My son has started watching Animal Planet and National
Geographic. The progression seems to be interesting; from Japanese animations
dubbed into Hindi and English to the sports channels and the channels that
highlight the wonders of nature. Like other children of his age, he too lives
in an imaginary world. While walking to the bus stop in the morning to catch
his school bus suddenly he cups his hands catches something from air and
triumphantly turns to me and raises his finger with a scream breaking out of
his little mouth. He has just caught some famous bats man out who has pulled
his willow up for a six. At times, at home, he falls down slowly, with labored movements
on the floor and I recognize it as a slow motion replay of a very risky
fielding. He has just saved his team from a four. Sometimes he asks me to close
my eyes. Unsuspecting and loving, I close them and a sharp punch below my belt
sends me into curls. He has just knocked down his opponent in a foul punch.
Of late, I have noticed him doing something more. He has
graduated from being a cricketer to a predating animal. He watches some program
that shows three different species of animals hunt for their prey; it is
presented as a competition. Often, at home, I either sit glued to a book or the
laptop, writing something or scrolling down the facebook page to watch the
variety of interests that people display out there in the form of their
postings. Suddenly some heavy form falls on me, completely unsettling me from
my poise and it bites deep into my calves or biceps for some time. With some
relish it removes or imagines remove a chunk of flesh from my body and gallops
away from there. That is my son, who has just turned into a leopard or a tiger.
He has just pounced on his prey, a deer or a bison or even a frightened rabbit.
I look at him as I regain my posture clutching precariously on my computer that
is literally on my lap. I see him, the fierce predatory animal walking away all
on his four, making some grumbling noises of satisfaction. Now I am very
careful when I sit to read or write. From the sides of my eyes, I watch out for
a head slowly rising from the side of the bed or from behind the cupboard or
door.
Bill Waterson, who created the famous cartoon strip (even in
a graphic novel form), Calvin and Hobbes, is absolutely right. Kids behave
really funny and their world of imagination is so immense that even the best
writer in the world cannot match up with that. Kids are wonderful creatures. When
I was reading and later on translating the famous Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s landmark
novel, Famished Road, I had felt the power of childhood imaginations. Azaro,
the spirit child, who is protagonist of the novel, sees the worlds that an
ordinary human being cannot even visualize. I was astonished when my daughter
asked a question, ‘Papa, do butterflies wear clothes?’ I mulled over the question
again and again; a question as colorful and as innocent as the butterflies themselves.
I thought of answering the question initially. Then left it there itself. Had I
tried to give an answer to it the beauty of the question would have vanished.
Some questions do not have an answer; the beauty lies in the question itself.
I remember a very beautiful and sensitive poem written by
Kumaran Asan, one of the triumvirates of modern Malayalam poetry. A child after
seeing the butterflies flying off from the flowers, asks his mother, why these
flowers are flying away from the plant. Also the child expresses his inability
to fly with them as he does not have wings like them. Then mother tells the
child, dear child, you are mistaken. They are not flowers but butterflies. Then
mother adds that he should not feel bad about things which he is not able to
do. As a final consolation she tells the child that we know very little in the
world as the world itself is a dream dreamt by God. Children, like that are
great repositories of questions that generally do not demand answers but make
the grown up world re-think about its deeds. As the child grows up he loses his
capacity to imagine as he gets into the systemic notions of imaginations where
control gets an upper hand than the liberated sense of dreaming and imagining.
Haven’t you seen the pangs of that child who wishes for the
absence of his teacher as he is filled with hopes by the pouring rain? And how
much gets disappointed when he sees the glimpse of a wet umbrella at the other
end of the alley! Don’t you remember what the little Oscar sees as he comes out
of his mother’s womb? A forty watt bulb that represents the semi-truths of a
Nazi world. Isn’t it a pleasure to see the world through the eyes of Apu who
walks behind the sweet vendor or runs across the steppe with his sister to see
the chugging steam engine? How interesting it is to see the world through the
films as young Tornatore remembers his childhood in Cinema Paradiso? What about
that child who runs a race to win the second prize because the second prize
would give him a pair of little shoes that he would like to give his young sister?
Children send our eyes moisten, with pain and pleasure. They are mischief
makers too who just don’t want a pair of lovers to have their private heaven as
in Truffaut’s Mischief Makers. Sometimes, parents want to kill their children
because they could make the lives of parents a burning hell. But we don’t kill
our own kids. Kumaran Asan wrote in his famous poem, ‘The Delivery of a Lioness’
(Oru Simha Prasavam), No animal feel hatred for its own offspring even if the
animal is so ferocious and cruel, like a lioness.
My idea was not to write about kids and their activities. I
wanted to write about how words come to a writer or to be precise, how a writer
launches himself to writing an idea that he has been mulling over for quite
some time. In fact I have been wishing to write about this topic since my son
started behaving like a predating animals and hunting me down when I was
absolutely unaware of his presence in my vicinity. The more I watched him
making his silent and stealthy moves, using his palms and soles as soft paws,
the more I realized that a writer too was like a predating animal. He moves around
his idea for a long time; like a sort of big newt of the size of a cat biting a
huge bison and wait for weeks to gangrene set in to kill the big animal. He
waits and at the opportune moment he pounces on his idea and shreds it into
words. A writer, when he finishes a particular piece of writing looks like an
animal that has just cleaned up the last piece of flesh from the bone and
smacks in lips with sense of relish, celebration and inexplicable satisfaction.
A writer is a like a kingfisher who meditates for a long time to swoop down to
pick his fish. Sometimes he is like happy white polar bear that plays amongst a
host of fish and catches very little. A writer is like a tiger, a lion but
never a hyena. A writer is an arrow a trained pair of fingers, an able arm, a
sharp eye and a calculating mind shoot. He is the target too.
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