While some of us live with total disregard for it and others dread it, most of us just muddle along from day to day, hoping that the final judgment will go easy on us. Will perhaps take into consideration the mitigating circumstances that inveigled us into making all those wrong choices and hasty decisions. Will hopefully gloss over whose long forgotten toes we trod on as we scrambled to reach where we wanted to go.
For all of us there are those judge figures in our lives from infancy - and theirs were, we thought, much harsher decisions than we deserved. Back in the time of earliest memory, there was this stern, lynx-eyed man who headed our family and while he certainly gave us more hugs than we merited, his cold stare and sharp rebuke (and yes, the occasional tight rap) made us very wary of what was to come at the end of the day.
Our mother's "Wait until Father gets home," generally kept us in line through sibling wrestling matches, gobbling and grabbing goodies at mealtimes, hiding or spoiling each other's toys and books, being cheeky with her, and many other childhood infringements.
In our teen years and early adulthood, we suddenly found that judge and jury no longer resided merely in our homes but was out there in the hurly burly of a conservative society - much more conservative and traditional than we were used to at home - and we realised that we'd actually been lucky, getting off to a free early start, and it was now that we'd have to watch our step.
There were all these hands and toes that not only came underfoot suddenly, but also took pleasure in pulling and pushing; there were all those constantly wagging, disapproving tongues when earlier we'd thought a mere silence was unfair, discriminatory, and unnecessary to the spirit of exuberant childhood! How much we had to learn!
Then, quite without preparation, we crossed over to the parental side and had to hand out judgments ourselves. We, the free-spirited, the anti-establishment, were thrust dithering and blathering onto the bench when we'd rather be strolling on a beach instead of doing this awful tightrope walk of justice and fair play - and so began a series of poor judgments on our part.
The easiest course for me should have been that all-purpose "Wait until Father gets home," but before I could think of it, it had been appropriated by the little one and used against me - for both father and child had taken refuge in a world of the free and easy from which I was excluded.
As we faced off, two on one side and one on the other, with only one of the adults as judge, jury, and prosecutor, I stood no chance. Evidence was shredded by the defence, witnesses for the prosecution backed down... My stint on the bench was a total failure and liberty and licence reigned!
I should have been free at last, but a judge figure came back into my life.
Somehow, given our waffling and vacillating, we've produced this straitlaced critic who, though he utters no words, now sentences me to a life of zipped lips and walking the straight and narrow!
No more can I give in to that slightly eccentric streak that sometimes has me indulging in a totally irrelevant cascade of words, a wayward binge in a bookshop or a crazy gyration in the gym. Now I have to keep myself within the limits of 'proper' and 'becoming' behaviour - not to meet father's approval or the norms of society, or even what awaits me at Road's End. Now I have to behave in order to be a figure worth looking up to and learning from!
How difficult it is to get through the eye of the needle of an adult child's approval!
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India
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