The warrior baby

 I would say Maira is already a hero, just at the age of one-and-half years. A premature baby during the challenging Covid times, she was pushed onto the stage of survival, a mere 1,250 grams little baby after just six-and-half months of pregnancy. She braved the toughest tests in the NICU for the next two months. After a week of her birth she got intestinal infection in her barely formed intestines. A very critical and extremely risky surgery followed. A part of the ruptured intestine was removed and there she was with the end of her small intestine serving as rectal outlet by the side of her stomach; such a tiny life facing a very challenging medical process called stoma. It was traumatic to see such a little baby struggling for life and that too right from the beginning.

Further complications followed. Her lungs would collapse. For the lungs bronchoscopy she had to be shifted to Delhi. The shifting was almost fatal for a newborn that had spent all her time on earth at the ventilator in the NICU. The farmers had blocked the road. ‘I cannot give you a guarantee that she will be able to survive this journey. But there is no other way. This is her sole chance at life!’ the doctor appeared to have almost given up. Literally chained amidst the tubes of the ventilator in the ambulance, she not only survived but would breathe of her own after a few days. But it was all pain in its raw, naked form; her tiny body ravaged by the scalpels and syringes to save her.

The waste around her stoma was acidic and would almost burn her soft skin. Then the stitching around the stoma started to give away. Just one stitch, miraculously holding itself on her skin, kept her away from the further bearing the trauma of getting it redone and the resultant extra surgery, more cutting and tearing of her barely formed skin. As she labored for her rapid, hard-fought breaths to keep swimming in the perilous sea, the stitching looked horribly close to come undone. So each labored heave of her tiny bloated stomach was as close to death as it was to life. But she held on.

A premature baby is at the risk of developing eye issues as well. Due to all these early infancy issues and trauma, some blood vessels in her little eyes ruptured, leaving little stains on her retina. It required multiple lager treatments to keep the retina from coming off causing total blindness. Well, she passed the test again. ‘Her eyes are totally safe now!’ the doctor gave a good piece of news after long, tortuous weeks. In the hospital she earned the status of a tiny hero for her ability to swim across the storms. The entire staff took a liking for her and she passed the test with flying colors; the discharge day coming like an emotional valedictory function.

At home, for the next eight months it was almost a tapasya by her well-caring parents to keep the body clean, to save her skin from infection around the stoma. The next surgery to correct the digestive system by connecting the small and large intestines to make her excretory system normal was done by a God’s child, Dr. Roberts of Bangalore. He did a miracle and within a month Maira became a normal child like anyone around. But she had seen so much in life which most of us don’t go through even in our entire lives.

Throughout the year, as her tiny body fought against death, we kept banging at the gates of God’s castle to have mercy on our little princess. Our prayers, fasting and pilgrimages seem to have helped the little hero and the medical staff in wading through perilous wasters.

Maira is my niece, my younger brother’s daughter. Now at one-and-half years, Maira is an enquiring girl, ready to start the journey on her doddering little legs and have her say with her learning tongue. Passing the critical tests is a good way of beginning one’s life. She is already a winner, having gone through so much which most of us hardly have to bear in our entire lives. Coming out of the fire, she is perfectly entitled to her favorite phrase ‘yekyahai’ (meaning what is this) mumbled with a slippery flow, a slurry drawl, pointing out anything from a grain of soil to planets in the sky. She has to know each and everything about the planet that made her literally walk through the river of fire to entitle her a journey here.

I think she is the biggest enquirer on the earth as of now. She is perfectly aware of the fact that she ought to know each and everything. It’s a big, testing world and you have to say a firm ‘NO’ to rule out misinformation and other’s manipulation of your life beyond a point. She is a big-time nay-sayer and shakes her tiny head sideways in robust denial of everything you propose. I think that the tiny lady is very sure of her version of things. I well remember the only time she meant to agree to my proposition. It was about the beauty of moon. It was a really shiny and beautiful full moon on a clear winter night and even she had to agree as she forced herself to affirm and put up an effort to slightly mover her head up and down in appreciation of the celestial beauty.

The cows are outside the house, so the entire world out there is ‘cow’. She points at the yard gate and sweetly mumbles ‘cow’. It means ‘please take me out of the house to see the wider world over there’. The buffalos, donkeys, in fact all quadrupeds are ‘cows’ to her, with one exception—hathi. There is a stuffed toy elephant whose trunk she has bashed and chewed to twist it sideways, even nibbled out a portion of it. So she knows that at least hathi isn’t cow. I hope she won’t expect a real hathi to have a twisted, nibbled trunk like her toy. Thanks to the mauling she has given to the stuffed hathi’s trunk, she recognizes the elephants very well, so much so that even a weirdly contorted ginger piece makes the sense of hathi to her. She doddered, fell, crawled and walked few cautious steps to me and showed me the best hathi in the world. Upon my soul, it looked like an elephant.

The cat is miau-miau. Imagine the plight of the babbar sher, the king of the forest, when he too is dubbed as miau-miau by the little angel. So the ruler of the forest with its regal mane is condemned the fate of a measly pussy cat. All the big cats in the picture books are poor miau-miau. The simplicity of a child’s version of things. I think the lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs ought to realize that they are mere cats of varying sizes after all. The dogs are bho-bho or bhau-bhau. All my attempts at correcting her through mollycoddling words like doggy or puppy have been spiritedly denied with a firm nay-saying movement of head from left to right and right to left. ‘Bho-bho,’ she says and stares at me pretty hard and I meekly accept it.

We have introduced yours humble truly as tau to her, meaning her father’s elder brother. From that referral and perspective, she calls everyone bearing an elderly visage, even the people in their eighties who are entitled to be called great grandfather, as tau. It’s a cute belittling of high ranks.

Out of all the canine fates, condemned as a single entity named bho-bho, one dog stands out, a brown and white robust female street dog that sits in front of the gate for warm, ghee-smeared chapattis. She has a firm objection against stale, dry breads. Maira has come to know that this particular dog is Bhui (something denoting brown color) not a mere bhau-bhau like the rest. So Bhui is something more than a measly street dog.

As her little tongue is slowly trying to chisel the linguistic monolith to shape the phonetic figurines to finally carve distinct words, phrases and sentences, she has very simplistic tools to cut the phonetic complexities. So the portly hippopotamus in her picture book is a puny ‘hee’ only. Ask her to pronounce any troublesome word, she picks up the first letter and smartly completes her assignment. So as per the simplifying rule of a little child ‘Pani’ is just ‘Pa’. So any oxymoron-adcdefz is simply ‘O’. And we still wonder why children are so happy. It’s simply because they know how to simplify things.

For many weeks she was confused between Cow and Tau because of rhyming similarity. So when I would carry out her request for an outing, i.e., Cow, which is a buffalo in reality in most of the cases, she would stare into my face, as if in confusion regarding which one is the real Cow or Tau. Or both are same? Why then this one has no horns and tail and moves with two legs missing? Well, these are the queries she has to find out for herself as she grows up.  

The other day we shot a family video wherein all of us can be seen gesticulating like kids in brightest spirits. She is all attention and stares hard into our screen avatars and then seems confused. She first looks hard at the person on the screen and then scans its real version in 3D on the real stage of life, trying to make out how come the same person is inside the mobile and outside at the same time.

There is a trash site in the yard where we collect broomed leaves, little rappers and other dry discards for the day. This heap of dry waste is her treasure hunt site. Here is a big world to explore with her slow, cautious, unsteady steps, each fall training you to get up again and move on. She sneaks away to her treasure site and salvages some broken cup handle, a button, or some plastic fragment and turn very possessive about her discovery. After that no amount of cajoling or sweet persuasion or irritating instructions would be sufficient to help the discard regain its former position. She has her own sense of what is entitled to go to join her treasure site. So I have to regularly fetch my toothbrush, hair oil bottle and comb from the esteemed collection in the yard corner.

Here is a little unit of life learning the art of living on her shaky steps and lovely blurry shortcutting phonetics. She wants to impress me with the fact that she is responsible now and does household tasks. She sees the elders running around with things in hand and seriousness on their faces. So now it makes some sense to her that to be grown up means basically to move around with things. So all the grocery jars, bottles, cosmetics, kitchen utensils, buckets, brooms, mugs are having the pleasure of interchanging places thanks to her busy schedule of shuffling things born of a keen sense of duty and the art of learning to be busy.

The other day the dustpan was in the little temple shrine in a corner in a room and the Shivlinga was found at her favorite treasure-hunting site. I’m scuttling away to do something but she spots me the idler. She is very busy in rearranging the house as usual. ‘Baithja’ she invites me, orders rather, to sit on a peedha, a popular low stool quite popular among the peasantry. There I’m obediently sitting, corrected and made to do the things that really matter. She then walks to a tomato basket and brings one, hands it to me and goes back for another errand. So my hands, then the end of my chador are full of tomatoes. Then she observes more important things that have been misplaced by the elders, peas. There they land at the most suitable place, that’s me, one piece at a time born of each of her visits. Then the potatoes arrive. The urgent task slowly builds up. She already knows that we are a disorderly lot and is trying her level best to salvage some order among the chaos.

Tiny teeth are emerging on her little gums. It gives her the grin of the most mischievous imp. Beyond all feelings of shame and inhibitions born of self-consciousness, she shows her funny little irregular upcoming teeth and puts to shame all we elders’ sense of consciousness about looks and efforts to be what we are not.

Little Maira loves sweets, buffi being her favorite expression to give heed to the sweet tooth. The moment she mumbles buffi, she sees our taunting reaction. So she now thinks better of it. She has a way out now to have her sweets and receive some respect as well in its wake. She is well aware of the fact that ‘pasad’—standing for prasad—is something that is held in high esteem. So when she wants to have her piece of laddoo, burfi or jaggery she says ‘pasad’ asking for the holy thing.

She has very sweet ways of using her slow-motion time in her little world. As I eat, she picks up the boiled peas from my plate—one of her favorites in eating and playing—squeezes the little boiled balls in her fingers, drops them onto the ground, stomps over them to add to the culinary delight on the open pan of mother earth, picks her preparation very delicately, cautiously, gently, sweetly, with greatest considerations for my nutritious requirements, and offers them to me. Of course, I have to eat them which makes her smile with a motherly satisfaction.

She has a confusion about the sun and the moon. The moon was first introduced to her, she being allowed to ogle at it with her wonderstruck eyes. On a fine full moon night she mumbled her favorite phrase ‘yekyahai’ and on being told that it was moon she has moon as one of her favorites in the sky. So the sun is day’s muun. They are both the same just giving different shades. During the day, with her eyes narrowed and the face drawn with discomfort against the light, she faces the sun and points out ‘Muun’. Beyond the tormenting dualities, there is a mix-up of hot and cold—she calls both tata, that’s hot.

It’s an ever increasing stage of life to take a bigger hold in her tiny fists and cover a larger distance with slowly steadying steps. As a post-modern child, she has to assert her rights on the TV as well. I’m watching sports, she arrives and demands ‘mote’ which I helplessly hand over.  She points it towards the screen, pressing key x, y, z and all and informs me what is worth watching from among all the idiotic things the elders waste their times upon. It’s ‘motu’. So cartoon binge watching isn’t far away.

She is innocently unaware of the haggling dualities of life that keep the elders’ minds in constant firmament. Bored with life on the ground, she authoritatively points to the terrace saying ‘upal-upal—upal meaning upstairs. And after enjoying the little things of life that presently make a meaning to her—all birds are chia, all cats and monkeys are mere pushu and a flag that inspires her to mumble Om-Om because there is flag on the temple top, so all the flags including the national tricolor are mere Om-Om to her—she points downstairs again giving the instruction of ‘upal’ asking me to take her downstairs. Isn’t it a glorious equanimity? As they grow, we train them for puzzling differentials through education and customs, spinning a web of opinions and judgments and when the spider gets caught in the complexity of its own design, it hankers to achieve that very same non-dual state of mind through meditation and unlearning all that has been deeply drilled into the mind.

A shiny red chili grabs her attention. She picks it up and with her sweetly unsteady steps walks up to me. I’m having my lunch. She cutely puts the fiery red eatable in my plate and eagerly looks at me, expecting me to eat her gift and explode with taste and clap and say thanks to the kind giver. Well, maybe she wants to see smoke gushing out of my ears and eyes. She has enough experience of cartoon programs to know the relationship between red chilies and smoky ears. These cartoon networks turn the children wise a bit too early.

Red, ripe tomatoes are very much playable. She knows where they would serve best apart from the frying pan. It’s the chairs, and more so under some seat cover or cloth, maybe to protect them from harsh winters and help them sleep better. I have dangerously come close to sit upon safely sleepy tomatoes and make fresh tomato sauce under my bum on a few chairs in the house.

Well, little Maira now wants to be in charge of the affairs. Dragging the broom around on her exploring sorties is her favorite task. So this time when she asks for goddi, she prefers to keep her jhau with her. The broom is heavy for her little hand, but punching well above her weight she is determined to hold it dangling by her side as I support her on my arm.

I’m eating and there she stands, holding a bathroom slipper in her hand. There is some space in the plate and she is looking ahead to fill that puzzle with the great item in her hand. I have to be very quick in removing my plate to avoid the footwear from becoming a part of my menu. It offends her and she cries quite angrily.

As the days progress, innocence driven by curiosity takes a planning shape. She points to the potty seat. Her mom is happy that she will now learn toilet skills. But Maira is smarter than her mother thinks. She sits on the seat and demands cartoons on the mobile, which is happily granted under the assumption that it’s a suitable reward for her voluntarily not doing her potty in a diaper and thus avoid all the haggling of washing and cleaning. Maira composedly enjoys her show on the potty seat. There is no sign of potty anywhere near. It turns out to be a trick to lay hands upon the cartoon show on the mobile.

She is a translator now. One morning she wakes up announcing to the world that ‘cow’ is actually ‘gai’. ‘Cow-gai, miau-miau-cat, bhau-bhau-puppy,’ she informs us.

It’s going to be a world of likes and dislikes. She prefers catchy songs koka-koka and paya-paya and raises her finger in bhangra celebration.

I find her mumbling car-car pointing towards the vehicle. We get inside. There is no key. She knows that a car without its key is no car, so keeps pointing towards the missing key, ‘kabi-kabi’ she reminds me, i.e., chabi.

It’s a great sight to watch her doddering steps acquire a bit more surefootedness. She falls lesser now on the way to her mission and gives long monologues in her own language putting in between a few words she knows. She now tries to climb the stairs all by herself, holding the railings, eager to become self-sufficient in going out and upstairs. She has now added to her knowledge about me and calls me tau Chhuppi, the latter linguistic pearl standing for my pet name Sufi. The tongue in its untrained free stage, but acquiring slight edges as she practices her words, imitating us, making cutely weird shortcuts over their complexities. That’s how life starts for a toddler, acquiring more control and the resultant sophistication. But the touch of her tiny fingers—untainted of any deeds, good or bad—is healing. It’s the touch of life, of just being; a soul’s selfless reaching out and touching you on your cheek, lips, nose or brow. Close your eyes and recall a child’s touch on your face. It’s pure, unadulterated energy. It seeps into you. A child will pay you back with its godly blessing, in the form of its touch and a smile, in lieu of all the cares and concerns undertaken by the elders.

Now, it’s a world of combination of choices. ‘Matar,’ she points out. I offer her a little boiled pea seed. She shakes her head in a firm ‘No’. ‘Roti,’ she says. I offer her a little piece, crushing it between my thumb and index finger. It also is met with a firm denial. Now, I realize she needs both. I make a combo of matar and roti and she gladly accepts. She is thus joyfully growing up with her slowly steadying steps, each step distinctly marked by a shrill ‘pee’ by the whistles installed in the soles of her tiny shoes. Each step a landmark, a reward celebrated by the sound.

She knows to survive one has to stand on one’s own feet. One fine morning, all fresh and looking beautiful for a new adventure, she crawls up the open staircase, falls, gets a bloody lip but finally reaches upstairs to greet me as I work on my book.

She knows it’s a big world outside there beyond the compound walls. I find her trying to open the gate standing on her toes, her little fingers bracing the heavy latch. But then she sees me and knows the value of human resource mobilization. She takes my hand and asks me to open it, walks out, looks back once before moving on to see a bigger world.

She knows the value of make-up as well. Me and my brother are brushing our teeth with a nice tooth powder. She asks both of us to sit on our haunches, dabs her little fingers in the powder on our palms and carefully smears our faces with the white powder to give us the fantastic make-up of handsome native chiefs of the red-Indian tribes.

She eats guava like a bulbul, no greed, with ease, leaving innocent needy marks on it with her little emerging teeth. It’s not like a grown-up’s clinical finish that shows greed. I have seen the guavas pecked at by the bulbuls in the little garden and those markings look exactly like what Maira leaves on the fruit she eats. 

It’s an open canvas for her to stamp her choices and preferences now. Here comes her first full sentence of all three words. ‘Chia neeche aao!’ she commands a starling that goes quite close above our heads as we play under warm sunrays on the terrace. Then follows the longest word, a few days later, spoken in the sweetest of a slurred effort. ‘Pigeon, pigeon,’ I’m pointing out. ‘K-boo-ta-ll,’ she corrects me.

She has now taken her first run in the game as well. I’m playing cricket for her with her little plastic bat and a rubber ball. She takes the bat from me, swipes at the ball and is seen running to the wall end. Only then I realize that she has scored her first run in the game of life. Of course, TV has a big role in preparing children for future. She has seen us watching cricket on TV and knows probably it’s about hitting and running. Let almighty bestow her a joyous innings in the game of life!

She is a champion of female rights already. The late winter has flowers in the little garden and a few butterflies hover around. I am lost in poetic muse. I feel a tug at my pants. Maira is struggling with brooms in both her hands. Her little fingers tightly holding the handles, she has dragged them from a far corner. She has a task for me in her mind. Why should ladies have all the fun with the brooms? Even the men should taste it. ‘Udhal, udhal, jhaau!’ she guides me to the part where there are some guava leaves scattered on the ground. She instructs me to clean the place. There I use both the brooms to clean the yard to her satisfaction.

It’s her ground now to run after the butterflies in the garden. It’s her sky now as she tries to catch the floating traces of smoke in the air. And hopefully it will be her world to fulfill her dreams and lead a joyous, healthy life. She has earned it at the cost of lots of sufferings right at the beginning.