The chocolate ice cream hit the floor first. Sanaa hit it second.
The fall injured her neck badly enough that she drove herself to the emergency room in the middle of the night, alone, because there was nobody else to do it. Her son, Eesa, was 4. She wrote about the incident on Instagram, where she posts as @sanaa.aesha, years later, and the part she wanted to talk about wasn’t the injury. It was what she did next.
She spent a week teaching him emergency procedures. How to unlock the front door. How to work the elevator. Who to call. How to explain the situation to the building’s security guard in Hindi, Malayalam, or Tamil, depending on who was on shift.
Eesa was thrilled.
He was, by his mother’s account, not remotely troubled by the premise. He had a new skill set and no way to use it, and the only thing standing between him and deploying it was his mother’s continued good health. He started monitoring her. If she took too long in the bathroom, he checked on her. If she made a noise in another room, he came running. He even kept one eye on her during hide-and-seek.
Nothing happened. Weeks of nothing. He was, she wrote, disappointed.
Around age 7, he entered what Sanaa calls his ninja phase, in which he stopped waiting for an emergency and began producing one. String stretched across the doorway. Blocks stacked behind a door. Obstacles positioned where a person walking normally through her own home would never expect to find them. It was very Home Alone.
“I spent the next few years in training,” she wrote. “FOR MY OWN LIFE.”
He’s grown out of it. He’s older now and, by her description, too cool to care and too busy to notice. Her assessment of the current arrangement: “My neck has never felt better.”
You can follow Sanaa on Instagram for more lifestyle content.
