the half-listened sentence

"Haan, phir kya hua?" — said to the child, eyes still on the screen, thumb still moving. Every parent has said it this week. This is not an accusation; it is a census.

Here is what deserves attention: the child is not fooled, and was never once fooled. Children price attention the way jewellers price gold — by weight, not by wrapping. They can hear the difference between listening and queueing them for later. Many will simply stop the story mid-way — "nothing, leave it" — and the account closes for the evening.

The repair is smaller than guilt wants it to be. Not hours. Whole minutes. Ninety seconds of turned-shoulders, phone-face-down, eyes-up listening is a different substance from thirty minutes of the divided kind — different enough that the child files it in a different place.

So tonight, one experiment: when the next sentence comes at you — and one will, they arrive on schedule — put the glass or the phone or the ladle down for the length of it. Just the one sentence, heard whole, with your face.

The story that follows the first fully-heard sentence is usually the one they came to tell.