Learning a Worldly Grip

 

In two months time Sky, my nephew, will be two years old. What do we make of the world around us? It’s not the same world for everyone. To me the movie on the TV may have a certain meaning defined by relationships, love, jealousy, hate, anger and greed. To him the moving picture on the TV means the things he knows: water, car, ball and a few more things he has come to recognize. The entire drama being otherwise meaningless to him, his eyes light up the moment he sees any of these few items he is familiar with.

None of us can comprehend this existence in its entirety. There is always more to know, experience and feel. Just a part of the picture we see and draw out meanings on the basis of what we know, what we recognise and what we have experienced. The purpose of life then is to know and understand more of the picture. Know more, understand more, feel more. It’s no guarantee of happiness though. Some even say that the lesser you know, the happier you are. However, it cannot be helped. The quest stays. The pursuit remains.  

He has taken the first tentative steps to assert his claim to independence and free will. As usual, in an effort to explore the otherwise meaningless world to him, I find him wreaking havoc in the flower bed. And he does it expertly by doing the thing in totality by pulling out the entire branch.

‘Sky bad boy,’ I try to make him say, thinking it will somehow make him learn that flowers aren’t to be torn apart.

He looks at me, a finger pointing to his chest, ‘Sky good boy,’ making it plain that my ‘right’ is not essentially the same to him.

This happens to be the first instance of asserting his right to think of his own, instead of being guided by elders in each and everything from shitting to eating. A landmark indeed!

Another landmark follows. He gets congestion in chest so the doctor has prescribed nebulizer. Now he gets irritated like anything when these vapours engulf his face. He gets scared and howls. Now he learns to bargain.

‘Ma Ma bhaanp de do...and chu-chu de do!’ he says.

It means, ‘I will take steam without any fuss if you let me watch chu-chu TV.’ Needless to mention, he is fond of this animation program to the craziest limit.

There is a little set of picture books. Whenever he sees me reading a book, he grabs the set of picture books, dumps it on my lap and stomps his feet to be immediately taught.

Even when you reprimand him, he repeats your rant word by word as if practicing his tongue for the bigger verbal battles in future.

Then he ignores your presence completely because he is absorbed in watching cartoons on chu-chu TV. Things are now beginning to make a sense to him in the ways and manners of we grown-up humans.

He is scared of aeroplanes. When he is playing in the front yard, the moment an aeroplane’s droning sound reaches his ears, he runs inside saying, ‘Aeroplane, aeroplane!’ Sometimes it’s a false alarm, as he mistakes a vehicle’s sound as an aeroplane.

On a flight from Bhopal to Delhi, he continuously kept a few old passengers nearby on tenterhooks by repeatedly saying, ‘Papa this plane is going to fall!’

This afternoon an aeroplane’s silhouette flashed silvery bright against the blue azure of the sky. I held him in my arms, made him look at it with his little finger pointing towards the metallic bird.

‘Aeroplane good boy,’ I made him repeat many times as he stared at it on the border of curiosity and fear. Hope he finds the metallic bird a bit friendlier now.

He is scrawling every nook corner with whatever object he can accomplish the deed. The walls are his big canvas to draw his sketches and stamp his authority.

His first attempt at telling a lie to fetch the situation to his advantage:

Whenever he sees me reading a book, he runs to grab his picture books. So here he is trying to slip out of my hands. ‘ABC...ABC,’ he is saying. I’m not in a mood to teach him at this point of time. He makes full effort to slip out. He feels my unwillingness to let him go and grab his picture books.

‘Nani pas, nani pas,’ he is trying to convince me that he wants to go to his granny. So here I let him go, taking him on his word. He has duped me. He runs to fetch his glossy picture books and dumps these in my lap. Here are his efforts to get attuned to the larger clatter of life with more impressive notes of the bigger world.