Sunday Story: Not (B)old Enough

Anamika had just got off a call with her best friend Shail, and she was manifestly distressed. Shail had just informed her about her inability to accompany Anamika to the Jaipur Literature Festival owing to some last-minute plans for a family function that she absolutely could not miss. This was bad news for Anamika for now it would be difficult for her to convince her parents to let her attend the festival.

For the rest of the world, Anamika was a 28-year-old smart, confident, and financially independent woman who could take care of herself. But for her parents, she was perhaps still their meek 8-year-old daughter who needed sheltering from the unforgiving world that waited to take advantage of her innocence at every step of the way.

Anamika spent the next hour and a half trying to visualise the entire sequence of going up to her parents to ask for permission. She tried her best to think of all possible arguments that her parents could put before her and the possible rebuttals to each one of them. After loading her arsenal with enough ammo—asking her parents to travel solo was no less than a war for her—she set about deciding the perfect time to initiate the conversation and decided that dinner time would be appropriate.

It was a quarter past eight—the time for dinner to be served in the Sharma household. With every tick of the second's hand, Anamika’s heartbeat grew faster. She was constantly checking the wall clock as she waited for her father to arrive as she and her mother set the table. She could barely wait till the time everybody had taken their places and begun eating before dropping the bomb.

A couple of minutes into the dinner, sensing that that was the best time, Anamika, as nonchalantly as she could, initiated the conversation by telling her parents about the family function at Shail’s home and how, because of it, she would be unable to accompany her to the festival. She continued by lying about how she had teased Shail about what all she would miss and how much fun Anamika would have at the festival, meeting all her favourite authors and attending the talks, when her father cut her midway and said the expected—that she won’t be going to the festival alone.

Anamika had expected this response and was thus prepared for it. She asked as confidently as she could as to why she could go because she was old enough—28 years old to be precise—to take care of herself. All her friends had taken at least one solo trip so far—even her brother, who was two years younger than her. To this, her mother had two responses: one, he was a boy, and two, he had been living in a hostel for the last three years and thus knew how to live on his own and take care of himself. Anamika, on the other hand, had never lived in a hostel, or even away from her parents for more than a week, and didn’t know how the world “worked”.

Anamika tried to reason that if she didn’t know how the world worked, the only way she could learn it was by actually going out into the world and experiencing it for herself. That was not how things worked, her father retorted. She was a girl and the world was not as safe for girls no matter how old they grew. No matter what Anamika said, her parents always had something or the other in rebuttal. But Anamika kept at it. Suddenly her father, manifestly frustrated by her daughter’s constant pushing, threw his trump card—he got up and left the table, and Anamika knew then and there that that was the end of the conversation. However, she swore to herself that though the conversation may have ended for the moment, she won’t let it go that easily and fight for what was right.

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