Don’t tell lies

The Background

At home Daivik was told that if he tells lies, a crow will bite him. In the kindergarten, for the same offence, they told him that his nose will grow long.

Vignette 1

A small family run circus company camped near our home. They advertised heavily around the neighborhood, with pictures of tigers, elephants and giraffes. Of course when we visited them, they had two horses, two dogs and a goat. Daivik, who was eager to see the tiger and elephant, was not impressed.  When the circus did not close down at the appointed day and instead extended their stay, he started scanning the sky and quipped, “I think lot of crows will come now”. He further clarified: They told many lies, so their nose will grow so long (shows how long). So many crows will come now to sit on their long nose and bite them.

Vignette 2

We were crossing a green field when Daivik spotted two crows sitting on the grass. He went near them. The stubborn city crows did not seem to consider the grinning three foot object approaching them as a threat. Daivik told them, in Hindi, “I’m not from India”. The crows didn’t care. He told his mother, “look, I told them I’m not from India, and they did not bite me”. His mother said, “But these are German crows”.

He bent down deliberately and told the crows in slow, measured and very clear German “There is nobody in Germany. Everybody has gone to India”. 

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"