Kutti Papa Part 1

My friend SK and I were pretty jobless these hols. Well, I had my opus to compose, but let's not count that right now, that merits a fresh post!

It's in vogue to work with an NGO, isn't it? Social Work.

Yeah, you know the prerequisites for that scholarship aren't specific at all, they just say the applicant should have a well rounded personality and care for the welfare of his fellow being. That means NGO work, yaar. Kuch kar lena idhar udhar, likh dena [Do some little here and there and then just write] Worked with so-and-so for two months.

What?

I didn't do anything last year because I was a big fat yellow liver. I was scared that I would not be able to change the world. So I didn't do anything at all. In the last couple of years, due to drastic changes in scenery, I'm learning, slowly, to shed inhibitions that I've had so long they seemed irrefutable. I've been trying to befriend the keerhe [insects] that my mind houses!

Anyway, SK happened to hear of an NGO in Lucknow (where our families are, where we come home for hols). All we knew about it was that it was called Ehsaas and worked with kids.

For the longest time, I've been terrified of kids in the same absurd, inexplicable way that you can feel about somebody you have a crush on. When my cousin A was born (when was that, now...1997?) I wasn't allowed to hold her. Heck, I was only 9 if it was 1997! No surprises there. When A was about two, I guess, that's when I saw her next and played and played endlessly with her, fell in love with her, the new sister baby, pretty little thing, smart as hell, making little toddler-quips all over the place. When we got back from Bangalore (where the Family Reunion had been), I couldn't remember her face.
For a while after that I tried to memorise faces; while going in a tempo with Amma to school sometime then, I saw a mountainous man with a craggy red-splotched face and sombre expression. I promised (myself?) never to forget his face. See, I can still remember it. Actually, that's not true. I can only remember my decription of his face. My mind also does useless things like attaching a likely red-and-white cotswool shirt to this person. Who knows, maybe it's not faces I'm good at remembering, maybe it's words.

Of course then there's the language thing. (Boy, I should be my own shrink!) When I came to Lucknow straight after Lagos, I spoke only English, and knew no Hindi to speak of, despite having begun Hindi at the Indian school I went to in Nigeria. I realised I spoke differently from the other kids, and so I probably thought differently too. I couldn't decide, at school, whether to try to mingle and become one of the crowd, or to be different. (I was chatting online with my oldest friend RR a few days ago; she is also an Indian whose early memories are of Lagos, and then the relocation from There to Here, to a home country as alien as any other. Funny, she and I both felt that we were so convinced we were oddballs that we never gave ourselves a chance to be normal!)
In senior school, during a free period, loitering around the grounds with other pubescent girls from my class, we'd often run into littler schools of small fry, scuttling along adorably to and from the swimming pool or the auditorium or the library. The other girls would invariably pet the little kids, coo in their ear, play with them. I wanted to sometimes, but never did more than once or twice ever, because I was convinced I spoke a language they didn't understand. For the record, by then my Hindi was certainly as good, if not better, than the average kid in my class who had trouble with comprehension, of any language, mother tongue or no mother tongue.
It's funny, when I think about it, it was only worse with Tamil-speaking kids we'd run into at big community functions that my mother and I would attend in those days; stuff like Ram Navami (the day Lord Ram was born, and the end of the Navratri fasting period of nine days). I stopped going to these things soon enough. When I discovered that you can be asked to sing. Bhajans, of course, what else. On a religious function obviously it's got to be a devotional song. I knew none. I knew only the school prayer songs. In Hindi. Which I was anyway not so confident of then, and would not be appreciated in a gathering of Tamil/Malayalam and the odd Telugu/Kannada speakers; a gathering which was the biggest Home Away From Home South Indian Social Reunion of the year in Lucknow, capital of the Hindi-speaking Northern Heartland.
I didn't know enough grammatically adequate Tamil even to speak a few sentences to the Tamil kids. So that was that.

Meanwhile, I loved kids!

After Nigeria, I don't remember going out to play with the neighbourhood kids (yes, there were some) or going to friends' places to play, barring a few stray playdays with NR or with that girl I didn't like, who stole my Hamley's toys and whose name I think was Anam.

Anyway, I really don't know why I am delving so deep. All I wanted to talk about was my relationship with children now.

Last year, I had a bright idea. I wanted to give back to my juniors in school all the musical gyan [knowledge] I had gained in the year I had been pert of the Western Music Society (WMS) in college. And I had learnt more in that year than I had in the last two or three put together. So I went to see my ex-Principal with my proposal. I had printed an ad and all, nice and catchy. For amateur voice lessons in the summer vacation, at school, free of charge. I was just something I wanted to do. I was really excited to teach 13-15 year-olds the next level of harmony; I remembered the laboured two-parts that we would devise when we were that age, and I thought it would be great to show them what real, beautiful, rich melodies could be woven together.

The Principal thought I was planning to teach primary school kids. I don't know why, it was just a miscommunication. She said, Ok, shall I put you through the In-Charge for Class 3? I just agreed. I'm not such a wimp now, but even a year ago, I was pretty wimpy. Ok was all I ever said.

Suddenly, my target age group went down from 14 to 8.

I had a class (a parody of one) of a floating population (literally, they went swimming and then came for Music Class) of five, plus minus two. And it wasn't always the same five either.

I was bugged at first, but then I was ok when I realised the only thing different is that I can't teach music to them in the same way as I had planned. What the heck, I was no slavedriver. I like to let kids play around. So after finding that trying for discipline in a random vacation camp-type environment was just stupid, everything went just fine.

So I pretended to teach, had fun with them. One day I saw a little dog of some pomeranian-esque yappy breed in the arms of a lady who had come to drop off her charges, two sisters (ages 5 and 7) at the Music Class. By the time I could ask her to wait, she had left. I asked the seven year old (I don't remember her name, but boy do I remember her face! And her voice, a very sweet voice. Very conscientious kid. Always looking out for her 5 year old sister, and, I later found, her baby brother as well) to bring her dog the next day, after asking for permission at home, of course, and laying down the disclaimer (that if her parents said no, she shouldn't get me in a soup).

So the two sisters turned up the next day, with this dog (a bitch who was called I think Lucy) that was very fit and frisky as hell, and what d'ya know, a St. Bernard pup called Rex, bigger than his full-grown friend, and a lazy lump. Then there was the baby brother, a sweet three year old who tried to lift the lumpy Rex to his feet, and was shorter than the puppy held up by its front paws.

We had our great Lessons in the empty auditorium, a veritable heaven for music, it has the most stage-y echoes when it's empty. I've spent countless lunch-breaks alone on that stage, imagining. I have always loved the stage. We go far back, you see. So when this dinky circus turned up, it was Play Day. We raced around the hall, slipping on its smooth floor, Lucy finally outrunning the overweight singers-to-be who were my pupils that day.
Another character showed up when it was time to go; she was a girl who looked my age, but I wasn't sure. So I used polite speech; she was the girls' aunt, just out of first year college, like me. She said now she understood why the girls liked my classes so much. I couldn't even believe it. It was such a strange, wonderful feeling, to realise that these kids could take to me.