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Literary Review
Time for answers
C.S. LAKSHMI
Khintu
FOR a long time I could not get up and ask a question in a seminar. There was always the feeling that I should not speak and the fear that I could be wrong. In our schooling days we accepted all the stories that were told to us and believed implicitly that the textbooks could never be wrong. The present day school children are luckier, for there are publishing houses which publish books for them which teach them to look at the world differently. And there are parents who buy them these books. That is why it is possible for children like Khintu to ask questions, some of them quite complicated. Khintu is the daughter of the caretaker of our building. Her father brought her to the building when she was about one and a half. She took to me and Vishnu, my husband, very quickly and when she was three, much against her parents' wishes, we put her in a nursery school. Khintu loved going to school. For a long time her birth certificate was a problem because she was born in a mountain village in Nepal and her father had not bothered to bring her birth certificate. I spoke to her father so much about the birth certificate that one day, when she was about three and a half, Khintu asked me if she could sit in a bus and get her birth certificate, for she wanted to go to school. This hurdle was somehow crossed and Khintu started going to school and she thoroughly enjoyed going to school.
The first thing Khintu began asking us was about what she could do as a girl. If she saw a policeman she would turn towards us and ask, "Can girls be policewomen?" If she saw a plane flying she would ask, "Can girls be pilots?" After this phase of questioning got over, Khintu began to question her textbooks and what they told her. She was very seriously studying for her unit test in Moral Science a couple of years ago. She came running with a page of the book open in her hands. She pointed out a line that said: Man is the best creation of god. "Isn't this wrong Mama," she asked, "What about woman?" When I told her that the sentence was indeed wrong, her next question was how she could change the sentence to include women. I told her that she could write: A human being is the best creation of god. Clever child that she is, she wrote what the text book said in the test, for she thought her teacher may not understand if she wrote it differently!
There is a poem on rain in her English textbook where the father complains that he has to go for a meeting and that it is raining; the mother says that her friends are visiting her and the roof is leaking; and the child claps and enjoys getting drenched in the rain. I asked her if she understood the poem. "Yes," she said very fast, (because she had other things to say) "the father and mother don't like the rain but the child enjoys the rain." And she added, "Why should only the father go for meetings? And why should the mother complain about the roof leaking? The father can also do that." "Yes, Khintu," I said, "you are so right." She looked at me smugly and said, "I know." The teacher who teaches Environmental Studies must have been quite surprised at the way Khintu filled in the blanks in the questions at the end of each lesson. Who cooks in your house, who brings vegetables, who takes you out, the questions went on. The answers expected from the child were obvious. Khintu filled in the answers to each one of them saying, "Mother and father." In both the houses she knew, both parents cooked and the housework was shared. The other children gave the expected answers and probably got all the answers right. Khintu did not mind this time, for she was older and probably wiser.
Apart from finding faults with her school textbooks, Khintu's favourite pastime is listening to stories. One day I told her the story of Cinderella and ended it saying, "Then Cinderella got married to the prince and they lived happily ever after." "What does that mean?" Khintu asked. "Well, it means they got married and were happy after that." "Mama," Khintu said thoughtfully, "Can't one be happy before marriage?" "You certainly can," I told her which seemed to satisfy her. Another thing that upsets her very often is the way people differentiate between a girl and a boy. Khintu has a little brother who is thoroughly spoilt by her parents because he is a boy. She would stomp up the stairs complaining that her parents loved her brother more. "What is so great about him?" she would ask, "He is just a boy!" But one day she had a very important thing to discuss with me. She came back from school and sat beside me looking very serious. "Mama," she said, at last, "Do boys have something different from girls under their knickers?" "Yes," I told her. "Don't you see your younger brother when your mother bathes him? Isn't he different?" "Is that all?" she exclaimed, "There is this boy in our class who behaves as if he has a train inside his pants!"
When she is not questioning, Khintu nowadays likes to write stories. At the end of each story she likes to write "This is a true story" or "This is not a true story, this is imagination." This obsession with reality and imagination has happened after watching hours of songs on the TV. She knows the songs can't be real. They are dreams. So when she writes something, she likes to explain, for the reader may not understand.
Recently Khintu came with us to Matheran during the Christmas holidays. Sure enough, on Christmas day she asked what exactly it meant. I told her about the birth of Christ and about how he died on a cross. "Cross" was a word that had only one meaning for Khintu.
"Did he die while crossing the road, Mama?" she asked. It took us a long time to get over the image of Christ dying while walking on a zebra crossing!
Children like Khintu are going to ask many questions in future about the condition of the world and about gender — questions which many have not dared to ask for various reasons. It is time to think of answers.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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