The Laws of Flawful Inheritance

Genetics is always misunderstood: oversimplified by us, or unnecessarily overcomplicated by nature.

 Take an Indian household, for example, where a wife has just given birth and, a few minutes later, wakes up with the kid beside her, surrounded by her extended close family. The first natural thing that is done here, the customary, inevitable, instinctive act, is to conduct a thorough breakdown of the physical aspects of that minutes-old, or sometimes even days-old, child.

The nose, the hair, the smile, the clasping of the hand: every single act, behaviour and trait is traced back through generations with the most unscientific precision, the kind that could embarrass the folks at genetics.com.

The family lineage of that kid is drawn all the way back to ancestors the parents themselves never knew existed until then.

The kid’s genetic breakdown, unfortunately, doesn’t stop there. That was just a trailer.

As the kid grows older, the parents become more and more certain that their child has been blessed not with the best of both worlds, but with the strangest draw of all: the worst of both.

The kid begins to do things the parents never liked about each other. This realization is painstakingly slow, like the sun rising behind a veil of clouds.

And these are always small things that irritate big time. From munching loudly, to digging one’s nose, to taking a bath for so long that the parents fear a water shortage every time the kid heads in for one.

These tiny annoyances are nothing but nature’s trolling at work.

A cricketing champion would love the kid to follow in their footsteps, but nature has other plans and makes the kid the most clumsy, unathletic, sore-to-the-eyes sportsperson that sports has perhaps ever set its eyes on. Or a chef hopes the kid gets into food, but the kid somehow has a penchant only for the latter part of cooking: the eating. “Let’s feed off each other,” says the kid!

Expecting kids to be just like us is natural. But DNA transfer isn’t selective like a draft pick; it’s a package deal that parents don’t have a say in at all.

It’s one thing for the kid to be on the diametrically opposite side of their parents’ professional chart, but the biggest kick in the nut is the passing of the family heirloom through genetic transfer. These are small traits you wish the kid never had because they were the worst parts of you, and now you see them staring right back at you.

When this happens, parents find themselves in strange, uncharted territory. Do they correct the kid, or begin to accept that they are basically replaying their own childhood? Hasn’t the trauma so far been enough to avoid a repeat telecast?

Be it the slamming of the door when angry, the stare-downs, or mastering the wonderful art of telling white lies, these acts not only pass on a lot of information about the kid but, in the process, make kids the permanent and exceptional transmitters of the flaws their parents tried to hide from the general public.

When the kid was born, parents definitely had a wishlist of the things they dreamed the kid would inherit. I, for example, wanted my kid to be extroverted and curious, but my wife is an introvert, and so we’ve got a curious introvert: a child with a thousand questions and no intention of asking any of them out loud.

On top of that, my kid is divinely lazy. It’s a strange combo, because she reads a lot of things and does absolutely nothing. Her curiosity must be quenched, but with the minimum possible effort: no asking, no exploring, no getting up. I assumed laziness made one smart (balanced for efficiency), but my daughter decided to juice her laziness to the max, sprawled on the couch with a book in one hand and a screen in the other, consuming elephantine levels of content and information while talking to no one about it.

There are days when I’ve caught her lying, and the lengths she went to in laying out that lie, the story she wove, and the journey she took us through were so intricate that even Abhimanyu, a man who knew exactly how to break into the chakravyu, would have struggled to find the one central lie the whole formation was built on.

But genetics does give you small wins, like when you notice the kid doing things just like you: the way she sits and ties her shoelaces, the way she drinks her milk, the way she folds her legs up to read a book.

Ultimately, a kid remains a mirror to the parents’ lives, exposing our deepest secrets through the most obvious genetic markers.

It is also nature’s demonstrative way of telling people not to fuck with its genetic codes. It’s not a game of cards where one gets to pick; it’s a complete Lego set with neither a return policy nor an instruction manual. One has to build it the best way one can.

Then there’s the course-correction theory: that nature hands us kids as an opportunity to fix ourselves. But I suspect a billion-year-old architect this elegant could have found a more elegant way to make that happen than through the cumbersome, fun job of parenthood.

Which brings us back to where we began. We spend our lives trying to decode genetics by oversimplifying it (the nose from the grandfather, the temper from the aunt), and nature keeps screwing with us by serving it up in the most overcomplicated manner possible. That, I suppose, is the first and only law of flawful inheritance: the neater your theory, the messier the child.