One of the most discussed domestic issues in our country is that at what age should marriage take place and the other is how many children are enough? Like others, we also got to hear and read a lot about this issue from our youth. There were many fallacies in them, but also many useful things. But in practice we had to go through some experiences, some of which had a very pleasant effect on us and our family, while in some respects we also faced a very painful situation. It can be useful to share these experiences with your readers. The purpose of sharing is nothing but to bring out the practical as well as the bookish situation regarding the above two questions.
These experiences proved to be very important for us as they were not mentioned in the book or curriculum that we had heard in these two contexts. So when we encountered them, it was not something we expected. And for which we have mentally prepared ourselves in advance. The first thing to note is that our late father got married at the age of 36 and at the time of our birth he was 37 years old. Therefore, in his very early appearance which is preserved in our memory, his beard was about half white and a little more than half black. When we reached the age of consciousness some years later, father was there before us as a ‘Babaji’ (an old man). It is as if there is no image of the late father’s youth preserved in our memory. We had no sister and I was the eldest among 9 brothers. So, imagine for yourself what must have been the case of may other brothers and especially the case of the youngest brothers among them.
I don’t know the state of our other brothers’ hearts but I feel very bad not being able to see the glimpse of our father’s youth. He was a great man, being his son meant a lot to me but I didn’t get to see even a glimpse of this great man’s youth just because his father married him off so late. I never heard anything from him about what effect it must have had on him, but it did not have a good effect on me. Perhaps the bitter experience of delaying his marriage had the effect that he married me at the age of twenty. And the marriages of our other brothers also took place at the same ages with some difference. The brother whose marriage got late the most was twenty-five years old at the time of his marriage.
From the day first, I had the idea of fewer children. And the reason behind it was better education and training. This much we knew at the age of twenty that the fewer children in the class the easier it is for the teacher to teach and give better results. So, there was an intention to have three children and it is the grace and favor of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala that he blessed me with three sons. We have heard from intellectuals in TV programs and newspapers and magazines that it is wrong to get married at the age of 20, it has many disadvantages. But in practice it is the opposite. There has never been any confusion which could be thought to have been caused by an early marriage. Life went on happily. The children were doing well in studies and they were probably getting training well that during thirty years we have received only one complaint about our children at our house. And that complaint also came about the middle son when he was 9 years old.
But it’s not like we didn’t face any problems. We had to face such a strange crisis which was not even in our imagination. We had to face our share of serious family crisis when the youngest son also crossed the threshold of puberty and reached adolescence. As he got younger, our crisis got worse. And the crisis was that with the onset of his teenage years, our house very quickly turned from a home into a hostel where we five sane adults were living. This situation arose because there was no longer a child in this house whose crying would disturb us, who would force us to take me outside, who would reach out and pick up the glass on the table and shattering it, for which colorful clothes would be bought, which would crash the toy on the ground when the battery was weak and we would immediately start arranging for a new battery. The one who sometimes grabbed our beard hairs and sometimes hit the glasses, whose happiness was our joy and whose sadness was our test, who sometimes wet our laps and rushed us to the bathroom, sometimes slept with his head on our arm and freezes us.
Not only us, but also our walls and doors would absorb energy from his giggling and whose cry would turn every wall into a wall of weeping. Without this one child, our home had ceased to be a home and we were all in a very awkward situation. In this hostel, we, our wife and three sons stayed for the last eight years. In 2017, the eldest son Salahuddin got married at the age of twenty-five. After this marriage, hardly anyone has waited for the little guest with the intensity that the five of us have waited for. It was like waiting for the greenery to come after a long drought. Allah graced us and Alhamdulillah in 2018 our first grandson Umar Alam was born. The most talked about thing in our house with his birth was that after many years this house will be home again. It will no longer be like the hostel where sane adults were staying. Here, glasses will break, vases will fall and papers will tear now.
We have not tried in this column to tell you what we should and shouldn’t do with regard to marriage and children. We have simply described what we encountered. We will not analyze it now, you can do it yourself, but before starting the analysis, know this last thing that on the date of birth of our first grandchild, our age was 49 years and two and a half months. Today our age is 54 years. Three years ago, the second son also got married and now he also has a two years old son. Both grandsons create a lot of commotion at home. And this commotion never bothered us even for a moment. Never told them not to make noise. Because with the blessings of this commotion, our house is no longer a hostel but a home. We think that the biggest advantage we have today of getting married at the age of twenty is that our daughters-in-laws do not have the opportunity to whisper in the ear of our sons that “dear! Your father is coughing a lot, we can’t sleep all night, shouldn’t we shift the old man to the servant’s quarter?
