It was peak Delhi heat back in 2014 as I sat under the fan, holding my head in my hands, trying to pray to any power that could be out there in the universe to help me understand what fractions are. I absolutely detest mathematics. Hate it with a passion. I don’t understand it, it doesn’t understand me. The hate started a long time ago and never really faded. That’s when my father knew he had to intervene. It was either him sacrificing his afternoon naps and helping his thick-headed daughter or having her mess up her future finances because she just couldn’t comprehend numbers. He went with plan A, understandably so.
“Papa, you’ve made me do four extra sums than what they asked us to do for our homework. I said, “Can we stop now, please?”
“Okay, okay. Just these last two, and then you can go.” He replied.
Twenty minutes pass by, and the man has made me do an additional three.
As I sat there, sweating, both from the scorching heat and the exhaustion of using my brain. I looked at him, almost pleadingly and ready to throw a tantrum, and said, “Enough, please. Can we stop now? I can’t think anymore.”
“Okay, fine, how about this-you do two more (I promise, just two more and I get you an orange bar from Mother Dairy?”)
“You’re lying, you said two more six questions ago.”
“No, no, not this time. This time, I pinky.”
“You pinky?”
“Yeah, I pinky promise. See, like this, stick your little finger out.”
And I did just that. We interlocked our pinky fingers, and I let out a laugh, “This feels stupid,” I said.
“It’s anything but stupid. Once you pinky, there’s no going back. Never break a pinky.” He said.
“Yeah, yeah, just let me get this over with,” I thought to myself and moved past it.
Shockingly enough, he stops and shoves not one, not two, but three orange bars into my hand. Now, the reason I found this extremely shocking was that, as a kid, adults didn’t really hold the best place in my heart. To me, they felt like old people who never really listen to anyone younger than them. Which, in some cases, is still true. What shocked me was that here was a 50-year-old man actually promising me something and living up to it. A thing that adults find so easy to ignore. That was when I knew pinky promises really did mean something.
And it held the strongest place in my heart. This made me think to myself, if I could rank all the types of promises, I think I’d start with the worst- “I promise” that could probably be the most horrendous of them all. Absolutely no effort and no interest in sounding original. If someone said that to me, I doubt I would believe them. Then comes “I swear on my parents.” I extremely hate those and never understood why they exist. I should not have to risk the lives of my birthgivers in order to provide reassurance. Finally, after all this thought over promises and swears, my heart settled on pinky as the most ideal. Not to say I haven’t received comments on my choice of promise. One surely gets laughed at, much less taken seriously, when you do a pinky promise. To some, it seems pointless, stupid, and even cringe. But my old man managed to convince the mind of a stubborn, mathematically impaired third grader with a pinky. I’m pretty sure someday, somewhere down the line, something will change that for you, too. Because, apparently, trust peaks at approximately four centimeters of a finger.