary.
“I used to be no different from any of those thousands of office workers you see in Delhi’s chartered buses,” he began. His wife (a teacher in a government school) and he were comfortably off but rarely managed time off for leisure. One morning, on his way to work, Dubey was hit by a bus. “I awoke in the hospital, unaware of the extent of my injuries, afraid I was going to die,” he said, “it struck me that my daughter, then only four, would probably remember me as a father who worked very hard, a father who was rarely home. But would she really have a lot of happy memories of the time we spent together?” Dubey made a full recovery from his accident, but something in him changed.
“I had recurring dreams about floating high up in the air, watching people like myself turn into little ants scurrying mindlessly from office to home. They didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves at all!” he reflected. In the quiet of the night when he lay awake after one such dream, he resolved to be different. When he rejoined work, Dubey ensured he had time everyday to play with his daughter. “I have colleagues who work longer hours and will probably get better promotions, but these things aren’t important to me any more…” he said, “slowing down at work allowed me to spend more time with my daughter, which both of us enjoy very much.”
I got up to complete my long-forgotten walk, unexpectedly happy after hearing his story. In my next round, I saw them having a race. Just as he was about to win, Dubey noticed that Guddi’s energy was flagging a little. Immediately, he bent to tie his shoelaces while the child triumphantly sailed past the finish line, laughing gleefully. As she lay down on the grass next to him, I couldn’t help but smile as I thought about the man who’d dropped out of the race, only to see how much nicer a slow walk in the sun was.
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