The thing that was shaped like a story
The thing that was shaped like a story
"I would get on the ground, plaster the side of my face to the earth, close one eye and try to position my gaze in line with their file."
I had been shifting on my bed for a significant part of last night — a taciturn but incessant occurrence creeping into my nights since a week past. At present, the sunlight flowed through the gap in the curtains and dancing on my closed eyelids, lit them to wakefulness.
Turning over, I opened my WhatsApp to notice a couple of voice messages that U left. Long ones.
I listened to them half-asleep, with a smile on my face.
“Hello Abhinaya, how are you?”, she had started, then proceeded to carefully hand over to me an idea that she had birthed at 10:30 pm at night (which to her was akin to the conventional 2 am thought since her sleep schedule is that of a morning lark, the earliest of them).
A drop of water — blue, an unfathomably wide and deep sea, caused by perceivably minor pain, true but one that shattered but set me free. A tear to you, A mourning to me!
I pondered over the idea for a couple of days, incessantly — couldn’t get it out of my head. I jumped ahead, retraced my steps back, took detours, peeped around bends and sprinted back as if someone noticed I was lurking. I chewed on leaves while waiting for it to hit me and always came up short. Always.
A microorganism sees a droplet of water as an expanse of ocean. An ant sees a crystal of sugar as a load worth lugging for metres on end and crossing a humungous landscape fraught with peril and any moment now, an abrasive obstacle might come plummeting down from behind and before she can turn back, she’s being greeted by the sweet (read: terrifying) release of death.
In my childhood home, there was a narrow canal behind the area where we parked our car. It ended well into the soil which hosted a variety of plants on the lawn. Growing up, it wasn’t a ‘narrow canal’ to me, it was just a ‘canal’. It only got narrow because I grew up. I often saw a few ants lined up alongside it, with their loads of sugar or occasionally, the game of a millipede or a centipede that took the strength of tens of them at what looked like a lethargic pace to me, then. Of course, I knew that life was different at their scale; I was curious how much. I would get on the ground, plaster the side of my face to the earth, close one eye and try to position my gaze in line with their file.
Certain differences grew obvious the minute I lowered my altitude but still, there was a long way to go. Alas, if only I could have shrunk myself and then unshrunk back. I must have been around seven. Life was interesting back then or I think, as Taylor says, I hit my peak at seven. The song always spoke to me.
Years later, I would see a movie named ‘Epic’, based on the book ‘The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs’ by William Joyce.
The garden is in peril! The brave good bugs march off to save the garden. First, they must fight the evil Spider Queen before summoning the Leaf Men to save the day. . . But what about the mystery of the Long-Lost Toy?
Beyonce dubbed for Queen Tara and the dangerous-looking aerial battle vehicles that the leaf men used were none other than hummingbirds, replete with leaf armour. It was everything I thought about, hour after hour, back at the empty canal that I used to fill up, just to watch the cement turn from an asphalt grey to a much darker charcoal shade. The book has such darling illustrations and according to its user reviews, children had no nightmares reading it despite it getting a little bleak in places. The good triumphing over the evil makes it worthy, they said!
Watching the movie gave me a weird sense of satisfaction, I call it weird since it seemed like I had finally scratched an itch, long forgotten. Particular scenes in which grass about yay high (picture me bending to the height of my foot sole) is an entire jungle with giant trees helped me answer my question of how the troughs and peaks in the concrete by the canal looked to the ants. The amazing creatures were scaling mountain ranges! It had given my seven-year-old a cathartic release. Another part of the weirdness that hung over my head was a deep appreciation towards my innocent inquisitiveness and having someone else, especially an adult, water a similar idea with time and effort and grow it into a full blossoming plant of a book was reassurance at its softest.
I had not read many children’s picture books growing up, exceptions include Panchatantra, Akbar and Birbal, Aesop’s Fables, Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle comics. I graduated to non-picture books early on, reading abridged versions of famous classics and binging on literally anything Ruskin Bond wrote. He was my literary hero and I remember the first time I finished reading one of his books in under a day. I read like no other day before — while eating, waiting for anything, in the car, on the porch, lying on the bed, convoluting my body into strange shapes on the recliner. My chest was swollen with pride till I went to bed that night.
At a Scholastic book fair (where buying books was notoriously expensive for us then), I had bought a paperback copy of ‘The Stories of Mulla Nasruddin’. It had a glossy black cover embossed with golden lettering and the pearls of witty short stories inside. Oh to be young and discovering favourites again!
It wasn’t until recently that I chanced upon the exciting world of illustrated books and one such dear book is ‘The boy, the mole, the horse and the fox’ by Charlie Mackesy. If you have read my previous notebook entries, you would know I also fell in love with Calvin and Hobbes and Tintin much later than most people do. It’s a different sort of a joy — one that takes you back to childhood again, watching Captain Haddock get drunk on the pages and come up with the most wonderfully alliterated insults on a bright Sunday morning in the park. I can’t appreciate how hard it is to write tomfoolery as entertainingly as done with Thomson and Thompson. On days when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I immediately hear myself quoting Calvin, “Boy! I’m in a rotten mood. The world had just better look out!” Boy! Is he such a mood!
I always think of the people that introduced me to these works whenever I read them, their presence at the back of my head makes them all the more special. I hope I got to be something close to that for you, today — an introducer to something that will wake the child in you from deep or perhaps, a lighter slumber. I want to leave you with the greatest advice you can give to your younger self (I can’t decide if I love the horse’s or the mole’s more!).
Good night and godspeed,
Yours,
Naya
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