Yaksha-Prashna

“He seems to be in distinguished company” said my wife, with a twinkle in her eye. Her eyes were on the two figures standing at the huge glass window some thirty feet away, overlooking the expanse of the Frankfurt airport. We were en route to the United States, with a change of planes in Germany.

I had noticed the tall, slim young man on our incoming flight, and had successfully fought an urge to strike up a conversation with him. He must have been in his late thirties or early forties. Throughout the flight he had kept to himself, scribbling with great concentration on a largish notebook. His photographs appeared fairly regularly in newspapers. Some years earlier, he and his British colleague had submitted their theory about the universe, taking the community of astrophysicists by storm. Wishful countrymen had even predicted that the coveted science prize would someday be awarded to him. Unlike many other scientists from the subcontinent though, he had returned to his native country to pursue his research there. But rather than his research, he was better known at home for his social work, for the varied efforts he made to promote scientific curiosity amongst school- going children.

The other figure was that of our son, barely four years old. My career had caused him to follow me from country to country with his mother, and the continuous change of surroundings seemed to have limited his attempts at speech to sentences of two or three words at a time.

It did not appear likely that the two had even noticed each other. The older man was lost in his thoughts, while the young one seemed absorbed in registering the arrivals and departures of airliners with gleeful shouts of “Helicopter! Helicopter!!” as the jumbos took off or landed at a distance. Somewhat to my relief, an amused senior citizen nearby gave us an appreciative wink. Apparently, the exuberance of our offspring had not yet become a nuisance.

Presently, the tall man awoke to the presence next to him. “It’s a jet plane, not a helicopter” he advised softly, and noticing that the communication had gone unnoticed, repeated the message.

The child looked up at the famous scientist, completely unimpressed. After all, wasn’t reality entirely subjective? Then, repeating his “Helicopter” refrain as if to hammer in the point, he disdainfully thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and walked back to his mother.

“Helicopter!” he informed her, as he picked up his bottle of milk.

I was not sure that he was overheard, but making that particular acquaintance on the flight to New York seemed just a little more difficult now.

“Can you beat up the dinosaurs, Dad?”

I stopped abruptly and looked up at the pair of earnest eyes confronting me. The shine in them was unmistakable. Clearly, the future of an entire little world depended on the answer to that momentous question. For a fleeting moment, I considered the consequences of replying truthfully, then gave up, and to make up for the delay, brusquely gave the required affirmative.

The effect was all that could be expected. Relief, jubilation, pride, all flashed over the four year old face as it grinned at me and then sped away, apparently to provide some erring adversary with this final proof as to which of the fathers in question was the mightier.

At last, all was well with the world.

Children are usually an integral part of the guest list, when members of the immigrant community from the subcontinent throw parties. Inevitably, the drive back home with a child that is tired as well as too excited to sleep, turns into an ordeal. And yet, having moved into a subdivision with very few children of the right age, we welcomed these get-togethers.

My wife has invented, or perhaps merely discovered, a bag full of tricks to keep our young man quietly occupied on the way home.

This particular late evening, she was trying to help him notice the seven-day cycles in the calendar. I was trying to concentrate on the road, for it was late and I was rather tired myself.

“Please, will you stop the car? I can’t take this any more.”

Her tone did not suggest that she was talking about our son getting on her nerves. And yet, she sounded nonplused, even a little fearful, and certainly excited. I did her bidding, offering to take charge of the problem in the back seat while she drove the rest of the way.

But that was not the issue. She had been asking him little questions about the calendar, and he had answered them all, complaining that they were too easy. Not only was he able to tell the days of the week corresponding to random dates in the month, he could reel out a list of months in different years which matched the pattern. And he could answer complex questions in a shorter time than we needed to frame them.

We spent the next weeks trying to figure out how a child that could not even add two numbers could comprehend the concept of leap years, cyclical patterns, and the varying number of days in different months. He, himself, was unable to provide a clue. It was just so.

“Do you know what it means, Dad?”

I looked across the dinner table. The question from the first grader was far more innocent than the gesture that accompanied it. He was a picture of concentration, trying to force three fingers and his thumb into a fist, while simultaneously trying to extend and point the middle finger skyward.

I darted a quick glance at my wife. Her eyes told me to be careful.

“I am not sure, son.” I lied. “What is it?”

“Oh, come on. You know the f-word?”

That, surely was one way to look at it, I thought. Aloud, I acknowledged the shortcomings of my vocabulary and implored him to provide enlightenment. Perhaps a little sorry for me, he was sincere in his effort to bring me up to date.

The exact pronunciation was, to my relief, rather different from what I had known. Devoid of the gusto that usually accompanies its rustic usage, the word had happily lost its lethality. But that apart, there still remained the mystery as to what exactly had been learned from the peer community at school.

“It is the s-thing you know,” he went on conversationally. “Americans have to do it to make kids.”

Not being exactly inclined to discuss the universality of procreation methods at this stage, I merely asked who at school had informed him of the phenomenon.

“Well, they did not really know much about it. But I know Charlie Brown explains everything. Do you know what it says in...". He went on to use some technical words that I, myself, had come to know at a much older age and was not quite sure how to spell.

I was aware of a picture book that had been recently added to his growing library. For the first time, I wondered if there was a need to read books carefully before purchasing them.

But I also suspect that our co-passenger from Frankfurt would have approved.





A first-time contributor to Chowk, the author, as a parent, was always intrigued by the late Erik Erikson. The article was written years ago for an internal publication of the corporation he worked for. The title has been changed, inspired by some correspondence he saw on the Chowk boards.