by Vani Viswanathan
[box]Vani Viswanathan pens five little stories around childhood. [/box]Seven-year-old Natasha ran into her parents’ bedroom, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘What’s it, baby?’ Arun asked, pulling his daughter onto his lap. ‘My Science project,’ Natasha said between sobs. ‘It’s due tomorrow.’ Preeti, who’d been folding clothes and putting them into the closet, turned around slowly, as if in slow motion in a movie, and looked incredulously at her daughter. It was 9 pm on a Sunday night. Natasha couldn’t possibly be mentioning a project hand-in now?!
They had no time to lose. Arun did some research and quickly landed on the topic of the food chain – relatively easy for a grade three student, they reasoned. Preeti tried rushing some sense into Natasha’s head about how the food chain really worked, and what it meant in the bigger world. In her nervousness to get it done, Preeti didn’t quite manage to bring it down to the level of a seven-year-old: Natasha’s eyes were wide with fear as she asked her mother, how exactly the chain continued after the bacteria ate up the dead lion that had eaten the giraffe that had eaten plants. ‘Ok, let’s forget the bacteria,’ Preeti said in haste, but of course, it was easier said than done.
Arun was, in the meantime, hunting around for an old shoe box and sturdy cartons that they could use to build a pyramid of sorts.
Preeti joined him in a few minutes, having put a sobbing Natasha to sleep after assuring her that when she woke up in the morning, there would be a beautiful model that she could take to school to explain the phenomenon of the food chain. Preeti and Arun were up till after midnight, printing out pictures of lions and giraffes from the internet, sowing mustard seeds in soil that Arun brought from outside the apartment, and making the model look as good as they could manage.
When they finally went to bed, Preeti told Arun that this was just how she’d behaved with her mother as a kid. ‘I vividly remember taking my sewing kit to her at night with tears, having suddenly realized the deadline was the next day…’. Arun turned over to his other side. ‘I knew Natasha got it from you…’ Preeti straightened up. ‘Well, were you in time with your submissions?’ Arun turned to look at Preeti and grinned. ‘You think I even bothered with these things?’
Pic : http://www.flickr.com/photos/nojhan
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