When I was young, I used to say, quite proudly and not a little condescendingly to people older than I who had lived fuller lives, that I have zero regrets about how I have lived mine.
As I have grown older (and perhaps, wiser), I have realised that if you’ve lived without regrets, you really haven’t lived. Or thought about your life with any kind of honesty. Indeed, show me anyone over the age of 30 who claims they have no regrets about their lives, and I will show you a liar.
Even when I maintain, as I have done forever, that I have almost zero regrets about most things that sons have about their fathers (I have spent great amount of time with him, hung out, got drunk, travelled, debated, fought with, made up, ignored, hugged him, loved, told him I loved him, and heard from him that he loved me), I still have one unusual one: All my life I have gifted Swiss watches to people, friends, family, employees, vendors, customers and so on. Now, while I have always had an affinity towards Breitlings, Omegas, and Tag Heuers for the machine-made ones and the Patek Philippes, Vacheron Constantins, and Jaeger-LeCoultres for the hand-made ones, when it came to gifting my own father, a lover of watches much like myself, I went with the gauche and vulgar choice of a gold-plated Rolex. As you can understand, it is a decision I have regretted from literally the point when I handed him the box. He passed away before I could correct this faux pas.
Of course, it would be a rather long post should I choose to speak of all my regrets. This is not about them. This is about a specific day, a specific event, and a specific request I denied on that day that I wish I had not, in hindsight.
It was 27 June 2020 when the little one discovered a roll of gardening pipe and went to town on it (https://kedar.gadgil.com/2020/06/27/the-story-of-a-saturday/). I remember her getting très excited about it and in the middle of watering the plants, declaring that now is the time to wet her Mamma, and subsequently her Baba, to which my immediate response was that nothing of that sort is going to happen and that decorum and order must be maintained, much like Amitabh Bachchan in Mohabbatein plays the spoilsport. We, in a manner of speaking, rained on her parade (by not allowing her to rain).
If we had, she would have run around the house spraying us with water, wetting everything in the process, giggling loudly as she ran and slipped and got back up and showered water from the garden hose all over our well-kept, beautiful, and (not to put too fine a point on it) dry home. It was only good parenting and the right thing to do to deny her any such adventure.
I regret it.
