by Anupama Krishnakumar
[box]Esha, 35 years old, artist and mother of two, takes you down memory lane. Join her as she revisits some memorable moments of her childhood. Esha’s story and childhood sketches by Anupama Krishnakumar.[/box]Hello there,
I am Esha, 35 years old, an artist and mother of two lovely kids. Before I tell you my story, here’s something you need to know.
a) The collage book to your right is mine. See the ‘E’? My mom got it for me when I was almost six.
b) I love pink, absolutely love.
c) I am going to take you through my childhood, flipping through the pages of this collage book. Not all the pages – am sure you wouldn’t have the time. Let’s pause at some of what I feel are the most defining moments of my life as a child and I shall tell you those little stories as I insert the small notes that I had penned down in the last one week, about my childhood, my children and the irrefutable change that has happened through the course of my life.
-dated 05 Feb 2015
Come on in!
Before I show you the first page, can I ask you something? Are you someone who often looks back and thinks about your childhood? Well, I am! I often think of my childhood as a time when all things that seem trivial now, looked so great and all that seems important now, seemed so meaningless.
It amazes me how as years roll by, experiences and age shape our beliefs and our very personality. As a child, I remember how I used to value each of my little belongings – a pencil, a paint brush, a pencil box, an eraser, my school badge and so on. I used to cry for hours together when any of these were lost. I would look so unhappy if a box of paints that someone gifted on my birthday got over. And now, I don’t care if a paint brush gets lost or a pencil seems nowhere in sight!
Back then, I didn’t understand what birth and death meant. I didn’t fear death and its causes for my sake and the people that I held close. But, today I do. Fear is the biggest enemy I fight.
The bottom line: Back then, letting go of small things was tough and letting go of bigger things was effortless. And, now it’s all the reverse! Now, what should I call this change? Good or bad? Or just forget the debate and accept it as a way of life?
Ok, do I see a scorn? Before you decide to shut this, I will shove the philosophy aside. And let’s enter the world of a five-year old. I don’t remember anything much from my life before I turned five. To admit the truth, the idea of a collage book was something my mother brought up in what I now realize as an effort to fight the insecurity she thought I would face with the birth of a sibling! So, there she gifted it to me, a week before my sister actually came into this world, and asked me to record whatever I felt and stick whatever I liked in it.
Little did I realize when I proudly held the ‘E’ embroidered pink collage book in my hand that it would awaken the creative personality in me and little did I realize that I would actually begin to speak to it as a friend!
When my mom first told me that I was going to have a baby brother or baby sister soon to play with, I imagined mom was hiding a toy inside her tummy that seemed to grow bigger by the day. I was almost six then.
In fact, the day I got this collage book, I vaguely remember holding it in front of my mom’s tummy and telling the toy inside, see I got a new book! Mom later has of course embellished my imagination of the scene with the exact nature of the dialogue we had, the dress that I had worn and so on.
So, when my mom said the baby bro or sis would actually talk, sing and dance like me, I was curious! Don’t you want to gift the baby something? My mother had asked. Gifts thrilled me to bits! Oh, why not, I said and the result is the floral card I made with her help, using paints and ear buds! The day I went to the hospital and I saw my little sister, pink and so tiny, and showed her the floral card, I wondered why she didn’t react and I wondered what mom was doing there by her side and why she wasn’t there with me! You see, the first hint of jealousy kind of seeped inside me.
Yet, I went back home, slept, woke up, forgot all about what I had thought and stuck this. The card and a small note!
Btw, the dates that you see in the collage book, my mom put them in.
Now, see the lovely teddy bears on the left? Those were mine. I adored them and never slept a night without them around. They used to be so soft and cuddly and I used to thank God every night that he gave them to me! (Yeah, Dad would tell me that God made soft teddy bears and sent them down to nice girls and would take it away if we behaved bad! Talk about white lies! Now, I know what they mean since I tell them to my own kids.) That Mickey Mouse – yeah, I was sticker crazy like any other almost-eight-year old kid. I stuck them all over; those Disney stickers and magnets. The fridge wasn’t spared too!
Talking of those teddy bears, I was so attached to them! Remember I spoke of how I was so emotionally involved with little things! One fine day, my sister, about two by then, decided to give them a bath. No, she didn’t actually mean to do it but that’s what I believed then! She poured water from an open bottle right on their heads and I caught her right at the moment! I was furious. Folks, the stage was set for sibling rivalry! First of all, she stole all the attention and she got lots of gifts! And now, she dared to spoil my darling teddy bears!
Ah, sibling rivalries! I guess they are such an integral part of childhood. Now, I see it play out all over again. My son is a month old and my daughter is five. And the daughter is already childishly jealous!
I know dear, I sometimes mutter as she sleeps blissfully, I know how it is. I have been there.
Well, the next scene after the teddy bear episode is almost obvious! I clearly remember I pushed my sister down. She fell and wailed. Mom came running and she screamed, at me, of course! Later that night, after sister (Neha, she is) slept, mom put me on her lap, ruffled my hair and told me that I was a big girl, elder sister – that God sent Neha to me so that I could take good care of her!
You know with kids, such responsibility works like magic! And it did in my case too. I did a sketch and wrote again. You see them here. Now that I think of me and my sister, I guess we have indeed turned out to be the best of friends, sharing everything from news to gossip to motherhood experiences!
And oh, those feathers. I am not sure if you saw them. I remember there used to be so many pigeons around our bungalow then. One of my favourite hobbies was to pick up the pigeon feathers that would have fallen on the ground, gather them in my collector’s bag. Whenever I felt space had to be filled in the collage book, I would stick them in! Dad’s idea that was! Feathers and stickers easily qualify to be called my childhood fancies!
Pink used to be my favourite colour! But Pinky – clearly not a favourite! I remember how I used to hate that girl. She sat on the desk behind mine when I was in class five. Once I lost my eraser (pink one, of course!) at school and searched for it frantically all over the class! I even complained to my Math teacher and she ordered that all pencil boxes be searched! But no! I couldn’t find it! Two days after that I saw that Pinky had an eraser that looked strikingly similar to mine! I immediately asked her to give up the thing to me. She flatly refused. She claimed that it was hers and asked me to prove that it was mine! I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t put my ‘E’ on it and she had conveniently put ‘P’.
That evening I came back home furious. I opened the collage book and called Pinky my enemy. Bah! What a word! Sure does show I was beginning to grow up – showing traits of an average human! What’s more – I was so furious that I wanted to pull her plait – I guess I found that the most irritating aspect of hers given my tomboy-ish nature and looks!
Yet, I was grateful too, that night, though am not sure if I exactly knew that gratitude was what I felt. I think I should have really felt
happy for Preeti’s presence. She was my best friend and she still is. We exchanged everything from pencil boxes to hair clips to dolls to kitchen sets! And she never fussed and I never fussed with her too. Perhaps I was too young to classify the sort of comfort I shared with her. But I guess she has been the biggest blessing in my life and we have had so many wonderful moments of sharing and giving, growing up together. I am sure you have one such friend too!
I think childhood ends by the time we are twelve. The innocence and simplicity of desires and of viewing life in general begins to transform to something more complex. And frankly, the transition we undergo isn’t obvious to us, unless we look back at ourselves when we grow older. My teen diaries are so completely different from this collage book – my tastes, my language, perspectives, ideas, I observe, have gradually moved away from being naïve and uncorrupted to hmm, I wouldn’t say something undesirable, but something that definitely shows it is very difficult to preserve the childish sense of wonder and purity.
When I was eleven, Dad announced that we were moving to a new home. I was curious. I hadn’t seen any other house as my home apart from the bungalow that we had lived in. Neha was excited at hearing the word ‘new’. And so, I decided to act like the big sister! Neha and I sat down and Neha drew out how our new house would look like. A child’s dream. And, that’s what you see here. I had put, it appears, all my then recently-acquired skills of scenery drawing into use to make the picture look as good as it could get and merged it with my own idea of the setting.
We showed that painting to Dad and he was amused. He told me that he would take me and Neha along to see the house and then I could decide if it matched my expectations! I went along and surely it wasn’t what I had imagined it to be! I was astonished to see that this building was so tall and Dad explained on the way back that this was called a flat where houses sat on top of each other as well as opposite and next to each other. I was confused.
On the way back, we saw a girl. She was dancing on the road and performing tricks using a rubber tyre. I hadn’t noticed something like that before. I remember Dad caught me looking at her from inside the car. He was quiet and then told me that girls like her weren’t as lucky as me or Neha. They didn’t even get good food to eat once in a day, forget three times. They had no good clothes to wear and didn’t have a good house to stay in.
That was the day I learnt a lesson: that I should be thankful to God for what he had given to me and that we should help the needy to whatever extent we can. No, it isn’t something I am working up now and telling you. The girl that day really made an impact. Lessons we learn as children sometimes last a lifetime. The house drawing made its way to the collage book on my dad’s insistence. The girl’s photograph came in later after my father developed the photographs of our newly built home. Yes, I made him click a picture of hers!
:). Ah, the memories of childhood!
I feel so nostalgic already. Yes, these are some of the memorable moments of my childhood and the fact that I have written them down also helps that I remember them to some extent. Yet, there would be many, many more that I don’t even remember. And, that’s when my children come into the picture.
It so happens that when you watch your child grow up, it’s almost like looking into a mirror and seeing your own childhood. In a way, it’s an access to insights about what I might have been when I was a child and what as a parent, my mom or dad would have done (leaving aside photographs) – things that I, in all realistic possibility don’t have much of an idea about! My children redefine the boundaries of my life. And I now know how I would have altered my parents’ lives.
My five-year-old daughter teaches me so many things that I ironically have forgotten; the beauty of simplicity, the power of an inquisitive mind, for example. Maybe as a child, I had taught my parents similar things – what they taught their parents and had forgotten. Suddenly, their daughter starts teaching the same things all over again! We teach lessons, to forget them, only to learn them again. Strange cycle?
The other this is that today, I have changed, in so many ways. I have grown up. Yes, I have. I no longer let out a shrill cry of joy at the look of a box of toffees. I don’t sink my teeth into a pastry, unmindful of cream smeared all around my mouth and falling onto my dress. I don’t fancy wearing all those jazzy pink ribbons and laced hair clips that I had once held with so much adoration. I live, carefully treading the boundaries defined by the society, the world, people. I no longer ask the right questions. Even if I do, I don’t bother to struggle enough to get answers. I bother. Oh hell, yes, I do. I care for what others would think of me. I care for not messing up.
There are certain things about childhood that never change. We hand down those parental emotions, those tricks. The childish pranks run down unstoppably too, generation after generation. The phases that we observe and admire are undoubtedly the same through years. However, the other fact that remains is that we as people change as we grow up and move farther and farther away from being innocent children. Is this what you call the nature of the wheel of life? Is this all a part of that package called ‘growing up’? Perhaps, it is!
There a few more pages left in this book but I guess I have shown you the most interesting and memorable ones! 🙂
Ah there! The little boy is already beginning to whine and my daughter will get back home any time now.
I guess I need to change gears now. Really difficult you know, but such is life isn’t it?
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