by S Jayasankaran

You know why you have to be nice to your kids? In the end, they’ll choose your nursing home.

Anyway, I have great confidence in Raisa. She’s 16 and my only child and I think she has great taste in nursing homes so I’m not worried at all. Well, at least that’s what my wife says and I have even greater confidence in my wife. You think?

She was a lovely child and when she was born it was love at first sight. Until, of course, she took a second look.

Anyway, I digress. She was a really good kid and, at five, she went to the United States with my wife who was beginning her PhD at the University of Georgia . So she had to go to school there which was how I suddenly had a six year-old daughter with a slight Southern accent who used to laugh at the way I spoke. Inspecting her homework one day when I went to the U S, I had great hopes for her impending medical career: she certainly had the handwriting for it.

Then she came back at the age of eight, began going to school here and, slowly but surely, the accent began fading, catalysed, no doubt, by the puzzled looks thrown her way by her friends who all spoke “normally”. But she was also changing. In those days, she couldn’t wait to be with her parents and she wanted to go everywhere we went.

But in her teens, she couldn’t wait to be with her friends and wouldn’t be seen dead holding my hand when I sent her to school. It was that awkward age where they all knew how to start a phone call but didn’t know how to end it.

I remember going to Singapore for an Eagles concert. I mean, here we were talking about Don Henley and Glen Frey, we were talking legends. And what does Raisa say? “No, you guys go ahead, I think I’ll just stay here in the hotel and watch TV.” Go figure!

Well, it wasn’t all bad. Another time, I persuaded her to come with us to watch David Gates at Genting, pointing out that this was the guy who’d composed and sung “If” and “Make It with You”, songs she’d loved as a child. After the show, she grudgingly conceded that Mr Gates was OK but said that I was embarrassing to go with because I’d allegedly sung along. And loudly! So I pointed out that I’d sung melodiously as well.

She said, “Allegedly, Daddy.” Now there’s a future lawyer for you!

What can you say about teenagers? They march to a different kettle of fish, a strange breed of human beings who express their desire to be different by dressing alike; who stop asking where they came from but won’t tell you where they are going.

My wife nods tolerantly and says it’s just a phase. But I don’t remember going through such a phase. If I did, I probably had to cover it up as my father and nearly all my teachers knew that “a phase” was nothing a well applied slap couldn’t cure. It was different in those days because Suhakam * hadn’t yet been invented and no one had any right to have “phases.”

Next year she will be seventeen and she wants to take her driving test. When a teenager wants to drive, wise parents do not stand in their way but I think there’s a good case to be made that only 21-year olds be allowed to drive.

Is Suhakam listening?

(* Editor’s note: Suhakam is an non-governmental organisation advocating human rights)