A bit of a funny conversation with his kids: “You know everything! Are you God?”
He suspected sarcasm at first. But no, it was said in earnest. A child’s innocent gratitude for a matter-of-fact answer for what seemed to the child an impossibly difficult question.
No, he does not know everything. No. He is not God. But he likes the Buddhists who think we have a bit of God inside us. It would be a little child-God waiting to grow up. The Christians too have an idea similar to this. The fact of the soul and how it persists till forever.
“How old are you?” The daughter asks.
“You were there when Jimi Hendrix was still alive? You must be very old.”
“Yes, I loved Jimi Hendrix and also Jim Morrison, Roger Daltry, Jimmy Page…”
“Wow! And I thought we were just the same age. Like, we were best buds!” the daughter exclaims.
What can a father say to that? “Yes. I am very old. And God willing, I will die ahead of you. Better get used to that idea. Make sure you will still keep playing your piano and still do your art and music, or whatever, after I am gone. Think you can do that?”
The child cannot, of course, give a guarantee. She has been silenced by the thought. The father presumes she has taken time out to converse with the little child-God inside her. Her silence is infectious. He also spends the next silence conversing with his own little child-God.
He thinks to himself: No, I am not God. No, I do not know everything. I do not know what happens from here on. I cannot even be sure when I sleep at night if I will wake up tomorrow. Indeed, I know very little. Not even, how you will read this, if you will read this at all. And what will the little child-God inside you think of all this?
There is an inescapable construct in the act of reading and writing. The writer seems like God but only inside his words. And only because he has written the words we are reading. By the act of reading him, we surrender some form of autonomy.
We become subject to what he is writing but only to the extent required so we might deduce the meanings from his words. But the reading is never ever universal. Words are always an imperfect cue. There is a certain uniqueness in how we personally interpret the words, the way we picture the writer as we read him in our minds.
Do we picture the writer now as his picture on the heading of this column? We would be misguided. That was him, fifteen or so years ago. He is much older now. He still has long hair and a bit of a stubble threatening to be a beard at odd times. Once he was accused by an engineer of looking like a hermit for his long hair. A hermit would seem at least closer to being God than an engineer. But this is only his own bias.
As he told his kids, he is not God. But his only proof is that he does not know everything. He just gets lucky at times. Indeed, he would rather think, he does not know anything for sure. If he did, he might start wondering. He does not feel discomfort from this, the fact he is not God. He finds this fact quite reassuring, given the condition of the world today. If he were God, the buck would stop with him.
He is not God. He is happy for that. And still, he feels the need to correct whatever misconception his children might have where this fact is concerned. If it seems as if he is God sometimes, it is not entirely his fault. It is only the fact of writing. That, and being father.