Basudhara Roy

Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India

My little one is twenty-six months old. Two point two, the school authorities tell me precisely. He has delayed starting kindergarten already. They usually begin with children at 1.8, I am told. Surrounded by cheerful walls, seated amidst colourful toys, I am shown a well-made presentation that efficiently sums up their classroom activities the year round. I am not interested in that, in all that they will teach and Sayan will learn. I want to know if he will be well taken care of; if he will be allowed to follow the chirp of a stray bird all the way to the balcony as he does at home; if there will be someone to smile at him when he mouths, by sudden accident, a new word for the first time.

All this is irrational, I tell myself. This is as good a school as can be. The happy photographs in the presentation testified enough to that and the gay classrooms decorated with pieces of toddler crafts bore witness to hours well-spent. The paper-work done, he should start tomorrow. All would be well with him as it was with his brother five years ago. Why did I feel such reluctance at letting go?

And as I make my way back, I try to remember how it was when my elder one started school. I had been apprehensive then but not reluctant. Rather eager, in fact, at having him reach that milestone. It strikes me now that Satyaki, ever since he was born, was less my child and more my comrade in the things we were destined to do together, for the first time. Learning to be a mother to him at twenty-six - to feed, burp, swaddle, sing lullabies, devise games, and to be frustrated and over-wrought at the day’s end - was learning a part of myself that did not pre-exist but appeared and grew with him each day.

I had enrolled for a Ph.D. just a few months before he was born in 2012, and his first four years in the world were spent watermarked by my books, laptop, and doctoral assignments. I needed him to keep quiet while I was thinking, to not shred my notes and papers that occupied every conceivable space left by his toys and diapers in the sunless, little flat we lived in then, to be pleasurably occupied while I was busy writing away. This last need, however, was never to be met, for Satyaki grudgingly looked upon my laptop as an older sibling who was granted my time and concern at least as much as he was. He was intent upon making a threesome to our inevitably interminable associations, threatening dire consequences to the device that held countless hours of my agonized labour. Finally vanquished by his determination to not let me and my laptop alone, his father and I worked out a ploy. The laptop screen was shared equally between us and while I read or wrote on one half of it, he would happily watch animations of nursery rhymes on the other half.

Given that I had to constantly read Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, Etienne Balibar, Avtar Brah, Ernst Bloch and Homi Bhabha interlaced with liberal doses of ‘Mary had a little lamb’, ‘The wheels of the bus go round and round’, and ‘How much is that doggie at the window’, I was, naturally and pardonably, eager for Satyaki to start school and enthusiastically awaited his turning two, right after which I got him enrolled for kindergarten. That he did not at all take happily to that, is another story.

With Sayan, however, things have been different. He was comfortably born after his mother had a doctoral degree tucked away in her files; had learnt the hard way to juggle work, childcare, family, and self; and had, with reasonable satisfaction and few disasters, brought up a child these last five years. Besides, we had moved to a larger flat now where his toys wouldn’t be in the way and there was more sunlight and more walls for him to write on than had been available to his brother. Sayan has, therefore, in every way, had the liberty to be the baby that Satyaki had, perhaps, never had. The elder one was and remains a friend, a comrade who demands an equal share in all that I must go through as parent, spouse, homemaker, and academic. The little one has had the privilege to be little, to raise tantrums and have them met because now the identification of tantrums as tantrums is a wisdom I have come by for good. Blake-like, thereby, innocence in motherhood has come to me through experience, and I have cherished every moment of it.

We have so much loved having the little one chirping and scampering about in the house that sending him to school has never been a voluntary thought, only a compulsion that must be met. I realize that I am reluctant to let go of him for entirely selfish reasons for I know that with his leaving for school - that first little door into the greater, wider world beyond - a part of the child in all of us at home will permanently be lost.