My father is an Alsatian. My mother is a Pomeranian,” said the child and stared me in the face. I was taken aback. I never thought I’d get such an answer when I asked him, “Whose son are you?”
It was unusual of me to probe into someone else’s life story of others, and yet I did. I didn’t know how it happened, but it did happen. What prompted me to ask him such a question was perhaps his sorrow-laden face. The boy was five or six years old and that was not the age one should wear such a pitiful mask. Second, the child was sitting in one corner of the cement bench, supporting his chin with cupped palms. While several children his age were playing in the Municipal Park, all the time shouting and having a good time, this child was looking into the vacuum.
I sat next to him on the bench and looked at him through the corners of my eyes. He didn’t take notice of me. He wasn’t even aware of my presence, wandering in a different world, perhaps a very problematic one.
He wore an immaculate white half-sleeved shirt tucked into navy-blue shorts. A bow-tie and an identity card hanging from his neck told me he was a school-going kid. It wasn’t yet 10 in the morning, so how come he wasn’t in school? My eyes searched for a school bag, a lunch bag and found none. There wasn’t even a water bottle with him. The absence of this paraphernalia drove me to inquire into the matter.
“Didn’t you go to school?” I asked the child. There was absolutely no response. I wasn’t ready to leave it at that. I held him by the shoulders and shook him up. He looked at me with tear-filled eyes. I repeated my question. He shook his head. “In what standard are you studying?” I next asked.
“Third,” he answered, looking into the sky.
“Third standard… Then I must be wrong in guessing your age. You are much younger than you look.”
The boy said, “I have completed eight years.” There was a ray of sunshine in his face when he said he was eight. Perhaps he was sure he would soon be a man, on his feet, depending on no one and ready to face the problems life was always ready to pose.
“Whose son are you?” I asked. Tears welled in his eyes, trickled down his cheeks and made wet spots on his shirt. I was sure the question disturbed him very much. He was perhaps caught in a web and I felt it my bounden duty to pull him out of that web. “I am a psychiatrist and my name is Santosh. What is your name?” I asked.
“Gopalakrishnan… Gopi for short.”
“Good. But you haven’t answered my previous question.”
The answer Gopi gave me not only startled me but also made me smile. “Then you must be a puppy,” I said.
He smiled amidst the tears and moved closer to me, as if he found a good companion.
“You know who a psychiatrist is?” I asked.
Gopi shook his head.
“Perhaps you know who a doctor is!” I asked, looking at his eyes. They were still watery.
Gopi nodded. “A doctor cures the illness of patients.”
“Psychiatrists also do the same,” I said. “The only difference is that doctors cure the illnesses of the body whereas psychiatrists cure the illnesses of the body and the mind.”
“Huh! Our mind too suffers from some illness, eh? Yes, must be. That’s what makes us go into a sorrowful mood… Am I right, Sir?” he asked.
“Absolutely right,” I responded. “But as a psychiatrist I know how to cure your mental illness, provided you cooperate and answer my questions.”
Gopi remained silent a while, then nodded as if to say, “Yes.”
“What brought you here when your friends are in school?” He hesitated and I insisted, “Open up, Gopi, open up.”
“I don’t have my schoolbag and lunch box with me. How can I go to school?” he replied.
“Where did they go?”
“They are inside my locked house. Alsatian and Pomeranian have left for their respective offices.”
“Where were you when they locked the door of the house?”
“With them.”
“With them? And they didn’t bother to find out if you had the satchel or not? They didn’t see you off? Well, then… How do you reach school every day?”
The boy looked disgusted and said, “Sometimes in Alsatian’s car, sometimes on Pomeranian’s scooter. But most of the time on foot.”
“You mean you walk when your parents are busy to find the time to escort you to school?”
“No… when they are cross with each other… at such times I become the target of attack,” Gopi calmly explained.
I ran short of questions and Gopi took over. “Why do grown-ups quarrel?” he asked innocently.
“That’s ego, my boy,” I said. “Ego is the most dangerous weapon on earth. It makes everyone a poison tree. And it kills. It is a self-destructive weapon that almost everyone knowingly or unknowingly falls prey to. Ego is something to be feared.”
“If ego is the primary reason for grown-ups’ quarrels, is there a way to get rid of it?” asked Gopi, pleased with himself.
I bowed my head and shrugged my shoulders. I fumbled for an answer. I hummed and hawed before I said, “A truthful man, a religious man, a principled man, a moral man. Maybe these qualities in us can undo the ego in us… only to a certain extent… No man is ego-free.”
“Is that so?” Gopi hung his head. He seemed upset.
“What happened this morning?” I asked in a low voice.
Gopi huddled close to me, as if to feel my warmth. He raised his head a little to look at my face. Perhaps he was not sure if he could confide in me on family matters. Seconds later, he emboldened himself to open up. “I woke up with a start this morning. What actually startled me from sleep was a porcelain plate that must have come from the kitchen, like a flying saucer. It hit the bedroom wall and broke into smithereens.
“Squeezing my eyes, I sat up and looked around. I saw my dad sitting next to me holding a pillow against his torso and face. Peering over and above the pillow, he looked at me. I could see him fretting and fuming.
“That was not new to me. It has become almost a daily routine. Pomeranian throwing vessels at the Alsatian, and the Alsatian hurling abuse at the Pomeranian. What really perplexed me was how they became chummy with each other on the same evening when they came back home.”
“Gopi, that’s life,” I interrupted. “Tension prevails in every house right from daybreak. By sunset, calm approaches and makes everyone cool down before they go to bed. People always need a change. European culture has understood it long ago. But we in India… that’s our fate. Every partner in life thinks he or she is living with a devil, who is sometimes a demon as well. It is this thinking that makes everybody sick of others. But we are helpless. Life has to go on.”
“I don’t understand a thing, Sir,” said Gopi. His eyes betrayed his ignorance.
“No… don’t… don’t ever try to understand. You are too young to understand life that is full of wonder, wonders and wondering. The only thing you need to think of at this stage of your life is try to learn. Every day is a lesson to us. We learn through our experiences, mostly our mistakes.”
“How can I learn my lessons unless I go to school?” Gopi asked with a perturbed smile.
“No… no, no! I am not referring to the lessons we learn through school textbooks. But from the greater book of life we call experience,” I said in a counselling tone. “Well, then,” I continued, “continue from where you have left off.”
“What shall I say, Sir? My mom’s feelings towards my dad had not changed. She warned him, threatened him. One unexpected moment, she howled, ‘Finished… It’s all over. Time to meet a lawyer’.”
“Huh, is that so? How did your dad react to your mom’s words?”
“He retorted, ‘Better… That’s better. Better to part than pull on with a moron.’ ‘Oh, you called me moron, eh?’ my mom howled. She was all fired up and said, ‘I say you are a meddler. You can’t do anything properly. Now I say, get out of my house, once and for all’.”
“Your mom owns the house, eh?” I asked.
“Yes, Sir! It is a marriage gift from her father… I will tell you what happened next. My dad lost his temper and got ready to move out of the house. My heart began to beat very feebly. And gradually I started to become frantic. My mom looked at me and said in a fit of fury, ‘We yearned for it with all our hearts in all these 10 years. We have to put an end to it all.’
“I, too, got ready for school, not sure of what was to happen next. My mom gave me a little moralising lecture, forbidding me to go anywhere near my dad. My dad, as if shaken by her words, did not want to brood over unpleasantness. He then said, ‘He is after all my son. Let him be with me till the court decides’. My mom retorted, ‘He is not your son. He is not born of you. But you can take him. Good riddance.’
“My dad looked askance at my mom. I reeled under the blow. The hours were ticking by. My mom virtually pushed my dad and me out of the house. She then locked the main door and left for her office. My dad, without even glancing at me, started his car. With their disappearance, I felt that I lost my anchor. Alone in the world now… Nothing made sense anymore.”
Gopi was all tears when he finished his story. I looked at him, my heart heavy with the boy’s plight, and murmured, “Courage… courage.” I felt as though I had given two drops of water to someone who was dying of thirst in a desert. “What is your next move?” I asked.
Poor Gopi simply shook his head and pouted his lower lip, perhaps to express his insecurity. “After all that you have heard from me, are you sure that both my parents will come back home?” he asked. There was anxiety in his voice.
At first I wanted to comfort him, but my profession dictated otherwise. I said, “Your parents have no loving, respectful relationship. They always raise their voices and argues. It is all because they are very indifferent to each other. Yet they pretend to admire each other enormously in the evenings. Life has to go on, you see. But I think their relationship has reached saturation point. There may be no looking back.”
Our day revolved around lessons and I took my role as teacher very seriously. We moved to a nearby cafeteria. I dispensed with my lessons, while we had burgers. Looking into the distance, Gopi drew a deep breath of fresh air.
We moved back to the park. Sitting on the grass and leaning my back against a bushy tree, I stretched. The boy followed suit. He loved my company. “We have to do something,” he said, looking at me intently, his face seeking a favour.
“Of course, we can’t leave things at that. Your future is at stake. We have to think about it,” I comforted him.
The chill breeze, fanned by tall bushy trees, lulled us into siesta. When I opened my eyes, darkness was trying to put light to flight. I had no idea of how long I had been asleep and then thought of the boy struck me. I looked around but he was nowhere to be seen. I stood and moved around, my eyes frantically searching for him. But there was no sign of Gopi.
I sat on the cement bench with a thud and my heart grew heavy. Did I really meet Gopi? Or had he appeared in my reverie? I was not sure. “What did he bring with him? What did he leave with me?” I asked myself. Obsessed with these two questions, I looked deep within and ransacked my fading memory. To clear both the questions, an answer emerged — His story. The answer reverberated through the park.
