Vicram Sharma says he enjoys holding his almost-five-month-old son up after a feed to burp him. “I do it because I enjoy it, and I want to be hands-on,” says the 44-year-old former “party boy” who always wanted to be a father, but was waiting for “the right time” until he was “completely, completely ready”. Currently in Anand, Gujarat, where Dr. Nayana Patel facilitated the surrogacy process, Mr. Sharma, who is one of the directors and owners of the Baidyanath Group, got stuck there in the lockdown, rented a farmhouse and is now enjoying time with his son. “There is a day nanny and a night nanny,” he says. His mother and niece are with him, but he likes to be around even when Shivay is sleeping, watching over him or working; or taking him out to the garden to absorb the sights and the sounds.
Men at work
Far away from the promise of gurgles and a long, healthy life, of well-trained staff and the advantages of social and economic capital, R. Jai Krishna says he has still not grieved for his father. N. Rangaraj died of COVID-19-triggered complications, at 70, and as Mr. Krishna, 42, himself recovers from the illness, somehow managing to perform the last rites amid the pandemic and the lockdown, he has been beaten down by years of almost single-handedly caring for his father.
When Mr. Krishna’s mother passed away in 2011, his father found it difficult to manage alone in his Chennai home, his heart problem, diabetes and asthma sometimes acting up. Mr. Krishna, who was living in Delhi and working as a journalist, shifted his father to the city and tried to find help. “But caretakers are not really caregivers,” he says. He adds that he tried several permutations and combinations, including hiring a couple to take care of his father and getting someone who would speak Tamil so that Mr. Rangaraj was comfortable. Nothing worked.
Eventually, they settled into a pattern where Mr. Krishna would get up in the morning, get his father coffee, cook breakfast and leave for office to be in by 9.30 a.m. “There was a circle of guards, so I knew he was safe. What I didn’t realise was that he was slipping into depression, after access to his grandchild was denied,” he says, of his separation with his wife. “One day, he said he was lonely, and wanted to go back home.” On the day that he was to put his father on a flight to Chennai, while he was to take one to Mumbai for a board meeting, Mr. Rangaraj left home at the crack of dawn and went missing. He had slipped into psychosis, a condition characterised by delusions and disordered thinking.
Over the years, Mr. Krishna travelled between Delhi and Chennai every week on red-eye flights, staying with his father in a psychiatric ward. His employers were supportive, but sometime last year, he decided to quit full-time employment, try the gig economy for work, and move to Chennai. He acknowledges letting go of a few offers, but adds: “I don’t know how many opportunities he must have let go in bringing me up. Fathers don’t say many things; a father’s love is not seen.”
Men also face caregiver burnout, much like women do, says Hena Faqurudheen, a psychologist who works with the Hank Nunn Institute in Delhi, an organisation that raises awareness around mental health and aims to make treatment affordable. “Men will admit to it, but what keeps them from accessing counselling is the stigma around that,” she says, adding that it could also be the problem-solving, solution-oriented mindset that men have that puts the focus on the situation at hand, rather than their own well-being.
Mr. Krishna though says he knows he has depression and has reached out for help.
Choice matters
In the world of primary caregivers, relationships are built on hidden work that often centres around the care of children or the elderly. Most often, it falls to women, who are pushed into it through societal conditioning or family choice or circumstance. It isn’t common to find men who grow into it, who are emotionally available and physically involved with those they care for, while holding office jobs and making difficult decisions about career progression.
After he lost his wife three years ago, Piyush Saxena, 40, an IT professional, decided to stay put in Gurugram, where he lives in a joint family with his five-year-old daughter Aarya. He is supported by his mother and his brother’s family, but works from home most afternoons (in pre-lockdown times) and has turned down a few international job offers because he would like to give his daughter a sense of stability and family.
“You get a new perspective when you’re single parenting,” he says. “If I’d had a partner, I wouldn’t have realised a lot of things.” Things like attending parent-teacher meetings solo, playing with dolls, taking his daughter down to play, reading the same story book each night, even answering questions about death. “I’m developing a lot of patience.” Mr. Saxena shares a YouTube video of his daughter saying in her primary-school-goer voice, “When the coronavirus is gone, I am going to find a mom for me.”
Aarya has developed her own understanding of god: the “bad god” took her mother away and the “good god” lives in the temples she visits with her father. Mr. Saxena doesn’t try and change the narrative with his daughter, listening to her and answering as many questions as he can. It is hard, he admits, “but at the end of the day, when she hugs me and sleeps, it is a rewarding experience”.
This open display of emotions and high engagement, unfamiliar a generation ago to many, is something that now has social sanction, says Gayathri Sreedharan, an applied anthropologist in Delhi. “Men have traditionally expressed emotional intimacy in terms of working towards giving their children a better life, whether through a job or even giving up a support system in a smaller place in favour of a bigger city.” While this continues to be the case, what has changed is that where men would be available to their families when they wanted to, it’s possible that now they make themselves available when dependants need them. It’s okay for a man to say he needs to leave early to take his mum to the doctor or watch his child’s band performance.
Help at home
Rajesh Lala, 53, who lives in Vasant Kunj, does not see himself as a procreator, provider and protector, traditional roles associated with masculinity. He describes his relationship with his mother, in her late-70s, and his son, now 18, as one of companionship. “My mother lives in her own home, and other than paying her bills and doing a few online transactions for her, she’s fairly independent,” he says. Mr. Lala lost his wife four years ago, and scaled back his travel and even closed a branch office of the education consultancy he runs, but says even in the hard times, his son was a support to him and vice versa.
It’s something Suman Tarafdar, 49, who lives in Janakpuri, agrees with. His mother, Shefali, now in her mid-80s, and he had “transitioned to being friends” a long time ago. “We would go out a lot. We share of lot of interests: art, books, gardening.” Five years ago, his mother had a stroke, and while he says “it’s sometimes melancholic” at home because she is often frustrated by her physical limitations, the only way their relationship has changed is that “I have to be responsible and think ahead to anything she might need”. As a travel writer, who needed to go out of town, he says a cook and caregiver are in place.
With shrinking families and single children, help is a necessity, and Viraj Mahajan accepts it gladly. As a single parent to two boys — Aaryan and Jai, 7 and 6 respectively — he’s happy for basic discipline to be enforced by anyone from the gardener to the cook at his home off MG Road. This doesn’t mean he’s giving up the responsibility, he’s clear: “There’s no question of me partying the whole night and my mother or father getting the kids ready in the morning. I am the parent. They’re the grandparents – they’re supportive, but there is no confusion in the parent role.”
Even as school has begun with Zoom classes, he says, “I’m running between two children; it’s madness.” He monitors the homework, cooks with them, nudges the children into not prolonging a five-minute shower into a half-an-hour bath-time game, while also helping form an opinion on respecting women. “When they were younger, they would playfully pull at the help’s chunni. I told them that was absolutely not allowed,” he says.
“It’s very similar to what all parents do for their children. The difference is that I’m solely responsible.” He says that all the work and responsibility is balanced by the hugs and kisses, a lot of which he has received from his own father. “When we were growing up, we knew we needed IQ, but now we know that in our day-to-day living, at home and at work, EQ will get you more friends, help you achieve more, make you a better person.”
