Why child is the father of man

When is man adult enough to be called a grown up? Is it the ability of the intellect to lord over instinct? To prune every action to reason, bring it to the plane of tutored understanding.
For the last few months my daughter, now 18 months, has driven a deep sense of despair, an anxiety to unlearn whatever my adult mind has come to think of as rational, and to pick up things anew, look up the sub-consciousness and delve into that instinct that manifested itself so freely and beautifully to communicate without words, without prejudice.
At eighteen (I am counting in months) she has, like most children her age, started to convey her needs with pronounced clarity in a medium that we have come to understand as language.
What discriminates a conscious mind from congenital innocence is the ability to say no. And, she has started to gather her wits and decline what she believes is unpalatable for her senses. It could be rejecting food for the lack of appetite, dismissing the strands of hair that accidentally stray into her mouth, or simply discarding the tunic chosen by her mother to dress her up on a day. It could be anything that she finds unattractive and she has armed herself with a coherent 'no' ready to dismiss it.
To be able to ask for more defines your love for something that cannot be appreciated even with a prudent yes. I realised its powerful connotation when my daughter started expressing her likes by simply asking for more. It could be "Aarro" in Bengali asking for more of food she has taken a fancy for. It could be "Abarr" goading her pishi or any adult for a repeat performance (of a song, dance, even buffoonery). Sometimes she would just appreciate a person's company by asking him or her to "come" over.
The simple instinct is at work when she is able to judge direction, calculate depth and understand the passage of time (not by reading clocks, which makes up for an evolved intellect). I am talking about dimensions.
She started getting down the bed by pushing herself over backwards with an effortless knack. But even before doing that she would dangle over the edge of the bed trying to measure the distance between her feet and the floor while entertaining a fear within. She can differentiate mornings from evenings to tell of the 'time' that has lapsed.
Some of her expressions are work of pure instinct. When confronted with a situation where she is unable to fathom what her companion is asking of her she puts up with a self-practised expression wherein she uses her eyebrows and plays them up and down repeatedly with a coy smile, which is a profound gesture for "you tell me."
Sometimes she would just blurt out "array" in response to things which she didn’t anticipate coming. Now she has this battery-operated mouse that is equipped with a motion sensor. When she runs after it and it changes course on its own without warning at the sight of an obstruction, she instinctively calls out "array…array".
I gathered we never taught her into the finer nuances of understanding. In fact, I now realise, we never had the aptitude to turn our attention to the simple things that define a moment far better than the powerful tool of a language. The realisation underlined the difference between a conscious mind and an evolved intellect. Maybe it is the same thing that sets apart nature from everything man-made.
While man, always eager to claim ownership over his creation, tags them, nature, which has never ventured to profit from its creations, offers on impulse. It could be the reason why intellect thrives in adults, while instinct flickers in every child's fancy to express in an unadulterated, untutored manner, the rebirth of the natural that is unyielding to the man-made.

That feeling...Part II

The second phase is the worst. It is here that you start thinking of the moments lost in life; the occasions that demanded celebration, but for the preoccupation of a healthy myopic mind. Life suddenly assumes meaning. I nourished no thoughts of my office in it. Not even in the remotest corner. Work had no place. I even started hallucinating about myself in a dystopian world. Then realised, it was not imagination. Just that I was thinking about myself in such a long-long time that it all seemed surreal.
I continued with my feeble attempts at diversions. Nurturing a thought here and there. Surprisingly, the only dream I remember having was about a colleague whom I had rarely spoken beyond an occasional greeting. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had resigned just recently and seemed happy. He was free. I also wanted to be free. To escape the pain that I was in.
But, pain as I realised much to my dismay and helplessness, was slowly taking over. It is a feeling that hurts the mind more than it attacks the body. In the middle of the night a burning sensation flirted with my eyes. I went up to the bathroom and looked at the bloodshot eyes staring back at me.
For anyone in fever, using an icepack is the ultimate loss in the psychological battle. I stole another glance at myself and decided it was better to lose, for now. The icepack was a nice feeling. It caressed my forehead like a woman running her manicured hands through her beau's hair. I started to entertain a momentary illusion that icepack was the cure for my bruised ego and shattered health. The virus with its half-life had taken over my biological system. The gladiator in me was kicked out of its senses and hanged upside down.
Fighting the rising body warmth with a cool pack came with its consequences. I realised I was shivering even at the lowest speed of the ceiling fan, which was protesting against the terribly slow grind, by grunting and puffing over my head.
After an entire night's labour - changing the pack, boiling water before drinking and fighting the gooseberries - the fever subsided on an early morning, 72 hours after it had, crept into my body. It was gone in a jiffy, just the way it had arrived in the first place.
I realised this when I didn’t have to pop a Paracetamol tablet for the first time in 3 days. Eleven tabs had found themselves teaming up with my immune system in the days of my suffering. One after the other, every four hours; like ants lined up to perform their part in the scheme of 'greater good'.
It would be another 72 hours before I would be able to trust my legs to carry me throughout the day. But, with the free-agent gone, I felt liberated. I was hoping again. It seemed nature had replaced all my organs with new ones. Just like a spell of rain cleans the dirt off trees and buildings and makes everything look new and smell fresh. That feeling. Ah! What freedom to be relieved of pain.

That Feeling… Part 1

What is pain? A recent bout of seasonal fever got me thinking about the antithesis of a healthy mind. For over 120 hours I battled the existence of unscrupulous non-living, cloning foreign matter that had somehow managed its way inside me. Virals! The doctor had causally dismissed me with a prescription to follow over the next five days. Apparently it could not be killed. And, its miraculous existence was beyond redemption.
Now pain is satanic enough. When wedded with fever, it becomes demoniac, which needs to be dealt with the fiercest, most detailed exorcism to flush it out of the system. In my case I was promptly handed over a strip of paracetamol tablets.
But, fever has its indigenous growth cycle. It is more like an obsession that grows on you, dwells and finally takes over completely to the end where it wrings your mind out of the last reserves of sanity and plunges you headlong into the abyss of hopelessness and piety. The first two days, my resolve to beat the intruder was supreme and bordered on arrogance of the millions of years of evolution that I had inherited from my tail-swinging forefathers. My attitude towards the virus was casual at best. I was the gladiator. They were the minions.
I ignored the ache that had started to swell around by ankles, my feet and my knees, dismissing it as a momentary offshoot of the battle with the virus. By then, the Paracetamol was working diligently with the WBCs, to prevent what was over the next few days, to be a total takeover. I treated the nagging, feeling of a cat's paw clawing the insides of my throat with a disdain. The occasional heaving of the chest was deliberately ignored. Man was supreme. There was no way a measly half-dead organism was going to change the status-quo.
Then, came the fever. It just seemed to have come out of nowhere and lodge inside me like a cabin crew which was to drive my body over the next few days. The thing about fever is that it introduces you to insomnia. The fever wouldn’t allow me to sleep as it radiated slowly and painfully from the forehead down to the eyes making them warm and moist. All my efforts to find solace in some wayward dream or even forced thinking were washed away with the chronic throbbing that would knock me out me out of my resolve like Tyson stomping on a featherweight.
My lips, though, responded differently. They became parched, dry and needed regular intervention of the lip balm to prevent my tongue from smothering over them or my teeth from digging into them to weed out the dry flakes of dead flesh.
The first conscious assimilation of pain comes in as a tireless wave of a throbbing attack. It is everywhere. It pervades. Takes over the very fabric of our thinking. Mauls it and scars it.
I remember trying to focus. But my mind would drift into the place exactly where it was hurting me the most. There seemed to be no escape. Every effort at digression, every conscious attempt at diversion is hacked into by a vicious programming loop where the victim is brought back to the moment of pain which he attempted to escape in the first place. It seems like a loaded train on an inevitable collision course.

My daughter Piyuh

She is 1 year 3 months and three week old today.
At this tender age she has started to amaze us all by her brilliant adaptability to surroundings, and her infinite detail for observation baffles us.
She calls me Baba one of her first words she learnt as a toddler. The first one was mumma, which she uses to call her mom, her grandmother and every lady that seems a little plum around the waist and round in the face.
My friends say she is learning fast. Picking up things from our daily chores. It is a wonderful feeling but, instills a creepy sense of insecurity within. The more she learns, the more she loses her innocence!
I am learning how woman as a species matures so fast.
She is by nature a mumma's daughter. Except for her attitude which hugely resembles mine and I can see the seeds of self-destruction of Bose khandan already flowering in her.
But, her zest for life, heavily borrowed from her mother's insatiable lust for everyday mundane, completely and happily overshadows my brooding sentiments. She loves to engage. Whether it’s a conversation with her grandma, who 70 years older to her, or cooing at the housemaid to draw her attention to her new discovery, it is a joy like no other.
She loves outing. In fact, she could give up anything for a walk outdoors, even her Dhaka (the ubiquitous cap which for some unwarranted, unexplained reason has triggered a fascination so huge for her that she always wants a hold on anything that opens and closes in the tiny grasp of her tender fingers). A drive by car is even better received and removes any trace of inconsistency in her merry disposition.
Her outing is incomplete without her shoes which she insists on wearing even while she is asleep. The kiddo is almost nurturing a fetish for shoes. She already has half-a-dozen of them, all of different colours. It is one of the few things she can spot and spell clearly in both English and Bengali. In English it is Shooj. In Bengali it becomes Jutto. I reflect and laugh on myself at her latest hook-up. Sometimes things come back to you in the most unusual way. Since my marriage I have been pampering and condoning my wife's obsessive urge to buy shoes. She has two cabinets full of shoes and more spilling out on the floor for lack of space. Now, our daughter has picked up her trait so casually and effortlessly that I am thinking of the space that would be required to put up with the collection of shoes of both the ladies in the years to come.
Like her mother, she is a die-hard foodie. She can already pronounce chicken with an alarming clarity and can smell it from a mile. Apple is her staple diet and pomegranate juice, her favourite drink. She has a pint of the iron-rich juice every day which her grandma hand-grinds and cloth-filters with painstaking effort. A single strain of the fibre can clog the nipple of her sipper and test her patience.
She loves potato fries which she fondly calls Ayoo as in Aloo. She has the McDonalds French fries. But she likes the fresh-boiled and stir-fried potatoes sprinkled with a generous dose of salt and pepper, even better.
She is my daughter. Piyuh.