“Help, help! Baby’s head trapped in a tin can!” shouted the agitated housemaid peeping in through the classroom window. So we parents, both teachers at the Lutheran High School at Uyo in Nigeria, hurried home, hardly a hundred metres away.
The sight was shocking, to say the least. Imagine a chubby two-and-a-half-year-old with a lovely paunch, prominent bums and a milk powder tin can in place of the head, frantically trying to get rid of the unwelcome hood. It was a heart-rending spectacle, miserable and equally bewildering because though struggling, the child was not shrieking. The mother rushed to hug the baby, but the face was out of reach, so she lifted him up instead. For me, what appeared initially a comic scene soon gave way to one of horror. It took me a while to comprehend fully the situation. Why doesn’t he yell? Why doesn’t he scream for help? Won’t he collapse out of fear? Can he breathe comfortably? Yes, fortunately he could.
The shriekImpulsively I tried to lift the can off the head without thinking of the folly and the danger in doing so. Our attempt at lifting the can elicited a painful shriek from the baby, and we found that the inner circle of the can’s rim had sharp remnants left there when the metallic foil sealing the can’s mouth had been peeled off, and that these could bite into the baby’s neck and under the chin and ears, and cut into soft skin.
An alternative was to press on the cylindrical tin simultaneously from the front and back to make way for the two earlobes to come out. No, the risk of the nostrils getting pressed against, resulting in suffocation, could be the dangerous outcome. We brought out a pair of shearing scissors to cut open the can rim. As it just scratched the sides of the can, the shrill metallic resonance alarmed the child and evoked another yell, which abruptly stopped inexplicably! Moreover the pair of scissors was not sharp enough to cut through the hard material of the rim. So we sent for the technician of the school, hoping he might have some more pliable cutting instruments.
All hands at workMeanwhile, everybody in the crowd tried their hand at taming the stubborn tin to make it behave with as many fingertips as could reach to protect the baby’s skin around the neck.
What’s happening, wondered the baby, his head still covered by the can. “Why has it suddenly gone dark? Where are the lights? How come I can’t see anything? Who did this to me, and why? Yes, there are people around me. Why are they punishing me? What wrong did I do? Where are my mom and dad? The hand on my chest feels like that of my mom’s. And, maybe, the hands on my arms are my dad’s. But why don’t they show their faces? They never used to behave like this!”
“What is that monstrous, stentorian sound in my left ear? Are they going to tear my ear off? Won’t they stop it? When I cry, why is it so deafeningly loud?”
Amplified soundsEven a feeble sound, right inside the ear, can sound appalling. Have you ever tried snapping the nail ends of the thumb and the middle finger holding them within the ear as much as possible? Try that. Doesn’t it sound like firecrackers? Then how much more intense will be the sound emanating when a metal object is cut right outside the ear, the head surrounded by a metal sphere?
The reverberation was so frightful that the baby suddenly stopped shouting. This was how the scream was so short-lived. Each time someone uttered a word trying to console the baby, the echo under the can was so unbearable that the baby would have hoped, “If only these monsters would stop barking! Are the adults so heartless that they howl at me even in such a predicament?”
The trials with rotating the can, tilting and turning it all around, continued. And, presto, the can came off, releasing one ear lobe first and then gradually the other one, too. “Thank heavens!’, all shouted in unison.
The baby was perplexed: “Who switched the lights on? Why did it take so long? How could the hostile adults play such a shenanigan on me? Should I cry out? Should I slap my mom? Or, give a kick to my dad for delaying the rescue for so long? … But, look, they are all smiling, nay laughing gleefully, as if I enjoyed their prank! Anyway, now each one is taking his turn to hug me! What a cruel joke!”
“Where’s my milk? Don’t they know I’m hungry and thirsty?”
The protagonist is now all of thirty-eight, a Finance Director in a firm in a Canadian firm at Vancouver, and for sure keeps all cans and metallic vessels safely out of the reach of his own three-year-old son.
itty_varghese@hotmail.com
