Remember the incidents from your childhood?
Here, I am going to share one more of my childhood experience which comes from my mom. This is the second instalment of the series “Childhood Memories” and I think most of the people reading this blog have gone through this incident.
I am the second child of my parents and the statement itself makes me obliged to do anything and everything my mother, father or elder brother asks me to do. It’s about a winter morning. I used to run for my school early morning around 6 O’clock. My mother was preparing lunch for me. For a child of around 10, it’s really difficult to get ready all by himself. Because I have a brother who is pretty good with the “art of living” and learnt everything at a very little age, my parents thought I would be another genius born in their house. Unfortunately, they expected a little more out of me as I came out as a dumb kid who believed in the slip-on shoes and flip-flops because he never really understood how to tie his own shoelaces.
My father is a little strict person he wants everything perfect, effortless, and he never puts an effort in that, neither does his elder son. But for me, it was little tough to manage the knot of the tie, a creaseless uniform and proper black shining shoes for my early morning school. The reasons and impossibilities never entertained my father. But who will tell the cosy morning that I don’t need more sleep? I need to step out of my bed-sheet and have to run for school. As usual like any other morning, I was late for school, everything was in chaos. Somehow I managed to iron my school uniform, wear it in the best possible way I could, knot my tie, took the blazer in hand and put it on the couch near the exit door, picked my shoes and stepped in them. A perfect start to a day I thought, but, it wasn’t possible for obvious reasons. My mother was doing some dishes in the kitchen and so asked my father to take my lunch box from the stand and put it in my school bag. My father came holding my lunch box and the first thing he did after putting it into my school bag was scanning me from top to bottom and then bottom to top with a blank face and then shouted “ain’t you able to bend and polish your shoes or your mother will do it?” At that time, I didn’t have the privilege of giving an ‘oh fuck!’ reaction neither did I know about it.
I went blank for a second and then shouted “mom where is the shoe polish and brush?” because she was the only one to whom I can talk like this or can show what I go through when I am not able to do certain things. Though I got a “how horrifying and dumb this kid is” expression from my father and then he left me in the trouble. A second later, my mother shouted back from the kitchen and said “It’s there only, in the cupboard beneath the staircase”. I went to the staircase and after 2minutes of searching in the cupboard and it was more than the time enough to check a 4*6 cupboard with three shelves but I didn’t find it. I again shouted in frustration “mom I can’t find it, please come and check,” and my mother replied by shouting on me with an exponential power of her voice. That’s what you get when you’re dumb alone in a group of smart people. “Get it by yourself, it would be there, yesterday itself I put it there” she shouted and “these three men will never let me sip my tea in peace” she added. I tried to find it for one more minute but didn’t and moved to drawing room in frustration where my mother was sitting with her tea in her hands and listening to her morning bhajans. “Mom is it more important for you to sit and listen to this usual bhajan, please get me the shoe brush,” I said and took a breath. I was expecting another taunt in the daily dose but my mother stood and came to me with her cup in her one hand. She put her other hand on my head and adored my hair and it wasn’t love at all, it was messing my hair which I tried to make good. I don’t know what has happened to my mother but she took me to the staircase and pointed out in between the side railing of the fourth staircase just above the cupboard and said, “see here it is, can’t you see,” I was upset with that. “How could she do this to me? She told me that it was in the cupboard but it wasn’t.” I thought. I conveyed this to her at the same moment. It was ruthless for me. My mother smiled at me and said, “I asked you to look in the cupboard and it doesn’t mean you can’t look here and there.
It was right there, in front of your eyes but you were trying to find it where it was instructed to you. You would have used your brain when the second time I asked you to look there and would have probably got It.” she made my hair with her fingers and asked me to polish my shoes fast and then she followed me to the bus stop. At that instant, it was really tough for me to understand what my mother was trying to say but now I understand it.
That’s how humans are, we have a particular set of instructions in our head on which we run our lives. We got it from our experiences and the life lessons people taught us in our life. Our present is totally biased towards our past and we notice things and observe them with the ability which we got from our past. We try to find happiness in the places where we have been taught or heard that it is there. We go straight or what we want and I guess, that’s how it must work and we never try to find it in the places which are still unnoticed, which is different from our past observations. It’s right in front of our eyes and probably looking at us smiling, or laughing on our disability of not finding it. But don’t you think it’s bad? It’s bad how we try to look for things only in the places we thought we could find it, in the person in whom we thought it’s hidden, how could we be so sure about it, how could we manage to get it the definite place where nothing is definite.
Probably, this is the reason a lot of us are running behind people and things which don’t have what they want, most of them don’t even know what they want but they are still running. One could wait and think what they want and where they will get it. One can’t find it even after searching for life in the empty cupboard just because they didn’t try to notice it above it or somewhere else. A lot of us try to look again and again in the same empty cupboard for what they want. It’s dumb; it’s dumb to look in an empty space again. Better try to find things in the uncertainty of life. In the places, one couldn’t try to notice. Find it in yourself, find it by yourself. Because there are chances that you may not find someone to tell you that you are running a blind race with enlightened hopes. Figure it out.
Thanks for reading
Udit Gour
#life #memories #childhood #short #story #experience #shortstory