Wild Child

‘ Ever close your eyes / ever stop and listen / ever feel alive / and you've nothing missing / you don't need a reason / let the day go on and on

Let the rain fall down / everywhere around you / give into it now / let the day surround you / you don't need a reason / let the rain go on and on

What a day / what a day to take to / what a way / what a way / to make it through / what a day / what a day to take to / a wild child

Only take the time / from the helter skelter / every day you find / everything's in kilter / you don't need a reason / let the day go on and on

Every summer sun / every winter evening / every spring to come / every autumn leaving / / you don't need a reason / let it all go on and on ’

I don’t think I give Tanzil, any satisfactory answer when he asks, “But why were you brought up by your maternal grandparents, and not your parents?” Well, I do give him the answer I know best, but perhaps to a hard-boiled practical person as he is, what I offer as an explanation sounds more like the stories Ed Bloom told his son in the movie Big Fish!

To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind hearing something more specific than what my Grandmother usually tells me. My grandmother has always seemed to the best person to consult on this matter, which I did plenty of times and received merely rearticulated accounts of the same tale. Specific or not, this slightly farfetched but not so fantastic tale of my childhood really does make me feel like Beatrix Potter at times. It’s also quite interesting how I had earned a huge audience through these stories of my childhood when I used to work in SJW School as a third grade Class Teacher. My class full of 10 year old captivated listeners would literally swallow ever detail of my story of how I grew up amidst 13 cats, 4 dogs, parrots, fish, chicks and a goat! It was class ritual for me to read a few pages from Charlotte’s Web to them every Thursday, and it would so happen that I would, on demand, have to slip in the stories of my childhood with my animal friends between reading out about Fern and her animal friends.

Till date, I assume I have recounted the story of my childhood umpteen times, sometimes in class to my third graders and sometimes to Tanzil in the dead of the night, with the sound of wood mites merrily gnawing a hole through my old wardrobe. Yet, I never am weary of having to repeat the tale, which I believe would be a time-honored bedtime story for my children and the children of my children, if the practice of listening to stories will still not be wiped out by then.

Unlike Fern (one of the main characters from Charlotte’s Web), it wasn’t a pig I had saved from untimely death in my early years. Instead, it’s a stray all American mutt that I fell in love with the instant I saw it. The ginger pup was tiny, frightened and hungry, barking its already feeble lungs out on the street in front the house in which I grew up. The guard was doing a great job at shooing the pup away, which he would have succeeded in doing too had I not asked him to stop and let the pup into the gates. The pup tottered in, and as soon as he did, I named him Tiger to claim him as my pet, officially. Then, my dog-adoring grandfather let Tiger join his group of dogs led by a greyhound named Tommy. I was four years old when I adopted Tiger.

However, it wasn’t only dogs that we adored; my grandfather and I are in point of fact cat-dog people. My grandfather had 21 pet cats, which had decreased to the number of 13 by the time I was born. My aunts tell me, that when I used to go to sleep on the big bed instead of the cot, (and i was only months old then), the cats sat around me in a circle and purred for as long as I slept. Sadly, when my cat-hating mother used to be around, she would emerge frantically with a broom in her hands and send the cats scramming in all directions very unceremoniously! Amusingly, my mother and Tanzil have numerous things in common, possibly because they are fellow Pieces. Much to my dismay, when I had told Tanzil how the cats used to fondly watch over me as I slept, he refused to see in it anything but the cats’ secret craving to eat me! Tanzil may not be in good terms with the feline, but he sure sports a very soft spot for the canine. He loves dogs and misses his childhood pet ones much. Right now, he has a tank full of fish in his bedroom. He looks after them, gives them food regularly, and at times when the fish-sitter feels too lazy to feed his charges, he just says that his fish need to go on a diet!

I have always found watching fish go about their own business in the tiny world of the aquarium, very interesting. At my grandparents’ place, my second aunt was the one who fancied fish as pets. Consequently, I have spent countless idle afternoons watching the colourful aquatic beauties whirling in the water, and wondering if mermaids were real.

Besides fish, I had a couple of parrots that my father had brought for me in the bonnet of his car one fine morning, in one big cage. I still remember how I had ran out to meet him and he had surprised me with the parrots. The addition of parrots to my grandfather’s miniature zoo rendered a little girl wake up earlier than usual every morning and sneak outside without brushing her teeth to teach her new parrots say her name. It did take a lot of coaxing on my part before the parrots finally decided to say what I was dying to hear. But then, the parrots did not have a very long lifespan. Their death made me sad enough to decide not to keep birds as pets again. However, just a couple of months later, I had made an exception to that decision for a crate full of chicks. There was an old lady who used to sell chicks and ducklings in front of my school. I had bought five chicks and a bag full of chick-food all for 50 bucks from her. It’s needless to say I was over the moon with my new chicks. I had not seen anything cuter in my eight year old lifetime. But all my excitement died out when on the very first night of my motherhood, two of my chick babies were stolen by the elusive mongoose that liked to take tours of my grandfather’s garden! I remained in shock for two days. Then I bounced back and started to look after the three chicks that remained, dreaming that someday soon I’ll watch them lay and hatch their first eggs. Ironically, such a day never came, but what came instead was a pin that popped all the air out of my dream, when my grandmother informed that my baby girls were in fact roosters!

Little girls despise little boys as a general rule, so how could a little girl like burly roosters? As soon as the chicks were grown into something that I hadn’t anticipated in my strangest of dreams, my heart felt quite incapable of loving them any longer. Besides, the roosters seemed happier left alone and I too was occupied with something different to be able to spare time for the roosters anymore. What I was occupied with was what I consider to be the best of all the gifts I have received till date. That winter my grandfather returned from his visit to his daddy’s old house in Comilla with two newborn kittens, one for my second aunt and one for me! Once again, I was over the moon, but this time I was careful to ensure that the complexities of gender was not to fool me again. When my grandmother assured that the kittens were female and would be remaining so for the rest of their lives, I felt like the happiest girl alive.

My kitten had white fur with an orange tail and two orange spots on her head. She was a beauty. I named her Sonie. She was my baby, my best friend. (I say ‘was’ because after 9 years of a happy and blessed life she died leaving me absolutely inconsolable. I do not feel comfortable talking about her death or Tiger’s; it still wrenches my heart, so I will skip those parts.) During the winters, I loved carrying Sonie around cutely coiled inside my pullovers. I would never go to sleep without her under my blanket too, and she being quite the attention seeker couldn’t stand it if I were at home and not cuddling her. The minute I used to return from school, Sonie would be there moving in circles round my ankles and purring till I picked her up and cuddled. In the evenings, when I used to sit with my homework, she used to jump on top of my study table and sit on top of my books and copies. She just wouldn’t budge till I used to leave the table. Then she used to jump down and run after me knowing quite well it was time to play. She had had only one issue in her life, when she gave birth to a kitten that looked exactly like her. I love Sonie. I love Tiger. I wish they were still with me. They were not only my pets; I literally grew up with them. They are the ones who made my childhood beautiful.

I was four years old when my younger brother was born, but he used to live with my parents and I with my maternal grandparents, which made an opening for me to go as wild as I could in the bestowed life of an only child. Now when I say wild, I don’t mean I was something that was uncivilized or barbarous, with unrestrained violence, fury, intensity, etc. For me it was more like how it has been described in Enya’s song that I have quoted at the beginning of my writing. I was a wild child because I was carefree. I was a wild child because I was closer to nature than any of my school friends, owing to my grandfather’s kempt little backyard, which used to be my Secret Garden in my pretentious role-plays. I was a wild child because I have sucked nectar off flowers growing in secret garden as many times as the bees if not more. I was a wild child because I used to walk on wet grass barefooted and prod ant hills with my toes. I was a wild child because I had discovered the fun of being barefooted to such an extent that I refused to wear shoes or sandals at all at home, bringing upon myself an unpleasant case of a stomach full of hook worms! I was a wild child because I ran away from home, on more than one occasion, without letting anyone know, and had enjoyed the fright that I had given everyone. I was a wild child because I had untamed imagination. I was a wild child because I was extremely stubborn.

C-sectioned out prematurely in the bone shivering cold of the month of December, I was taken straight to my mother’s parents’ house. There I got regular oil massages, sun baths and feedings, and started to become the pumpkin that my grandmother says I was. On the other hand, my mother only eighteen and underweight at the time I was born, was far from recovering. The stitches on her tummy opened twice and she also was having hernia troubles. As a result, I was kept away from her so she would not have to worry about looking after me. After several months, when my mother was much better, my parents took me to their home, which was a thirty minutes drive from my grandparents’. And that is when the unanswered (or rather vaguely answered) ambiguity of my childhood began. My parents couldn’t keep me with them for more than a week; I had fallen severely ill and was returned to my grandparent’s home.

As the story goes, the instant I entered to my parents’ house, I started bawling my lungs out. It is not unnatural for a child experiencing a change of environment to cry, but the way I was crying was unnerving indeed. Even after all the efforts that my parents put in to pacify me, I had spent the first day at their house crying nonstop. The second day wasn’t any different. So my parents took me out of the house for a walk, of which, my folks recount that the moment they had stepped out of the house with me, I stopped crying. I stopped. My eyes weren’t spilling tears, my mouth was silent. An hour or so later, when they took me back in the house, no points for guessing, I recommenced bawling! After another two days of continuous howling, which would cease abruptly the instant I was taken outside the house and resume when I was brought in, I came down with a fever. When I was taken to the doctor, she said I was not going through any bodily discomfort or pain, so she saw no good reason as to why I would be crying so much. In my maid’s opinion, I was seeing things, supernatural and paranormal things. I was only six months old, which means even if what my maid said were true, there is no way I could have confessed to it then, or remember any of it now. Hence, this part of my childhood which I spent turning red crying, is overtly obscure. It was almost as though some kind of bodiless force was trying everything possible to send me out of my parents’ house. A day after I had come down with the fever, I had almost drowned to death in the tub in which my mother was bathing me. Water had entered my lungs and I had to be taken to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed me with bronchial asthma.

Consequently, my father decided that I should be kept at my grandparents’ house till I was old enough to walk and talk. It was also decided that my mother should never bathe me again, which she never did. Therefore, this is the story of how and why I was brought up at my grandparent’s place and not my parents, which sounds mind-boggling to Tanzil. I don’t blame him because it seems mind-boggling to me too. How could I be crying so with no reason at all!

My parents used to come and visit me at my grandparents’ everyday. When I was ten years old, they proposed to take me back to their place. But the proposal was nipped in the bud because I started cried again. For a change, this time everybody knew why I was crying. I was crying because I did not want to leave my grandparents’ home, which was the only home I knew, where I had all my pets: my cats, my dogs, my fish, my birds, my roosters and also my goat. My goat which I called Blacky had been bought for me by my grandfather because goat milk is good for asthma. Thus, Blacky was there as a member of my animal family to give me milk. She gave me milk every morning, in return of which I gave her grass, bread and two pats on the back.

Perhaps the reason why I grew up in my grandparents’ home instead of my parents’ is a bit of a mystery, but I remember my childhood as a blissful one where I was allowed to enjoy the way my heart chose. I was allowed to run around barefooted (only until the hookworms made their way inside me). I was allowed to get wet in the rain. I was allowed to eat ice cream and chocolate and coke whenever I liked. I was allowed to scream as much as I wanted to or laugh as loudly as my lungs would allow. Childhood in itself is a beautiful thing. I am positive everyone remembers theirs as so, but mine was different. Mine was mystifying. Mine was such that in it I lived as a wild child. A child who had gone away to waters and a wild, with a fairy hand in hand, from the world’s which is full of more weeping than we can understand.