Every time I come to Kolkata, there is a hard reset to the last time I lived in my parents' home as a dependent child. This was before I left to college and it is where their understanding of me as a person has fossilized. It is understandable being that the flow of information reduced over time, they did not have many in-person data points to validate that information against.
Consequently, they stayed with what they knew to be true for sure. The baseline of a person is formed by eighteen and the core set of values might persist for the most part. Each time they see me, they calibrate against that baseline and find I am who they knew me to be but that does not explain all that they don't understand anymore about their daughter.
The other side effect of this recalibration is my father's anxiety about my safety and his need to protect me. Since we have traveled backwards in time, he can easily forget he is close to eighty now and cannot physically protect me. In his mind, he can and therefore insists on taking me places to keep me out of harm's way.
He is an old man now and comes a time when he is too exhausted to go anywhere. This might be my last trip alone to Kolkata just as it was my first. We need to come together so my father knows there is someone there to protect me when it cannot be him anymore. The fact that such protection is needed for any woman is the great tragedy of everyday life in Kolkata and India.
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