The full game of life

 I don't exactly remember the name of that plant. But when we chew its leaves during childhood they tasted very bitter. But the bitter taste was just half part of the game. The other half presented sweetness when we drank water after chewing the bitter leaves. It was good fun. At the end only sweetness would linger in the mouth. Bitterness transformed into sweetness by water.

Bitter situations are simply half part of the game. If we keep ourselves limited to the bitter part of the game, we would turn a grumpy, cynical and cranky person. It means we have lived just one half of life. Like a passive stone mutely weathering due to environmental elements. But if we take some steps to be a part of the other half and drink the water of patience, gratitude and understanding then sweetness follows. Then bitterness becomes a prelude to sweetness. It then becomes a full life expected of a human being. Then we are a flower blossoming by absorbing heat, rain, storms and dust and transform these into a sweet smile. 

Life will keep throwing its bitter situations. That's its nature. If we just react to these situations we become a sour, unhappy person. But if we respond by taking cool sips of patience and gratitude then sweetness defines our persona despite all the bitter experiences.

Dancing parrots and sulking crows

Have you seen beautiful, colorful birds courting their lady love? They dance, spread their amazing wings and tails in fabulous patterns and let out the best of vocals to attract and woo their lady love. With a negligible exception it’s the males who go into a great eye-catching show in courting the female. There is a thrower of charms and there is a receiver of those charms. So much for the scheme of this polarity!

That amazing range of play-acted maneuvers (under the impulse of hormonal throw of energy) is not what the male persona is under ordinary circumstances. They are an exception; just an ecstatic throw of mood and attitude to catch the female’s attention. These are momentary sprouts. They don’t define the normal traits of a common bird in its day-to-day life. For the rest of the time they are simple birds, doing normal things just like any other bird of the species. And I don’t think the female birds mind that. They are lucky that they don’t have memory like women to remember all this dancing.

The restless male energy is always looking for rest in the silent pools of receptive female energy. She too is looking for the wearied runner to walk home and rest in her receptive folds. It gives a meaning to her life. It fulfills her. It saves her from the restless void, the procreative emptiness brimming with the potential to manifest and create new life forms.

There is hardly any difference between a colorful bird pirouetting in dandy mode using the tail and wings and singing best songs and a man wooing a woman. At the peak of hormonal storm he jumps to fulfill all the columns of female expectations. That’s natural. But that’s not what he is in normal state. He is a normal guy otherwise.

Under the patriarchal system the man has convinced himself to be far superior to the woman. It’s factually very-very incorrect. There is a deep-seated acceptance of his inferiority and to cover that the system of patriarchy was built up. And to justify his patriarchy construct, he is trying his best to fit in the chauvinistic slot from as many angles as possible. When he covets a woman and goes into the process of wooing her, he adopts an emergency ploy to appear the best in all slots. He is helpless and it’s all about bright colors, bright dance, bright song, best attitude, best look, best behavior, best hobbies and much-much more. Truth and genuineness take a backseat. Falsehoods creep in long before we even realize. And where falsehoods creep in, miseries entail in good measure.

O thou poor dancing bird and the still poorer man! But a lady bird can be duped. The dandy can afford to be normal after the deed is done. But not so with a woman. She has a brain and a nice memory. She remembers the entire range of colorful somersaults that you have been doing to get her hand. And that becomes her benchmark to assess you. Now how long you will maintain the crest of your best version? Of course you will come down to a normal self as the fever comes down. Then you appear such a poor guy, almost a cheater who pretended to be what he isn’t usually. I think a woman can be more forgiving if she accepts that the poor guy was simply doing a wooing dance like a bird in the Amazon forest. He is simply throwing his message to have a partner. The content of the message isn’t what he is in reality. It’s just a catchy title to draw attention, like an eye-catching book title and its cover. The title might appear attractive but the story is usually mundane, very-very common.

The bird cannot be dancing forever at the best of its colors and the best of songs. Naturally it will become a common bird after the energetic storm is over. The beautiful parrot turns a boring crow. But brother, why did you try to be what you are not. You gave your best in wooing her and that raised the bar of her expectations. And expectations breed disappointments. She expects you to be the very same beautifully cooing and majestically dancing parrot. She is right in sulking over the dull crow cawing boringly by her side. 

The irony is that we get habituated to take the wooing dance as the primary characteristics in an individual, i.e., we take the catchy title as the story itself. Isn’t that a mistake? The excitement and thrill that one gets out of the bird dance is addictive in nature. We need to learn to be comfortable with normal people around us. We need to give respect and love to the ordinary humanity. Sadly we hold high expectations from people. To fulfill those heavy expectations he is all valor, grace, dignity, bravery, stability, unqualified giving and masculine handsomeness; and she is all receptivity, feminine grace, support, acceptance, care and share. Both sides trying at their best. Effort beyond a limit breeds artificiality. This artificiality then ends up in stumping each other. After all, how long will one keep jumping at his/her best? Ultimately we have to get grounded. The boring normalcy sets in. The dreams vanish. The colors fade. The songs turn to ugly croakings. Angels turn to dark angels. Then both sides part ways. Look for new partners, expecting the thrill of wooing exception to be the everlasting normal. No wonder most of us are a series of broken relationships.

That’s why it’s advisable to be just normal, the real self, even during the phase of courting a partner. Stay as you normally are. Honesty is a highly undervalued trait in the modern society. But primarily it’s the sole trait that decides whether we are carried as a miserable junk into the cemetery or a peaceful corpse looking at whom not many people get scared. I remember the face my mother after she had left her body. She looked angelic and so beautiful in her eternal sleep.

If someone accepts you with your dull colors, weird dancing and hoarsy songs that relationship has a better chance of survival for a longer time. Truth always serves well in the long term. It may appear to let us down in the short term, giving us little-little disappointments and let downs. But it saves us from major collapses in the long term.

One may wonder why this guy is preaching about relationships. Yours truly tries to speak from his own experiences. Experiential knowledge is very near to truth. I did my own set of fabulous dancing for seven ears—just once in life and with one person only. I can feel myself almost boasting about the fact. It simply means I have to clear more webs from around my eyes to see more clearly. It’s wise to learn from one’s experience.

Using my creativity I built up a grandiose avatar, almost like a shining angel, and became the crowning prince in her big eyes. In flying too high I burnt my wings. So couldn’t afford to fly anymore after seven years. When I landed on the plain of normalcy she felt cheated on witnessing my normal colors and mundane songs; her dreams broken, her shining angel merely a common person like anyone around, no longer able to maintain her beautiful dream. There was a normal crow cawing around her. But I’m happy that these are the days of women empowerment. Confident, self-standing, glamorous, with a smile to kill and eyes that could intoxicate a dozen men with a single glance, I saw her flying away with a beautiful swan who was flying on seventh heaven to fill up the slots of her expectations. ‘You idiot, you too will fall one day!’ I cawed from the ground. Even as a pretending spiritualist I am happy that he too fell within a couple of years. I take it as mark of victory for having flown more than him. I’m not bothered about other men but at least I viewed him as a rival.

Normal cawing has its own benefits. It taught me poetry. There were emotional storms in the tea-cup which I amply cashed by forcibly trying to be philosophical in nature. Lost love, or for that matter any type of loss, is invisibly preparing you for many other gains in many forms. There comes a day when you actually feel gratitude for those losses for what you late became. You realize that those losses were meant to make you what you are today. So I respect the past without any grudges, but I’m far happier with my present and give due credit to all the experiences I went through.

I also realized that maybe I had punched far-far above my weight in wooing and actually winning her. But how long you will keep the arena clear of rivals if the girl is such a head turner that there are at least a dozen men dancing to her tunes with their tongues out? To match her big aura I too had acquired larger dimensions like a porcupine spreading its thorns to look more imposing. All said, as a man I take full responsibility for creating those expectations. And as Buddha said expectations breed sufferings—at one end at least, if not both. Most importantly, I’m happy for her. Why should men have all the fun? The women have been subjugated for too long and they have lots to cover up in enjoyment and normal fun which we the men have enjoyed so far.

Thankfully, I seem to have spent all the wooing fuel in one go. Wise people don’t need to repeat the same experience to get the same lesson again and again. As far as beautiful girls are concerned, I am able to impersonally appreciate them like a flower, with a pleasant detachment. I connect more to old women with their motherly aura and saintly faces carrying the majestic wrinkles of age. Maybe losing my mother is a far bigger weight on my soul than losing the woman I loved.

These days, while watching the colorful birds dancing and singing in the documentaries to woo their ladies I become very conscious, even embarrassed. I cannot blame them. All of us are birds in the same way. But I always wag my admonishing finger and mutter, ‘Son, take care! You will have to pay for this!’

And now on a serious note. Retain your simple colors, ordinary steps and normal songs while wooing a partner. If he or she accepts you with your normal stuff that’s well and good. If not, give it a damn and laugh at all the artificially jumping lover-birds—ranging from birds in documentaries to the people around you—and go giggling about this funny game.

A slim sliver of hope

It’s an angrier world than ever. There are wars, violence, blood and gore. A very insecure world it is. Trust is falling apart. Faith lies sidelined and charlatans misuse trust and faith for parochial motives. The states are arming themselves with more and more deadly weaponry. There is a stampede for supremacy and one-upmanship.

Violence has been deeply institutionalized in the society. The states, intelligence agencies, shadowy players, business mafias, cartels, religious fanatics and many other actors have been covertly and overtly using institutionalized violence to further their interests.

Its effects can be seen in the society. Relationships are falling apart. The people are lonely and depressed. It’s a very unhappy world. And a very dangerous spin off surfaces: the individualization of violence. The stand-alone shooter mired in his lonely, unrelated world. Someone marooned on the island of pain. He too launches war, goes out with a sophisticated weapon and shoots innocent people out there for mundane activities of life.

There is so much of collective mistrust, hate, insecurity around. The lonely individual absorbs his share of fear, phobias and suffering from the air around. Then he goes for a blast. It’s a culture of arms. Imagine sophisticated weapons in the hands of lonely, anguished, depressed individuals. An unarmed depressed man might go for verbal assaults or fist-work at the most. If you are equipping him with sophisticated armory, you are providing predatory talons to his lonely suffering and anger. Isn’t it an aid in crime? Give him back his faith and love in humanity that he has lost, not arms.

The arms industry is running the world. They are the ones who finally decide which country gets bombarded or what innocent blood is shed in which part of the world. They are very dangerous people. The lethal-most traders they are. To them an ant squashed or a human murdered hardly makes any difference. They are sadistically addicted to blood and gore. It’s simply business. Commerce. To sell more grains you need more hungry bellies. To sell more weapons you need more wars and murders. And a violent society serves their purpose well. A violent society will have more violent leadership. There will be more wars, more blood, more butchering. So they are happy with the scenario of lonely, depressed human hunters.

Ironically, we started as hunters of other species. Now hardly anything is left to hunt in the jungles. So we are hunting our fellow humans—just for the sheer mad fun of it. Nobody is safe anywhere on earth. Anyone can be killed by anybody over anything in any part of earth.

Is there any chance of redemption? The scenario is very bleak but there is a slim chance. Almost hundred out of hundred mass shooters, bloodthirsty dictators, warmongering leaders, fanatical religious heads, mafias and other evil incarnate are men. The statistical truth is we ‘men’ have failed in managing earth. So let’s try with ‘women’ for a change. Let’s have more and more women in leadership positions. Yes, it will be a far more chatty and gossipy world but that is still better than blood and gore that we see around.

The spring's last day

It’s the last day of March and the month of spring leaves a soft, languorous nostalgia. There is a deceptive, denotative simplicity in the manner the trees, apprehending the boiling and beguiling summer, are shedding leaves to get a light-clothed summer look. Although there are still some honeybees, gloating with sensuousness, singing librettos to raise the spirits in the source of their food, yet the flowers are losing colors. The spring still holds its oblique ambience as is proven by many butterflies that flutter among the engaging crosscurrents of this brief interval between cold winters and hot summers.

The mornings have big dewdrops on the grass and the pathside shrubs and weeds. Under the rays of the rising sun these shine as culturally illuminating and beautifully layered pieces of marvel.

Hit by the unyielding whip of love and passion—inevitable for someone as young and handsome as he—the oriental magpie robin seems forlorn after diving in the unfathomable depths of love. Given its young age it’s yet to come to terms with loneliness. Its multivalenced sensitivities will gestate, germinate and grow as it matures to learn the value of solitude in old age. Its love affair seems to have been very short-lived. After wooing him with her oeuvre of feminal charms—catching him in the pools of lean, taut, bustling desires—she flew away. After parting from the honored custodian of its heart, the forlorn lover is now left to sing sad love songs. Going along the shading and layering of painful emotions, it’s sitting on the dry branch of a completely dead neem tree. The sadness inside maybe makes it feel comfortable in sitting among a matching surrounding.

This bird is a very bubbly imitator of notes. Its dynamic dialogues surely cross many birdie social interfaces across various species. That makes it seem a very confident little bird. However, as of now among the sadly dead canopy of the neem tree it’s singing the songs of loneliness. A male house sparrow is sitting silently just a foot away from the sad bird trying to overcome the post-breakup melancholy. Possibly the sparrow is trying to learn the amazingly varying notes so that he too can use the skills in wooing the best-looking girls of his species. Who knows, there might be another reason also. As of now the dashing magpie robin is letting out trilling notes. Maybe the sparrow thinks that a few girls of his species will get duped into taking this great song to be his composition and turn his fans. Well, irrespective of the reason they maintain their positions for almost half hour, while the sun turned hotter as it moved up the horizon. By the way, the magpie robin still comes to the little clump of trees in our yard to rest for the night.

The hosting parijat tree has gone crazy and is shedding its leaves quite madly. Possibly the magpie likes its nighttime resting house bearing a sad look of loss and paleness befitting its lonely state.

It’s the start of the harvesting season and the sparrows have gone. They have plenty of grains in the open fields to feast upon. The parijat has plenty of button-sized pods, the seeds of its fertility. It will stay almost withered till the monsoons arrive. It will then throw away its seeds with orgasmic delight. And then it’ll wear bright new shiny green clothes, a kind of celebration for an annual cycle completed, a kind of fulfillment of its natural duties.

A rufous treepie has delayed its going back to its home in the Himalayan foothills. Let’s hope it realizes that it’s getting late and flies for its little dale in the hills because the silence there awaits it motherly. 

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.