Managing childhood

Piyuh dressed as Araina Bose

It has been four days since my only child stepped inside a world full of strangers. We call it a school. An institution that has over the years gained societal mandate for grooming a child to the needs of this ruthless world. (Though, I have pushed myself to the point of obsession in looking for an alternative to this norm, its failures roiling my already burdened conscience for being unable to return her in full, the joy she has handed me since her arrival).
This day, a Monday like any other, holds promise for me as it does in small measure a sense of foreboding. As I open the gates of the school swamped by the noon sun, my eyes rest on the still figure of a girl with her bag slung on her tender shoulders, the impish Winnie the Pooh on its front pocket smiling at me. The maid sees me first, a glimmer of recognition flashing in her eyes. She must have told Piyuh something for the next moment, the Pooh was gone and I was lost in a pair of big Bong eyes – one of those rare treats that she has borrowed from her mother – staring back at me.
And, then I steeled myself to face the moment of reckoning, the dropping of guard and the unmasking of a façade.
My child’s venture into a school hasn’t exactly been an Alice in wonderland episode. Far from excitement, she has been constantly traumatised by the separation from her known ones whenever she finds herself forced into a curious world of adults and unknown kids. The teachers pose they know everything about the kid and they can manage its ways. I loathe both the traits.
I am unable to fathom, how for once, they can or anybody else in this world know that my daughter cannot tolerate her feet perspiring in shoes. How can they ever understand that I call her Why Baby (In English), Kyon Baby (In Hindi) and Kano Baby (In Bengali) that recognises the many whys she bombards me with everyday encounter of something new and encourages her to flatten me out with more of why each day?
The other thing I have aversion to is the term manage. Far from the magic word that managing has come to be associated with, it admits a plea screaming about a botched-up situation bereft of resources that the circumstances warrant demanding a stop-gap arrangement to tide over the moment. What if the moment stretches into unending loop of habitual arrangement?
For sometime now, we have been grooming our daughter for school. I speak of a mental make-up fashioned to meet strangers and greet them with a hello or a good morning. Then, arrived the moment of truth.
On her first day to school, she was extremely chirpy during the journey to school regaling us with her cherubic laughter and her otherworldly talks that she engages in and surprises us in retaliation to our conversations that are hard for her to comprehend. But, the moment we landed at the school, she was a different person, a mouse caught in a trap. The feeling, as I look back, was mutual.
We were leaving her in care of an adult, whom we met for the first time. While our daughter was fighting for her freedom from the clutches of her teacher, the only thing that crossed our minds in that moment of helplessness was to tell more about our kid to her mentor so she could play mumma and baba to her. Then the maid dragged her away. I turned around and walked out of the school never looking back, ignoring her desperate cries that were driving a dagger through my cursing heart. My wife stayed put for sometime before following me out. She got into the car. I revived the engine to life. Her sobs were drowned in the beastly drone.
The first three days I returned for her, my daughter would rush towards me like a maniac on suicidal mission. Tears would stretch down her cheeks in deep rivulets as she would gasp in incoherence about the torture we subjected her to. Her tired eyes would have just one question: How could you? Every time I would come back for her she would be there by her teacher, standing, with her bag on her back and sipper in hand refusing to let go of them (In an unknown world, I now believe, these were the only things that she could relate to).
Today, as I steeled myself again for her guard to come down, she surprised me with a calm repose. She was not running towards me. Just walking languidly in easy strides. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were riveted on me, but not watery.  The rivulets on her cheeks that had become a part of her facial landscape had dried up, the eyes holding back the water that fed them. Yet, she had her bag on her shoulders refusing to let go of the emotional support the entire time she was in school. As I drove with her I was left wondering if she had truly matured or just managed the situation to our mutual benefit.  

Oh! Dog

While driving down my house on a surprisingly cool March morning, a street dog looking for comfort under the first rays of the morning sun set me on a hot chase of this question: Why do we value things in life?
I was forced to take my mind of the road and journey into my own enlightenment when the dog, thankfully unaware of my predicament (and its own), made me think of my daughter and then forced me to steal a smile at the recollection.
Now it happens that my daughter shares this naïve fascination of spotting things - living and inanimate - and learning to identify them every time her eyes, new to the world, behold a visual treat.
Dog is a vital part of her nascent vocabulary, which she flaunts to perfection in front of others with an infectious delight. Since we do not own one - my otherwise stoical wife's symptoms of morbid fear and loathing for the canines has prevented us from indulging in the pleasure - street dogs, benevolently left to gay abandon by our municipal corporation, happen to be the building blocks of my 2-yr-old daughter's vocabulary. Well she is actually less than two. (Now why did I say that?)
That dog on the roadside pulled off the incredible! It found a place in my heart and, if I might add, gave me some comfort by stirring up my daughter's memory. The best part about the entire rendezvous was that it happened in the most commonplace of all circumstances, while I was driving down to my house by the same road I take every day, around the same time and in the same car that has two years' of feisty run under its hood.
My daughter's association with the dog had redefined the moment for me. And, so it was in some way, remotely valuable for me, just as a tattered kite dangling off its broken spine from a Neem tree holds meaning for me, because like the dog, it speaks to me of my daughter.
My tryst with the dog has made my life simpler. For when I value something I know it is not the subject (or the object) that holds meaning, but the moment spent, the time lapsed and the memories shared with it that makes me yearn for it.
It made me realise events that are absurdly meaningless and terribly insignificant import a promise when a shared past happens to peer through the trivial that our eyes picked off the routine landscape.
It is the same feeling that radiates from the songs we remember from our childhood and carry with us to afterlife. Because they touch a beautiful raw chord somewhere, some place, in past, which now lies buried in the worthless mundane of our busy lives.

Batman or Badman?

As a rookie scribe I was once reminded by my editor on how one has to be 'little selfish' to make it to the top. "Think about yourself," he would pat my sorry conscience when it chose to confront me in a dog-eat-dog world. After watching Sachin go after his 100th ton in Bangladesh, I just cannot help feeling how well he has been playing for himself. There is a difference in playing for the country and playing for one's own enhancement.
Now I am not a great follower of the game and I might miss out on where Sehwag scored his triple century or the year Kapil's Devils got the Holy Grail of cricket home, but my inconsistency with the game is what gives me the pleasure of having a ringside view of the goings-on, when my cricket-crazy friends are blinded to the follies of the playing eleven.
In other words, I can play the third-umpire, like it or not.
So, I found myself practically amused when people underplayed a nation's loss to an individual's milestone. Sachin might have scored his hundredth ton, but nothing can take away the fact that India was beaten by arguably the weakest cricketing side in the world.
At the end of the match, I found my colleagues, who would be reasonably stable in a crisis-situation, completely missing the cue. That includes some very responsible individuals who wouldn’t miss the woods for the trees on a normal day. They seemed to be hopping mad at everyone, blaming them for the team's loss - the bowlers who couldn’t scalp wickets, the captain who picked the wrong team and of course the missed opportunities.
That's when I started to wonder why not Sachin? Had it been any other cricketer on any other day, he would have been flayed for playing slow and poor. One might choose to ignore, but there were 82 dot balls in his 100th ton. That explains two things: One he is certainly not the same batsman he used to be and he wasted 14 overs in his run-up to personal glory. How many batsmen, I suspect, would have been allowed that measure of leeway by the fans or the selectors?
That is why I would rate Dravid, Ganguly and Sehwag far ahead of Sachin as a team player. They did not go after the records, but after the opponents.
As ironical as it comes, his latest ton may have made him immortal, but it has also earned Bangladeshis the right to tell the world that their boys beat the God to his game on this day.
Here I am reminded of the closing remarks of the Batman in the move The Dark Knight where he tells Lt Gordon, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Perhaps for Sachin it is just turning out to be true.

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.