Recently, my son and I attended a college festival in Bangalore. The plan was to take the guided insect walk that had been advertised. To my mind, this would be an experience my son would cherish, even remember, in the years to come. 

He’d remember that some spiders are known to eat their webs; or that dragonflies, gorgeous creatures, are among the world’s most accurate hunters, with eyes that can survey the world 360 degrees, and with wings that help them pivot, glide, sideways, upwards, diagonally—

The wonder! 

This is how I imagined it being—my son a part of a tight cluster of kids, discovering, under the care of a mentor, that insects aren’t eeky, creepy, or vile; that they hold within their bodies moments of absolute beauty. 

This is what happened instead. My son reached the venue, almost 18 kilometres from our residence, and told me he wanted to skip the insect walk. There was a stall he had spotted on the festival grounds with BEST bus magnets and metal rickshaws—and here, a wooden toy. 

It was the toy that had my son mesmerised. It came with a slide, and on it, a little wooden bird. If you lightly nudged the bird, she’d slip down, her feet going clickety-clak, clickety-clak. 

My son plonked right down by the sales table, rapt. 

Then he asked me to buy the wooden toy for him. 

Then he carried it in his arms, found his way to an unoccupied open amphitheatre, and sat with his new love interest right down by the microphone. 

For the next hour, under a profuse tree, on stage, by the mic, my son watched bird and slide. I watched him watch it. I asked myself what enchanted him so. The colours, I decided, the reds and yellows; or the feel of wood. Or maybe it was the sound, the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of the bird’s feet, so gentle it felt like a lullaby. 

It could be any of this. Or it could simply be the fact that that day my son wished to be wrapped within himself. Without instructions. Without a voice that said look-at-this. 

I considered the programmes I had signed him up for in the past—nature walks, and movement classes, and treasure hunts. And how, while sometimes my son did choose to participate, there were many many many occasions when he did not.  

I recall how, in the early days, I’d sense a twinge of disappointment. This wasn’t how I had wanted it to be, how I had pictured it. My son was meant to be happy naming flowers, or digging for Easter bunnies, or whirling in circles. 

But there he was in the movement class—seated under an umbrella he had opened out. Alone. Happy.  

In the days to come, I came to grapple with a number of concepts, all to do with childhood consent, and learning, and freedom. 

But this, too, was something that I came to understand—the need to name and acknowledge the motivations guiding my choices. 

Because the fact is that each time I offered my child a piece of the world through music or dance or art or movement, through walks or performance pieces, I expected him to engage deeply and slide into joy—this was the dream. 

Dear reader: this was my dream.

The contours of my son’s joy were being defined by me. 

In other words, I was convinced—I had allowed myself to get convinced—that by dint of age and experience and the biological fact that I had birthed him—I had the right to choose the doorway through which my son found happiness. 

But what if there were no such doorway? What if happiness was in the here and now—under an umbrella or on an empty stage with a bird tap-tap-tapping down a slide? 

How did I come to believe that such moments were insufficient; that to live was to act, to chase, to make a point, strident and sure, like everyone else? 

When had I come to assume that my views on a life-well-lived were identical with my son’s? 

When? 

I learnt—it took me time but I learnt—to let go of the visions I had built for my boy. To trust him just enough (and so much, and so completely) that I could view him as the architect of his own delight.

At the college festival, I sat next to my son. There was something so marvellous—how had I missed it?—about a bird with legs like drums. 

This could be our forever—it really could be—here, on a stage, nobody around; a bird. 

Was that a dragonfly hovering above our heads? 

Perhaps.

And it wouldn’t matter.

Dharini Bhaskar is the author of These, Our Bodies, Possessed by Light. She is working on her next novel and can be reached at dharini.b@gmail.com

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