Guessing the relation

A couple of months ago I was working with a small business. Here while working I was coordinating with two people. A man and a woman. Anand and Kaya. I had not seen both of them so I did not know what their ages were. There last name was unique and hence I knew they were family members. Yet I did not know what there relationship was.

For the daily operations I would co-ordinate with Kaya. For the query resolution or guidance I would co-ordinate with Anand. Every time I would speak with them I would try to guess what there age could be and what their relationship could be.

First time when I spoke with them I thought that both of them must be in their 30s. This made me think that either they are siblings or they are a married couple. But I was still not sure what relationship they had. Professionally it was not as per my ethics to ask such personal questions to them. I decided to keep my curiosity under the wraps.

One day I was speaking with Kaya for a particular challenge that I was facing. Kaya was not a technical person hence she did not know how to proceed. She suggested that I should get in touch with Anand. Instead of mentioning his name she called him 'sir'. This made me a little suspicious. To me it indicated that definitely Anand was not Kaya's sibling (no sister would ever respect her brother enough to refer to him as 'sir'). Also somewhere I was getting the feeling that they may not be a married couple. Because if they were married Kaya would have called Anand by his name. This made me think even further that what could be this mysterious relationship. But again I decided to let it go and focus on my work.

A few days a later I was speaking with Anand towards the challenge that I was facing. Anand guided me towards the potential solutions and asked me to implement those. While ending the call he mentioned, "I hope this works for you. I really like to see how well you are coordinating with me and my daughter".

I was confused and after a long pause I asked, "daughter?"

Anand told me that Kaya was his daughter. While he was the technical expert she had been closely monitoring the operations. With Kaya's support he was able to grow his business. Now I had the answers.

Next day I mentioned to my mother that the business owners I was thinking whether they were siblings or couple, are father and daughter in reality. This is when my mother suggested something that I had not realised by far, "so they are just like you and your dad. Both of you run a collaborated blog, while they run a business. While your dad focuses on the content of the articles you publish the articles and make social media posts about them. Everywhere the father becomes the expert and the daughter ensures that his expertise is viewed by the world".

This was a strange moment of realisation. Despite working with them, this was the first time when I found Anand and Kaya to be relatable. At that moment I felt close to them because the equation that they had was the same one that I have with my dad. And of course I felt closer to Kaya because both of us had been working with the same goal - daughters determined to fulfill the dreams of our fathers.