“Stop day dreaming” - Girls who day dream get into trouble, strongly
believed my mother pinching my arms bringing me from the dreamy world.
Like most children of age 5 and 6, I always lived in a dream world. Unlike
my daughter whose dream world consists of myriads of characters from Disney and
toys and movies, my dreamy existence were associations with ants, bugs,
lizards and my all-time favorite antlions or otherwise called Kuzhiyana in
local language. One never had difficulty spotting antlions hiding in the
garden and ours was home to umpteen funnels in the sand indicating the presence
of the little bugs. I used to sit with my knees folded, legs behind (a
seating position that was then disproved for some totally unrelated possibility
of dad incurring debt) watching them religiously and patiently waiting for
them to come out so I could swoop them and place them on my hands, much to the
disgust of my mother. I held the belief with my neighbor an equally
dreamy boy, that singing to them helps them to come out of their hiding.
So we coined the lyrics together kuzhiyane vaa vaa; kuzhiyane
vaa vaa; paalum pazhamum vannal tharam ….
Reasonably disgusted at our rendition, it would never show its face until
its home was rummaged with our little fingers. The destruction was saved
for the days when I was being shouted to hurry back inside, which then meant I
had to take them with me inside my petticoat pockets. To be kept under my bed
later. Hence the rummage. Other days and like most days when my existence
was ignored by the weird adults around me, I patiently sat and watched the
funnels, humming the song. The slanting funnel in the warm sands, each deeper
than the previous one until the entire construction becomes a slippery, cone
shaped hole about two inches deep – trap laid for the clueless ants that wander
into these clever traps.
Once the
Ant-lion makes the slanting funnel in the
sand, its victim, the Ant, slides down the
slant and is then stoned, from the bottom of the funnel, by the hunter, who
turns his neck into a catapult. There is a lot of activity that happens
in the Antlion’s gazebo and you need the microscopic vision, focus and all the
time in world abundantly available to a 6 year old who then hated school and
the nuns in habits, to understand the antlion’s conspiracy theory early on.
There were days that I took the antlions view of things and there were days
when the Ant’s held my pity, depending on my mood. But more often, I was
cross with the ants, for falling into the trap over and over again, for not having
the foresight to realise what lay in the soft blanket of sand. Decades
later, as I type this I understand that like the ants there are no traps as
deadly as the ones you set yourself up for in life.
Often, I left a mark of some sort near
the funnel, sometimes a twig or sometimes a flower, hoping to come back from
school and continue the conversation or witness the activity which had ended
abruptly. But the little treacherous things they were, almost as if they
feared my kathi ( relentless talking),
would have moved their trap by the time I came back from school the next day
teaching me early on that the traps are never set consistently.
Inside my home, I had another friend. I was completely besotted by Lizzy
the lizard and her family who also lived with us. Lizzy constantly kept
an eye on me, following me even during my private moments, watching me from the
ceilings of bathrooms. Anything that falls from a certain elevation
breaks, including humans. I broke many bones as a kid. I was living
proof. But the little lizard was the wonder creature which could never hurt
itself when it fell from the walls. How was that even possible ? Unlike
the bugs I had to hide underneath my bed and in my pencil boxes, the lizards
were held with much more reverence in our family as it was believed that if
they tch tchd whilst humans spoke, it would come true. But mostly that
seemed to be applicable only to whatever my mom said. I tried to convince her
that Lizzy my pet had tch tchd that I was not well and had to be kept away from
school, albeit on deaf ears. Many hours blissfully passed at me staring at the
lizards, whose belly sometimes seemed to hide little baby lizards and they many
days they offered me consolation on a bad school day. For a long time I thought
that it was lovingly gazing at me and listening to every word I spoke to it in
the bathroom. It was only in 7 th standard I learnt that lizards did not
blink and therefore you never knew whether it was gazing at you or not.
For many happy summers,
I thought the Lizzy and I were best friends until I realized that I was its
unwitting butler, who brought the
antillion inside home every night serving Lizzy’s dinner. Unknowingly, I
was rendering karma to the Antillion punishing it for its trap by
befriending the lizards. Such is life, you never know how you get
caught in the cycle of karma of various things and people who come into your
life, knowingly or unknowingly.
And then came my
best friend. The common crow. There were two varieties known to me
during my early childhood days of keenly observing the surrounding wildlife.
The crow with a grey patch on its neck and the crow which was completely jet
black aka without the grey patch. The jet black one was a source of
depression during many days as I then
completely believed “ One for sorrow and two for joy” . I would wallow in self
pity and misery if I had not spotted two jet black crows
and that alone would be reason for me to be
depressed the rest of the day. I would search in vain and allowed myself the
new rule that spotting the next one within a span of one hour would resolve the
misery and bring in joy. It is a wonder that we learn from early days to make
the rules and beliefs for sorrow only to emerge from
them happier. My mother had different views about the
crows. A crying crow, according to her does not indicate hungry crow but brings
bad news. According to my mom, crows never cried for their food. If food
was unavailable, they grabbed or snatched their food and were natural
scavengers. I believed the latter part as many times I was the gullible
victim and have seen my toast blissfully carried away in its beak.
Nevertheless, I loved the crows, enjoyed playing the gullible and never
resisted the food grab, a habit which got ingrained much into latter part of my
life.
The ant trappers
(kuzhiyana), the entrapped(ants), the anti-fragile (lizard) and finally the
scavenger crow were all my childhood wild life friends teaching me various
lessons with their lives. In hindsight, I believe I should have taken
onboard the lessons offered by my wild life friends with the seriousness it
actually deserved as opposed to the lessons offered by the nuns with what that deserved
-contemptible mirth.
