JOIN USCan a four year old take a stand against capital punishment? Yes, said the young mother I met at the book shop.
Apparently her four year old got very disturbed if a story ended with a killing and wanted that everybody, including the baddies, should ‘live happily ever after’.
The mother added that since all the classic children’s tales followed the formula of the good characters eliminating the bad ones in the end, she needed to alter the endings in her narration.
The ripped stomach of the wolf that swallowed Red Riding Hood’s grandma got stitched back.
The bad lion, tricked by the rabbit, got helped out of the well by the animals after he promised to behave.
Years later I came by another four year old who ruled that the vanquished villain in the epic be spared his life.
It was a win-win arrangement.
The young parents were free to stay up late and enjoy the concert at the hotel. And I got to baby sit the kid, tell stories and play grandma for a few hours. We were co-tourists on a holiday package tour who had bonded in the short period of travel together.
“I want the story of Rama and Ravana,” Nikhil declared at the very outset and that made my job of zeroing in on one easy.
The child obviously was familiar with the epic and wanted my narration to begin with the golden deer.
With a good idea of what parts of the epic held his interest, I moved quickly to the final battle scene.
Thanks to Ramanand Sagar, I managed to describe the fight scenes with full drama and had my audience wide eyed and quiet.
“On the tenth day of the fight,” I said with a flourish, “Rama released one special arrow. The arrow split into ten small arrows. And each one of them cut off one head of the rakshasa king!” “No!” said Nikhil with urgency in his voice. “Rama cut off only nine heads. Ravana needed one head for breathing.”
“But,” I said, “Ravana took away Sita and troubled everybody. So Rama had to kill him.”
“No” insisted Nikhil, “Rama just took away the bow and arrows and chariot and everything from Ravana and...” The boy paused here to think of other ways of punishing the one who was undeniably bad. “...and he put Ravana in Jail and locked him up forever.”
Was it natural compassion or did the defence stem from an acknowledgement? ‘Hey, I too have been bad many times. So let us not be too harsh!’
Soon Nikhil would move to the next inevitable stage and stay there for years, addicted to the sound, light and action on the screen.
He would derive enormous thrill shooting down trespassers at sight, and getting better and better at being the terminator.
But how would he be once he crosses that phase as well and becomes an adult? Would the empathy return? Would he have the conviction to course his life story based on his convictions?