Lest we forget

I have written blogs with various aims and purposes, like to share my understanding of life as it is gained through my years as I spent time reading the greats of philosophy while trying to build a home twenty years back with a desktop being sold out at twenty thousand rupees, with a wife in the tow, and a home, in a slum like cluster in Delhi, well-furnished with one pressure cooker, three dinner plates, a bucket, a mirror and a comb, and a thin mattress to sleep on. The years went by with a Yamaha, must say I still miss it, and the twenty thousand yielding desktop as family backup, as I got wiser through an experience in which death came so close that I could extend my arm and arranged disheveled hairs, as I gained a lovely daughter on the way two years back. Then some blogs I had written essentially to clear my own concept of things which bewildered me on account of complexities, like the Nuclear deal or the Greek Economic crisis. However, this is one blog which I am writing for a totally different reason, with no intention or no interest and concern about its ability to be able to gain a single reader. Somerset Maugham wrote, I write as if I am writing for the most important person, which I am indeed to myself; similarly this blog I am writing for the most important person to me, who is more important than myself, that is my daughter. I know, however hard I might try to hold back the waves of the untamed rivulet called time as it flows down the cyclic terrains of life, it is not going to be possible, Nonu, as she grows will soon be Sanskriti and then school and college and will leave the nest behind and two misty pair of eyes. I am not sure how much of her blabber on this date, I will remember when she will stand to her full height in front of me, debating me on the merits of selecting friends on the basis of strange criterion like common preference for something as crazy  as bungee jumping. She, at two, now speaks quite coherently. She loves sitting for prayer with me in the morning with her small bell, a process she thoroughly seems to enjoy a lot. She calls the process and all symbols associated with it "Jai Jai". Whether it is a temple or an idol or my rudraksha, it is all Jai Jai for her and she would want me to sit for Jai Jai with her, whatever be the hour of the day. Today, for instance, she was keen on Jai Jai at eight in the evening as I sat down to check the internet, and so for thirty minutes or so it was Hanuman Chalisa and Maha Mrityunjay (in the praise of Lord Hanuman and Shiva respectively). The idea and object of this blog is more about capturing the sweet twists of language that she brings about at this age, as she learns to play with the words, and therefore, the flow, the direction and the impact of the blog is of little relevance to me. Her day begins with sweetly calling Mama, Dudhu (milk in Hindi is pronounced Doodh, with "Th" of the being the starting sound, for Nonu, it is literally D of Dear, which is the sound with which the word starts). Usually, she is asleep or nearly sleeping when I leave for the long one hour commute to the office, if she is up, then she suddenly will not let me go, not even for her mother, an embrace which makes up for the fact, that the sweet sound with which she asks for milk in the morn is restricted for her mother only. Then and in the evening, if she finds the mood conducive for that, she has grown immense talent for the age to understand the state of parent's thought and if all seems well to her, a small word will break out of her lips as if with some effort "Ghunne" which is Nonu-speak for "Ghoomane" which could mean anything out side the house, could be to the park, to the shop or a walk on the street. The word once catches her lips, will stay their incessantly, repeated at equal interval (with gaps which could be between thirty seconds to a minute) till we put on the slippers and move out of the door. Once out she is very clear and I suspect, she now even knows the way to the provision store next to the Deer Park and Cafe Coffee Day. She even at two, is the lady who knows what she wants, someday it is "Pichs" which she uses for "Chips" or "Ek" at CCD, which is her term for Cake (that is what she calls the Chocolate Brownies). It has nearly taken her around two months to graduate from cookies which she calls bikkis to Cake. Her curiosity has taken toll on many attempting to befriend her with "yeh kai haai" which she will keep on asking for a number of time which she determines in her mind, irrespective of whether or not she received the answer. After the evening stint of her Jai Jai, she just now walked into the room where I am writing and asked to sit in the lap, seeking for "guddi" then wanting to do "OM". In the night she insists on listening to khanni, Kahani or story in her sacred dialect, her favorite being Kipling's Jungle Book in which displaying great talent of a professional casting director, she has fixed herself to be Pugli (Mowgli for her), Baloo, the bear for her baba, which is me and Bagheera for her mother, ( whom she sometimes call Chonu, for Sonu, a name of fondness I had given to her mother after we got married during our one bucket, two plates days). She of late, encountered a movie, Jumbo, with voice over by Akshay Kumar, with a cute elephant, which she calls "Jaambo", and every evening for almost a fortnight she wanted a run of Jaambo on my laptop, after all her interest in Brainy Baby series exhausted, Brainy she never said only called it "Baby"( as if there is some other kind also in this world), baby is what she would call all children, irrespective of whether they were younger or older to her. On those walks around the neighborhood, when she went "Ghunne", she has now started realizing Yellow Car, black car and red car based on the color, my Safari for her, inspite of black color for her is a special name, as she calls it "Papa-car". Her book of alphabets is what she calls "dub-leu" on account of a harmless looking W lying there in the midst of twenty-six others ( I have now idea, why she so much loves this alphabet). While I once slightly and blasphemously doubted her prudence, worrying for a moment that it might become difficult for us to explain what an elephant is, given her fondness for Jaambo, to my surprise, once when teaching alphabets, when reaching E, she on her own said Elephant, a complex word for her., but then, I might be wrong as she speaks strawberry, picking it from picture of fruits (admittedly, growing in small towns, I did not know what strawberry was till I was out of college, but then, so did I not know what a Valentine Day was, colleges were different those days, especially engineering colleges) with a lovely tinge calling it "Troughberry", and pronouncing in a perfect british tenor, our humble rice or Chawal, as Chaubol. Her solid food intake however is still fairly limited to occassional Kela or Banana, which she sometimes obliges us by having, after a pleasing walk through the park where she gets to see Khurgosh or rabbit in hindi, which she pronounces with a bangla hint as Khorgosh. What amuses me particularly is that while she is so very afraid of these harmless looking and beautiful creatures including butterfly or Titali in Hindi which she pronounces thus with "a" clearly spoken between 't' and 'l', much unlike us adults for whom, Titali is usually Titli; she is totally unafraid of Man's best friend which she calls puppy since the time she was around eight months old, again however, mercifully, D in alphabet book is Dog for her, though she prefers to call them Puppy when she admonishes them to go to sleep (Chchouu kar lo) when goes for walk in the night with me. Her mother to mock me, called her first big teddy bear I brought while coming back from a tour to Mumbai, as Babai, as something close to "Baba", now that is the name which has stuck to all colors, shapes and sizes of teddy bears for her. Now she would sit in front of the computer, and call me almost with the same force with which she calls out her maid's name "Munee", as "Baba, O, baba" and say "Chalta Nain". With her everyday growing vocabulary, as I soak in the secret happiness of the promise that her interest in the words indicate over the possibility of her pursuit of knowledge in future (which I thoroughly consider different and distinct from education) holds, I do hope and pray that she soars high in the world of knowledge, reaching to the horizons to which I never could, and that when I reach an age where my words start loosing the coherence and start resemble her speech of today, my love does not hold her back.

To quote Khalil Gibran,"

Your children are not your children,

they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

They came through you, but not from you

And though they are with you, they belong not to you.

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you can not visit, not even in your dreams.

I end this blog with a song I devised for Nonu, hope it will not be taken as a measure of my literary capability, this song I love, she loves and sings a long during the walks and sometime during showers, which goes like

Ek hain chchote Nonuji (there is a small Ms. Nonu)

Nonu says: Ek hain thote, nonu ji

Pyare Pyare Nonuji (lovely lovely Ms. Nonu)

Nonu Says: paale paale nonu ji

Sabse Sundar Nonuji (The most beautiful nonuji)

Nonu says: Thabthe chundal nonuli

Meethe meethe Nonuji (Sweet sweet Nonuji)

Nonu saya: Minde minde nonuji

Why she pronounces Meethe Meethe as Minde Minde is out of her own secret volition, just as she would insist calling a Duck as a kuck and a Dhakkan (cover of a tumbler not a stupid person) as a kakkan. Airplane was one of the earlier thing she could identified at the age of around one and she could call it Jhaaj instead of Zahaaz, when we (she with her baba) were stuck at the airport on a foggy night. She spoke it without much trouble and any prompting, therefore her insistance to call some words in her own way seems more like her experiment with sound than limitations of speech.