tonight's question — what scared you when you were small

Tonight the children hold the microphone. Their question, put to every adult at the table: what were you scared of when you were my age?

Answer properly. The well near the ghost tamarind tree. The maths teacher whose footsteps you knew by heart. The dark between the light switch and the bed, crossed nightly at a sprint. The more specific the fear, the better it works.

Because here is what the answers do, invisibly, while everyone laughs: every fear at that table shrinks a little. The child doing long division with their own private dreads learns the two facts that matter most — that the biggest people they know were once afraid of small things, and that those people are sitting here, fine, passing the achar. Fear, it turns out, is a stage everyone was carried through. Somebody's hand was behind each of us.

If a child volunteers a current fear in return, receive it like a guest — no fixing, no "arre, that's nothing." Especially no "that's nothing." A fear called nothing does not leave; it just stops being reported.

One round of the table is enough. The ghosts of three generations, aired and shrunk before the curd is finished.