…but to tell a child not to make noise is a form of cruelty…
- Bertrand Russell
It was a peaceful and quiet September afternoon. I was going about my chores listening to the joyous chirps of young children (whose afternoon classes were off, I presumed, due to the ongoing quarterly examinations) out on the street, lolling around in the shade of my across-the-street neighbour’s tree and bouncing a ball. A very innocent and pleasant scene, you’d think. But wait, appearances can be deceptive.
Our neat, concrete-paved and inviting street is in an upwardly mobile, middle-class neighbourhood. My across-the-street neighbour and I are representative members of this class. But the children on the street that afternoon were neither his nor mine. They were the ‘lane’ children – as we call them. For they come from a poorer, unpaved, garbage-strewn lane abutting our street (where our ‘service’ people, the housemaids, cleaners and so on, come from).
Hold on…the tree! I called it my neighbour’s. In a sense it is his for he planted it, waters it, prunes it and takes care of it. But the land it stands on is not his. For you see, it is just outside his compound wall. No complaints from me, though – the foliage is pleasant to view at from my window. My family and I enjoy spotting and identifying a variety of birds amongst its branches.
The quiet of the afternoon was soon interrupted by loud, adult voices that had effectively shut off the children’s. The bouncing ball had fallen into another neighbour’s yard and she presumably had objected — it was obviously not the first time the ball had committed the crime — and refused to allow its owners access to it.
Soon, the ‘lane’ children’s parents got involved and the scene became acrimonious, each party defending his/her territory. Even as this scene was playing out in front of me, my mind couldn’t help going back a year in time to a similar scene on the same street…
Only, then the children involved were my own and a few of their friends playing street cricket with a ‘smiley’ yellow sponge ball that people in this part of the country are all familiar with for its ‘safety’ aspect. After it had fallen and been retrieved a tolerable number of times from a particularly volatile neighbour’s yard, the boys were yelled at and they sheepishly returned home.
When I attempted to take this up with the said neighbour, I was turned away, too. Other neighbours either joined her cause by alleging how the ball could damage their car and the glasspanes and how their late afternoon naps were being disturbed by the noise the children created.
Even though I withdrew from the tirade on that occasion, I continued to encourage my children to play on the low-traffic street, the only public space left for them to play. All the little parks in the neighbourhood had been paved for walkers or landscaped to charm the eye, and the one or two playgrounds that remained were monopolised by organised paid sports coaching.
But a product of middle-class upbringing, thereafter the boys completely avoided playing on the streets. Instead now they travel an hour every day to play at their paid tennis coaching class. When they are home, they play inside our living room, which I keep sparsely furnished just for this purpose. Rarely, if luck favours them, they might get for themselves, all of the 20X10 ft parking lot (the only un-built space) at our apartment building when none of the resident two-wheelers or four-wheelers is parked.
It makes me wonder if all these cars and motorbikes, pretty landscaped houses and parks are worth the joy of young children exercising their limbs and lungs.
My reverie was interrupted by a voice threatening to ‘call the police to see this matter through’, and rejoined by another voice challenging the first to do what she could.
I’d love to wait it out to report how this plays out. But do I really have to? Don’t we all know how this will end? Welcome to the world of touchy adults and deprived children of the 21st century in urban India.
anandhi252@gmail.com
