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They gathered around me. A swarm of largely toothless creatures. All dressed like a rainbow had exploded over their clothes. Children. Annoying, noisy children, including one that belonged to me, had found my hideout.
If parenting could be confined to early mornings and evenings, like a hoodie that I could change out of when I needed to be a professional, it would be easier. Especially now, when we are all working from home. Instead, what we have is a version of the Japanese Hikae, a permanent shirt, tattooed on to the skin.
For a moment, I wondered if I could evade these intruders, throw my lime juice into their eyes, temporarily blinding them as I escaped with my laptop. They would find me though, even if I hid in the bathroom. Resigned to my fate, I decided to use them as experimental subjects, a focus group of tiny minds.
An illustration of Saalumarada Thimmakka featured in 'When I Grow Up I Want To Be...'. Credit: Aaryama Somayaji
‘When you grow up, what do you want to be?’ I asked.
Along with ‘Tall’ and ‘My papa’, one said, ‘A hero’.
I persisted, ‘All right, but what is your idea of a hero?’
‘Someone who doesn’t use plastic,’ said the girl with an orange Nerf gun in her hand.
‘Inventor of stinky fart lasers.’
Another thankfully said, ‘Gandhi ji ’ and my little one chirped in with ‘Chhote Master!’
Chhote Master is a new entrant. One that has popped up in her lexicon in the last few days after she read about him in a recent book we published about real-life Indian heroes. I assume she has gravitated towards this young man, because he started his journey at the same age as her, eight.
She claims, that like him, she too wants to teach other children. When she is goofing off during lessons, I remind her, ‘Missy, if you are not going to learn properly, how will you teach anyone?’ She turns back to her books and then I return to my own.
Khanna’s daughter with the new book
Being a parent differs from parenting. Nouns are passive. It is enough to merely exist. Parenting, a verb, denotes an action, and this one comes without instruction manuals. Sometimes I wonder about the incongruity of needing a license to navigate a moped down the street, but no tests, no preparation, for steering these little creatures we produce down the right path.
Raising a child seems to centre around winging it. Stuffing them with parathas and green vegetables without paying as much attention to what we are cramming inside their heads. The few tools we acquire through experience, we try and pass on to our children, hoping they come in handy someday. Books, though, are entire toolboxes with spanners, hammers, screwdrivers, borrowed from several divergent lives instead of just one.
I recall a time when my little one wanted to discontinue her swimming lessons. A tan had become her nemesis.
‘I want to be the same colour as bhaiya .’
The book’s cover
A chance remark by a foolish relative within her earshot had not gone unnoticed. ‘She is so cute but not as fair as her brother, na!’ This led to many questions within our home, with me telling her I want to be the colour of her favourite carrots and she laughing and wanting to be orange as well. Then, I gave her Frida Kahlo’s illustrated biography. Gleaming skin of a shade not unlike ours, with eyebrows that met in the centre, a formidably talented woman as a role model. A hacksaw to cut through rigid perspectives.
These days she claims she doesn’t need to use as much sunblock as her brother. ‘Brown skin is stronger,’ she says. ‘White is a light colour so it gets dirty fast like my T-shirt, brown is darker, so it doesn’t,’ is her simple explanation.
Each time my little one opens her books and reads about an Afroz Shah cleaning up the beach right in front of her home, her beloved Chhote Master, Frida or Malala, her universe expands. She sees ordinary people, not Superman, Harry Potter and Wonder Woman, but people like her, doing extraordinary things, and knows that she can do them too.
That evening, we lay in bed, her colourful tribe disbanded and my cavernous maw of work sealed shut for the night. She was holding on to my left hand, almost asleep, when she murmured, ‘I am thinking of the D thing again.’
An illustration of Arunachalam Muruganantham featured in 'When I Grow Up I Want To Be...' Credit: Aaryama Somayaji
D is a code word for death. Unlike clowns or heights, this is a legitimate fear. I have tried combating it with both logic and humour, mixing up my reassurances between, ‘How many of your friends, the ones you know since kindergarten, are dead now? to ‘Then you can turn into a zombie and eat everyone up.’ It seems to have worked because now she is not scared of her own death, but of mine.
‘You will die before me because you are old,’ she whispered in the dark.
‘Yes, that is true.’
‘So, after you die, will you become a soul, who can see and hear?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Good, because then you can watch me as I become big.’
I imagine being a disembodied fragment, floating around corridors, keeping an eye on her as she grows.
I hope like the people in the books she reads, this little girl, who is starting to believe she can achieve anything, uses her borrowed tools to craft and transform a multitude of possibilities into probabilities. Then even if I can’t, the world will watch her for me.
Published by Juggernaut for Khanna’s Tweak India , When I Grow Up I Want To Be... is available on amazon.in for ₹299.
