You @ 7: a Dreamy Butterfly…
My dear Niky,
A tiny mind of mere seven autumns can imagine so much is disbelievingly amazing to me… but that has also helped retain your innocence within you, I think…we plan to visit Anshoo Bua in London towards the end of this year, and will happen to spend Nithila’s birthday in London…you then asked what do we plan for your birthday, I thought for a few minutes and said “how about seeing a play with your friends? Its about Ramayan”.. and your reaction was “yaayyyyyy yay yay yay, I will tell my friends, so exciting”…. Only if you knew the difference between seeing the grand palaces of London versus seeing the stage set of a palace here, you would have slayed me for even suggesting this… nevertherless you actually saw and loved a grand performance of Ramayan on your birthday with your friends :) Ankoo bua, however, is mighty unhappy with this and so she ended up promising a Disney Land trip to you soon :)
A few other journeys –a drive to Uttarakhand, trip to Lucknow and Dudhwa Wildlife – were as enriching…your trekked for the first time in Uttarakhand and, oh my, your stamina was indeed a revelation to me… After returning from Dudhwa when you wrote about your experience, one line in it struck me…you said “the tiger may have not liked us so he did not meet us when we went to his jungle, but he did not kill us too ... like we kill cockroaches when they come into our home”… this thought of yours will stay with me forever Niky, hope it stays with you too
All these thoughts, expressions and writings are fueled by the abundant reading you do.. you continue to read a lot, really a lot… I had to introduce a “no-book-week” to you to get you off this addiction… you put a book below your pillow every night which you pull out first thing in the morning.. and it tags along you everywhere you go… you get so engrossed in it that it is impossible to have a dialogue with you when you are reading… you laugh, you frown, you emote along with the characters in the book… you are into your imaginary world and I have to shake you up to bring you back… with this behavior of yours, I was shaken myself and I decided to introduce this no-book-week when you were not allowed to touch a single book outside of studies… every day you would look at me despondently, but I did not budge…after a week when you got hold of one book, you stared at it for long and later hugged it, tears rolling down your cheeks…It was a scene out of a movie, full of melodrama and I didn’t know if to laugh at you or sob with you… But I never dared attempt such a stint again with you…
Many more such soul-stirring moments you share with Polo…you sit next to him and talk to him endlessly and (I think) he understands…you read out your books to him, you complain to him about Nithila, you tell him how sad you are when I scold you, you think he cries with you and so you wipe his tears, you hug him when you are happy and he then rolls on the floor sharing your excitement…you two have grown to be BFF (“oh Mamma, you don’t know what is BFF? Really? You need to be educated silly Mamma.. It means Best Friends Forever” is how you ‘educated’ me)…and yes, your language now has more exclamations and adjectives, more pauses and effects, and many more acronyms…the other day you were speaking in Numbers (1 instead of A, 2 instead of B… so HELLO becomes 8 5 12 12 15) and you spoke with such fluency... I tried catching up but in vain… I realize you are getting into territories alien to me and there is a lot of catching up I need to do…
Another such area is of the Art and Paintings. I have, somehow, always tried to believe that you have inherited my creative side, and have patted my back on it. But, as days go by, I realize your imagination and creativity is far beyond my reach… you spend a whole 2 hours every Sunday in an Art Studio where you paint with colours playfully at your free will… recently on the occasion of Dusshera they asked you to paint “Victory over Evil” and you divided the canvas into two parts, painted lower part in black (evil) and upper in red (victory)… such an intricate mature topic that took quite a few kids sometime to fathom, I was amused to see, came so easily and quickly to your imagination and you interpreted so well with colours… on another occasion, as you learnt about Picasso, his work on shapes and forms and you were asked to do a self portrait like him… you quickly made a side-face of ‘yourself’ with two distinct backgrounds – dark blue on left half and a subtle yellow on the right – saying “they are the night and the day”… on probing why side-face and not front-face, you said “I’m moving from right to left carrying light into the dark, like the Sun”… and I was left aghast wondering if Picasso himself would have trickled out a smile or two at the sparks of brilliance you emit…
…to me you are that dreamy butterfly, fluttering from one blossom to another, spreading joy as you spring around, brightening our life with your dazzling colours, streaming happy stories all the way… these stories define you and I hope and pray that they get your name someday… we will title your book “Diaries of a Dreamy Butterfly”…
Love you to the ‘stars’ and back… yours ever… Mamma
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