truly beautiful

Daivik and me were in a park. It was one of those rare moments when he was playing by himself, which allowed me time to do something else. I was in the middle of it when he came and told me that he wanted to show something. I said I was busy. He went away, but came back immediately saying he wanted to show me something "beautiful". I was still busy, he went away but came back again, tugged my hand and said, "Appa, come, I want to show you something truly beautiful". The use of that adjective intrigued me. Whatever I was doing cannot be more important than finding out what my son considered "truly beautiful".  He led me to a little slope that was covered with Dandelions, some of them were still in their blazing yellows but most of them had dried out, forming neat little golf balls that were sitting pretty on their long stems. It was indeed, truly, beautiful.

After admiring this beauty we went back to our respective things. Later on, we were walking back and Daivik was happily chattering away. As I turned to the right,  my eyes fell on a large area, about the size of a  foot ball field, covered with Dandelions. They were  in direct sun, bigger, swaying gently to the rhythms of the breeze and every now and then dislodging  a puff of the dandelion snow. I tapped his shoulders and without a word gently turned his head towards that field.  As his eyes fell on those Dandelions, Daivik stopped his chatter. He stood transfixed. Both me and the Dandelions were eagerly waiting for a word from him. If that little slope was "truly beautiful", what was he going to say for this vastness of Dandelions ? It was one of those moments, whatever he was going to say was bound to be precious. After several moments of a truly beautiful silence, he looked at me, flashed a brilliant smile and said, quite simply, "wow".

Of course, nature made the Dandelion blooms truly beautiful. It has also devised ingenious methods to enable their propagation to ensure a continuation of that beauty. We tend to think that the wind aids in dispersing the seeds. However, that is only partly true. Nature does not rely entirely on such stochastic occurrences. It wants to be absolutely sure that those delicate seeds are efficiently dispersed . What does it do ? It sends little boys, it sends Daivik. So, after this rather intimate admiration of beauty, Daivik stepped into the field and urged me to join him in what he called as 'Pustebloom race'. The objective was simple : to disperse as many florets from the blooms over as large an area as possible. Before the race began, he initiated me into its intricacies. Apparently it is not quite as simple as plucking one of them and blowing into it. I was astounded by my ignorance in this critical area. You have to hold the stem firmly but not too close to the flower (otherwise it will not bend and the flakes cannot go far), the speed and the angle in which you blow is critical (otherwise many flakes will fall down together, and that is not good), if the wind is against you, you have to blow harder (otherwise all the flakes will fall on you)...

So, we began the race. Soon enough, it was obvious who was going to win. The odds were stacked against me. He was clearly more practiced in this art than me. In order to educate myself better, I picked up a flower, sat on my knees and turned towards him with an objective of  observing his methods more closely.  However, I had to stop my education as the scene I encountered  froze me. It is an image that demands being accurately photographed and carefully framed. I have neither the right camera nor the required skills to do justice to that moment, but its memory lingers : Daivik is on the slightly blurred foreground. His lips are pursed in a delightful joy as he is blowing into the bloom.The still soft late spring sun is somewhere behind his head. It causes the moisture on the lips to glisten and casts a mini-halo around the edges of his hairs. The Dandelion bloom, under the force of his carefully calculated blow, is slightly bent away from him. In the process, it dislodges tens of little florets into the blue sky. The florets appear in sharp focus as they gently parachute down in the still air.

Truly beautiful, indeed.

where do babies come from

It is true. This question is inevitable !

Daivik already knows part of the answer (first mummy's tummy grows. and grows and grows. then the doctor takes the baby out). But when the said question arrived in its proper form it was completely out of the blue. 

First he asked a very complicated question to his mother. "Mummy, when you were inside my granny's stomach, where was I?" (!) His mother smiled at me. I smiled back rather stupidly before realising that she was actually passed the baton. To be sure if I heard it correct, I asked Daivik to repeat the question. Now, Daivik talks to his mother in Hindi and to me in Tamil.  Languages, like the people who use them, have their own idiosyncrasies. So Hindi has two different words for the two different grandmothers but Tamil largely uses one. Hindi has genders for nouns while Tamil does not. So by the time this complex question was reformulated, with contexts and genders corrected, the impact was diluted. So he tried again, this time getting really close to the mark. "Appa", he said "how do babies get into the stomach's of their mothers in the first place". 

I could see he was curious but suggested that we could have this question as our bed time story. He completed dinner and  other pre-bed rituals really fast. In the intervening time I tried to think of a proper answer but none was really forthcoming. I thought he might just about forget the question. However, the first thing he said after getting into the bed was "hmmm, now tell me. How do babies get into their mummy's tummy". "Well", I found myself saying, "actually half of the baby is already there inside the stomach". He found the concept pretty incredible and let out a loud gasp. He kind of missed the half-baby part, though. "Wow" he said, "but how did they get there". I said they do not get there because they are already there. To explain it better I asked him "why do you see roses only in a rose plant and not in a pea plant". Again, it was an incredible concept for him. "Yes, I did not see any rose in the pea plant. But why ?".

I explained :  "That is nature". 

This word caught his fancy. NAT-URE, he started repeating, NAT-URE, NAT-URE...the excitement of the discovery was too much for the little bed to contain. He jumped out of it, ran to his mother and reported "Mummy, I know where babies come from. Do you also know ? Actually, babies are already there in their mother's stomachs. It is called NAT-URE"