by Joshua Hoyt
Let the Buds Bloom
by Arya
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY
Let the Buds Bloom
Copyright©2012 Arya
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Edited by: Roshi Vijaywargiya
Introduction
Back home after an eventful day, I watched my thirteen year old daughter’s face as she read the newspaper. Her anguish said the news was about something that tugged at her heart. She motioned her brother to read the news with her. His face too reflected the same distress. She exclaimed with pain in her voice, “Why can’t they just let the kids live? They will somehow grow up.”
I immediately understood what they were reading—the suicide pact—the bane of our society!
Each child is unique. Children see the world through their own innocent eyes. Nothing is more precious than their innocence. They should be given an opportunity to bloom to their fullest without the worms of hatred and distrust eating away the petals of happiness in the little buds. Unfortunately, ADHD, ADD, dyslexia and dyscalculia were unheard of many years back. Such kids were considered lazy and beaten up by parents and teachers alike. Unfortunately, in India parents consider education as the only way to excel in life. This is especially so if the parent is a teacher. The sadness in their lives is doubled as they are unable to accept the fact that their children are different. This kind of a situation has an adverse impact on these child and also their siblings. An extreme reaction to this situation—the suicide pact— burns the souls of hapless children even if they survive it…
Let the Buds Bloom
My husband, Deepak put his arm around me comfortingly. We were in a clinic and my psychiatrist was explaining to us how hypnotherapy worked and what to expect. “Asha, don’t worry, you will not let out any secrets and can always come out of it any time you want to”, he said. I nodded in understanding. It would help me face the trauma of my past and allow me to let go of the pain. It was all deeply embedded in my psych and I had guarded it earnestly without letting go. It felt as though I had lived through that yesterday. The mist was slowly clearing and I was in my school days again.
“Do you remember how early Prateek started cheating in class?” asked my sister Riya. “Of course”, I replied. He started as early as kindergarten. I still remember Prateek screaming, “Where is my ‘days of the week’?” when he was getting ready for school. He had asked me to write the days of the week in a small bit of paper and I wondered why the little boy wanted it so badly. Only later did he admit that he wanted that bit of paper to copy in a class test! Prateek simply couldn’t learn the days of the week by heart. This incident came up in our discussions because my father, a teacher himself, had just caught him cheating in class again. Prateek had done so badly in his Mathematics paper that he tore it up and wrote the entire test paper again in a new sheet. Using my dad’s red ink pen, he ticked most of the answers right and awarded himself decent marks unlike the pathetic marks he actually got. But he made a very grave error. All the ticks were turned towards the left. Being left hander, my poor brother didn’t remember that the right handed world did not put ticks that way! The red marks on his thighs from the cane did not deter him from future acts of cheating.
Once Kumar, a classmate of Prateek’s, teased him about his poor grades. Prateek was so upset that he stopped talking to him. It was almost near the end of the term and kids were busy preparing for their exams. We were in for a surprise when Prateek started talking to Kumar again. A week later, Kumar’s notebooks went missing! Since Prateek had patched up with him, he was no longer a suspect. Actually Kumar trusted him so much that he even took his help in nailing the (?) culprit. Of course, he was unsuccessful. If anyone is curious to know what happened to Kumar’s books, they rest in peace in the depths of an abandoned well behind our house. That much for teasing a classmate for poor grades!
Prateek had a wonderful sense of humour and often had us sisters in splits. Once he went out camping with his friends. He kept eating ice cream after ice cream and his teacher warned him, “Prateek, you are taking your second tab for loose motion”. Prateek ignored it. Then at night the inevitable happened. In Prateek’s own words, “All hell broke loose with the noise of some dam bursting”. Poor thing didn’t even have the time for rushing to the toilet. It was too late the save his pant. He went out scouting for water to wash it. There was none in sight except a large tank in front of the camp. He dipped the dirty pant into the tank and washed it. He was really exhausted following the late night ordeal that he woke up late the next morning. When he woke up the first sight was that of his friends brushing their teeth and washing their faces with tank water. He said he wanted to puke thinking about what the previous night’s incident would have done to that water. He wisely decided that he didn’t want to wash his face or brush his teeth at all.
Prateek often found himself at the receiving end too. We girls never missed an opportunity to tease him. Once we came to know that he got 4 marks out of 25 in a Mathematics test paper. Prateek added the number 1 to the left making it 14 and proudly showed the marks to dad and mom. We came to know his actual marks though a classmate of his and decided to tease him. While having lunch with parents, we girls quizzed each other. Trying hard to suppress giggles, I asked Riya, “How much is 4 and 1? She replied, “14 or 41”. She asked me, “is the value of 1 zero?” “Yeah” I replied. “I guess so. We can always prefix any number with 1”. Prateek’s face turned white and he lowered his eyes. Mom immediately guessed something was wrong. She asked Prateek, “How much marks did you get? Why are your sisters teasing you?” His lowered his gaze and his face told it all. Between peels of laughter, I told my sister, “We will go straight to hell after death. I am sure God will not even give us a trial”!
These incidents were actually rare moments of fun in that otherwise dark year. Prateek was in class five, and studied in a local primary school. He would soon join the public school where we girls were studying. But before that he had to take a tough entrance exam. So this year he is going to be really busy. We were glad we had both cleared our entrance exams with good ranks.
Saying that my brother was not good at studies would be an understatement. He was really bad at it.He was a bright kid, but somehow he could not study at all. In spite of the syllabus in the primary school being so light he found it hard to get decent marks. Prateek was three and half years younger to me and two years younger to Riya. He joined the government primary school where I was studying when he was four. The first year he was sent there
just to spend time and play. He was bored when we sisters went off to school. Even after attending classes, he did not learn much, but then he was one year younger to the others, my parents thought. The next year, when Prateek was old enough for the class, the situation remained the same. Teachers constantly complained that the boy was way behind his sisters.
When teachers complained, my parents affectionately said that it was probably because he was the youngest and the only boy after two girls. He was sure pampered, but it soon became evident that it was not the only problem. My dad, who was a teacher in an English medium residential public school, thought that this was some kind of a starting trouble. He could not imagine that his son could not study, while we girls did just fine. The boy finally hit the wall when he was in fifth standard and had to face the tough entrance exam to join the public school where my father taught. We also lived in the same campus in the staff quarters. All other staff kids did well in the entrance exam and went on to study in the school. This made his joining the school an emotional issue as well. This year was not going to be easy I thought. If