Behind my house is a coop, home to a few chickens. In our occasional walks around the house, my almost-three toddler and I stop and spend a few minutes by the coop. The stink of droppings and the jute sack on the floor, wet due to their collisions with the water pitcher, form a thick blanket of odour around the coop. On occasions, our contemplation of the chickens gives way to a game we play. It’s a simple game. One of us, the player, will nudge the tip of a finger in through the grill of the coop. The hen will notice it and arc its neck forward, aiming a swipe at the fingertip. You have to pull your finger out before you are hit; that is the game. The shorter the gap between the pull and the swipe, the more exciting it is. In the nick of time.
This is the human-to-animal part of the game. There is a human-to-human part too. The thrill of this part is that in the moments between the hen noticing the finger and lunging forward, the observer heightens the tension for the player with urgent words. “Pull… now… now… right now…” Out. Swipe.
Who first?
During one of these sessions, the toddler had the tip of his finger in, and he was responding to my verbal nudges with abrupt pulls and reinsertions of his fingertip through the grills. In one of those moments I said, “Pull… or she will peck you!”
At that moment, the toddler turned to me. In my memory, this moment has all the gravity of a slow-motion sequence. I see the toddler’s feet, one placed slightly ahead at an angle to the other, in colourful toddler floaters. Ash-grey shorts and striped t-shirt. The coop is now an edgy protrusion in a corner of this frame as we focus on the character. The toddler turns to me and says, “Papa, it’s not pecking, it’s kissing .”
I wonder how different the recoil from a peck might be from the thrill of evading a kiss. I wonder how dense the spectrum of a kiss is, between the ones you yearn for, the ones you enjoy, the ones made in corruption, reconciliation, regret, the ones that swipe and you lose from.
I should have left that moment in the annals of pleasant memories, evocative of the inspirational sentence my once-upon-a-time mouse-pad bore: ‘You will never live this day again.’ But I also happen to be a teacher, teaching undergrads and post-grads. Given my own training for years, marked by the pleasures and pains of discoveries, I thought: Here I stand, I can do nothing else but exemplify!
From coop to classroom
So I got to thinking if the episode at the coop could be an example I could gainfully employ in a classroom. I narrativised it, gave it plot points so that the story exemplified something else. But language is a slippery field. Comma kills an example. In the foggy future, my story might be the only link to some long-buried wisdom. If I had been Hitchcock, I might have spun a thriller around it.
But setting an example, even a simple one, to pull us out from getting lost in a maze of words whose known meanings don’t seem to work anymore, is so hard. One is haunted by doubt. Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher, argues that the ideology of a society is not tucked away in a corner accessible only to a select few, but hidden in plain sight. He cites the example of the German toilet, which he says displays the German hermeneutic tradition. I think of this. But what do Indian toilets stand for? The anxiety of influence hangs in the air. I feel I shouldn’t appropriate someone else’s example.
An example is a very singular thing, according to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. An apple from a basket of apples, when put forth as an example of what is in the basket, stands for itself and all the other apples in the basket. An example lives this double life of same-difference. An example is a Macondo, a city of mirrors, where a life might be lost by the door between two rooms.
One teaches by example. Often, one turns moments from one’s own life into an example. A teacher is exhorted to be an example; but can an example be a teacher? If I am just an example, doesn’t it mean not only that there are many others, but also that I exemplify one thing and no other? By being one with what I say here, can I say no other? Do I then become an unreliable narrator?
But, what else, after all, is education?
The writer is a post-doctoral fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities.
