One night, about a year ago, I started reading Charlotte’s Web to my children. It was one of the novels my older son’s class would be reading that year at school. In an alpha-mom moment, I thought we could read it together at home to give him a head start.
My sons were then eight and seven years old. That night, they wanted to play some more before bedtime. They didn’t want me to start reading yet. I read out the first sentence of the novel: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” At once they sat down to listen.
Moral conflicts I can’t think of a more dramatic story than E.B. White’s classic 1952 farm novel. The little girl Fern — one of my all-time favourite characters in fiction — asks her mother why her father would need an ax. Her mother replies that some pigs had been born the previous night, and one of them was too small and weak to amount to anything.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta Within the first few lines of the novel, we were looking at one of the great moral conflicts of human life. We were looking at a man with an ax — a father and a farmer, a man who was “almost ready to cry himself.” We were confronted with the word “injustice”, spoken by a girl who was “only eight”.
As we read on, we started to imagine the farm. We enjoyed the way the goose spoke, we became fond of the grumpy and greedy old rat, we marvelled at the assorted things Wilbur liked to eat. Yuck, yuck, giggled my boys as I read out the list, which included carrot scrapings and stale hominy. We loved the sense of diversity, community, and the friendship that seemed most natural, between a naïve, runty pig and a tiny, wise, compassionate spider.
“The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell — as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.”
I stopped reading for a moment to let the children imagine the barn. I never thought spiders could be kind, murmured the seven-year-old. Of course they can, said the eight-year-old, impatiently. Go on.
When we reached the final chapters of the novel, when death does come but not in the way we had feared, my children cried. And I found I had a speck of dust in my eye too.
Dealing with death We moved on to James and the Giant Peach , Ruskin Bond, and other books; we are now on the new Harry Potter. We forgot about Charlotte’s Web — until the time came to understand why we had read it.
This week, our cat died. Billoo was twelve years old, over eighty in human years; elderly and diabetic, but we had thought he would pull through. One evening after the visit to the vet for his daily IV, he remained inside his travelling cage instead of coming out to sit on his rug. From a corner of the cage, he gazed out at us calmly. Within minutes, he put his head down and died.
My younger son sobbed; Billoo should have lived for some more years, he said. I reminded him of Charlotte’s Web : the pig is saved from the ax, but death comes in the story eventually, in its season, and this is a part of the natural way of life. My son became quiet, dried his tears and made a farewell card. “Bye Billoo,” he wrote.
My older son was quiet and thoughtful. Our dog sat at his feet as he made an intricate drawing in Billoo’s memory.
In our lives, animals teach us many things. Like Snowy who follows Tintin even to dangerous places, against his better judgment, they will follow us anywhere. Like the dog who walks along with the Pandavas on their final journey, they will pad along, only stopping occasionally to smell the grass or chase a squirrel. When we come home at the end of the day, even if our children are too busy playing cricket or Minecraft to notice that we are back, it’s the dog who will greet us as if we are Odysseus himself returning from long years of travel. The cat might even deign to turn towards us and blink briefly.
Animals teach us to tolerate scratch marks on the upholstery and slippers chewed into fragments, and to tolerate the unfairness of death.
Meeting Billoo I remember vividly the way Billoo had come into our lives. This was before the children were born. My husband and I had gone to a book reading at the NGMA Mumbai. It was the launch of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City . Walking back to our car, we saw, between the Elphinstone building and Jehangir Art Gallery, what looked like a tiny scrap of cloth. It was moving. It was a kitten. It was almost going to get run over by a taxi.
We waited for the mother cat but to no avail. By this time the kitten had already rolled into a ball and was using my arm as a scratching post. We took him home and introduced him to our affable Labrador who didn’t look at all surprised. We called the kitten Bilkul; he soon became Billoo.
In books, and in life, animals show us that you don’t always need words to express the important things; that unlikely friendships and coexistence are possible. Spiders have to eat, too. Pigs can be radiant. And in a Maximum City, a tiny minimum creature can narrowly escape being run over, and make his way nonchalantly into a corner of your heart.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS, currently based in Bengaluru.
