Muthusamy became a father at forty-five.
He jokes that this means his daughter gets two versions of him at once.
“She gets the father who wants to play with her,” he says, “and the older man who is already thinking too much about her future.”
When she was small, most of what he wanted to give her was simple.
Time. Attention. A safe home. Someone to answer the endless questions.
But as she grew, Muthusamy found himself thinking further ahead.
Her eighteenth birthday.
Twenty-one.
Thirty.
Perhaps one day forty.
“I think every father has things he wants to tell his child,” he says. “But what I want to tell her at eighteen may be very different from what I want to tell her at thirty.”
Some things, he knows, are better said in person.
Others may be easier to write down first.
There are stories about mistakes he made when he was younger. Things he learnt about work, money, friendship and marriage. Things his own parents once told him that made little sense at the time, but became clearer many years later.
His wife sometimes catches him thinking too far ahead.
“You know she’s still a child?” she tells him.
“I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m not giving it to her now.”
That was what drew Muthusamy to Clozeu’s Time Capsules.
He began thinking about what he would want to prepare for different stages of his daughter’s life.
Something for eighteen.
Something else for twenty-one.
Perhaps, one day, words for thirty, when the questions she was asking herself might be very different again.
There is no need for all those words to arrive at once.
“I like the idea that something can wait until its time comes,” he says.
Some of the capsules are serious. Others are not.
He has thought about recording himself telling one of the family stories his daughter has already heard too many times. He wants to leave a birthday message that will probably embarrass her. There are photographs he wants to put together with an explanation of why a particular day mattered to him.
And there are things he hopes he will simply be sitting beside her to discuss when the capsule opens.
“That would be the best outcome,” he says. “She opens something I wrote twenty years ago, looks at me and says, ‘Appa, you were worrying too much again.’”
But becoming a father later in life has also made him realistic.
Life does not always follow the timetable we expect.
He does not dwell on that, and he does not want his daughter growing up surrounded by messages prepared for the worst.
For him, the Time Capsules are about something else.
They give him a way to think deliberately about what he wants to pass on—and when those words might be most meaningful.
The important conversations still happen now.
There will still be advice over dinner, disagreements in the car, birthday talks, mistakes, apologies and all the ordinary conversations between a father and daughter.
The capsules do not replace any of them.
They simply allow a few words to travel further.
“She will become many different people as she grows up,” Muthusamy says. “I hope I get to know all of them.”
Thinking about those future versions of his daughter changed what he wanted to say today.
Some thoughts belonged in a capsule.
Others belonged in a conversation over dinner.
Either way, he wanted to take the time to find the words.