She cut her hair

By Jagdesh Singh | OPINION |

“We’re her parents! Surely we can convince her to not do it?” she said to me as I stared pretty blankly at her.

“We can. We can force her not to… but that would make us hypocrites, won’t it?” I answered in a drab monotone.

My wife agrees immediately. She was sure before but she wanted to make sure that we were both on the same page. She’s smarter than me that way.

Our 14 year old daughter had decided to cut her long luscious thick hair months ago. She shared her intentions at one of the long coronavirus lockdown dinners. Our initial reaction was to discourage her as much as we can. As a Sikh couple, my wife and I hold down dearly to the fundamental principles of being a Sikh. Keeping unshorn bodily hair is a basic tenet to us both.

But another vital principle of being a Sikh, according to our understanding as a couple, and as parents, was to avoid compulsion onto anybody with our very personal beliefs. This includes our own children.

Many years ago, before joining in holy matrimony with my then girlfriend, I had this profound conversation with a dear wise old friend. I was instantly attracted his simplicity and straightforward honesty. This was the instance when I became his mentee over the next ensuing 16 years.

“Very often, we think we own these children of ours. We want the best for them, but we also want the best from them,” he said as he sipped his hot cup of chai in the lounging sun rays of spring. “But beta [son], we are merely the chowkidar [caretakers] to these marvelous gifts from God.”

My perplexed look made him further describe more deliberately what he meant.

He went on: “What I mean to say was that we should be the servants to these new souls who are new in their journey in this lifetime of theirs. We are just their sewadars, guiding and providing for them the best we can within our capacity. But they are individual souls with their own paths and journeys. We cannot force upon them our ideas and our expectations.”

There was a louder tone as he emphasized on the words “cannot force” while piercing his large brown eyes into the very young impressionable me. He was at the same age as my father, and commanded my equal respect and admiration, even until his passing last year.

I was still a bachelor, and couldn’t even have had imagined being a father of a teenaged girl, but his words made so much sense because I resonated to being the child and not as a parent at that time. Fast forward to today, and I’m on the other side of the table.

My daughter was sitting opposite us. She was still adamant, strong willed about her decision to cut her hair after months of going back and forth with us. We didn’t relent. But we finally acknowledged that this was a very young adult who has made up her mind. We also admitted to ourselves that we did the best we could to impart our understandings of our religion to her since her formative years.

But the lesson imparted to me by my dear old friend finally came into realization and I felt compelled to still learn from my mentor. After all, I too, had my own journey that I’m still on, learning and discovering my own truths. I was like my daughter at her age when I had very strong ideas of myself and stood firm to the decisions I made. I have no regrets, but I also had many a lessons to learn from. Why shouldn’t my girl also have the opportunity to learn from her own journey? I’d rather she learn this way than we forcefully teaching her something she’ll come to hate.

I now understand what my friend was trying to tell me that faithful day.

ASIA SAMACHAR is an online newspaper for Sikhs / Punjabis in Southeast Asia and beyond. Facebook | WhatsApp +6017-335-1399 | Email: editor@asiasamachar.com | Twitter | Instagram | Obituary announcements, click here |