Vanaja just had to be the best at
everything. Even as a child, she constantly competed with everybody.
She wanted to have the longest plait, the largest bruise, and the
neatest homework. If she jumped rope two hundred times yesterday, she
wouldn't rest until she managed two hundred and ten today.
Her mother had no idea how to handle her
rather malcontent child, and she soon learnt to let Vanaja do
whatever she wanted. Vanaja carried her fierce competitiveness to
college, which, of course had to be the best in the city, and for
which she worked harder than she ever had. But when she got there,
she found that she couldn't top the class as easily as she could at
school, no matter how much she worked at it. So, she compensated by
enrolling herself in all sorts of events, and winning every kind of
prize that could possibly be won.
Right after she graduated (with
distinction,) her parents decided that it was time she got married.
Vanaja made an exhaustive checklist of attributes, and checked with
meticulous care the credentials of every prospective groom against
it. Finally she settled on (and married) the one who scored the best
in terms of education, career, and looks.
She was the perfect homemaker. You
wouldn't find a mote of dust on any surface in the house. She
prepared tasty dishes and served them in the best china she could
afford to buy. Her home was decorated with the choicest articles,
painstakingly selected and bought at excellent bargains from various
handicrafts exhibitions across the city. She was a wonderful
hostess, always having guests over at home and preparing fabulous
spreads. She was always well-turned out, with not a hair out of
place.
And inevitably, she transfered all her
ambitions to her husband. He had to make the best presentations, buy
the best car, rent an apartment in the best complex (until they saved
enough to buy) and just had to be promoted whenever his promotion was
due.
And when her son Akash was born, she
transfered all her expectations onto him. Even at the hospital, she
gushed about how his bawl was the lustiest among the babies born on
the same day as him, how he weighed the most, and how he was the
pinkest of them all.
As he grew, she kept an obsessive watch
over his development, charted his every step, agonized over every
delayed milestone, and exulted at everything that he did ahead of
schedule. She entered him in Beautiful Baby contests and sent his
photographs to diaper companies.
Before the year had gone by, she had
listed out all the babies in their neighbourhood and confirmed that
her son was sleeping, walking and speaking well-ahead of everybody
else.
And then, a couple of years later, Vanaja
met Akhila at the local park. Akhila's son Prajwal was just two
months younger than Akash, and they went to the same school. For the
first time, Vanaja found someone who seemed to be nearly equal, or
did she dare admit, even ahead of Akash in certain respects.
For Vanaja, Prajwal became the embodiment
of all the other boys in the world. To get Akash ahead of Prajwal in
every way – this became her sole ambition in life.
She had to concede that it was a
challenging task, because Prajwal seemed to be naturally good at
everything. He wrote the alphabet and counted upto ten before Akash
did. But Akash learned to count up to 100 before Prajwal did, and
Vanaja basked in her private glory for days after that.
Akash was far more athletic, but Prajwal
was better at colouring, and so Vanaja bought colouring books of all
types and put Akash to the task of colouring with crayons, colour
pencils, and even paints, in anticipation of further challenges to
come.
Prajwal's mother Akhila seemed totally
unaware of this contest, and that annoyed Vanaja. It is really
irksome when you are in intense competition with somebody who doesn't
even know about it.
Everything came to a head when the events
of the Annual Day function of the school was announced. For the
pre-school play, Prajwal was chosen for the lead role of the naughty
child Lord Krishna. Akash was to be a tree.
Vanaja performed the mental equivalent of
throwing herself on the bed and covering herself with a blanket. She
spent entire days wondering where she had gone wrong. She compared
the two boys as they played in the park, looking for any sign that
Prajwal was more charming or attractive than her own son, and having
genuinely not found anything, again got into a twist about what had
gone wrong.
She concluded that in some way, the
teacher had become biased towards Prajwal. Perhaps Akhila had sent a
better card with Prajwal on Teacher's Day? Perhaps she had paid some
underhanded compliment to the teacher at one of the parent-teacher
meetings? Perhaps....
This wasn't in Vanaja's hands – that
much she realized. So she resigned herself to make Akash the best
tree that anybody had ever seen.
She bought him a brown T-shirt and brown
trousers to represent the tree trunk. Then she made a large
cardboard cutout of a tree's foliage, with a circular opening in the
middle for Akash's face. She scoured the hobby shops for felt of
the best and brightest green, and cut out actual leaf-shaped pieces
and pasted them all onto the cutout. She attached red balls to it to
represent fruits.
When she was finished, it truly was the
nicest tree that you would have ever seen.
The evening of the performance arrived,
and Vanaja sat somewhere in the middle of the audience, camera in
hand, waiting to capture for posterity the most beautiful tree in
pre-school play history.
The characters came on to stage, little
huts, trees, and tiny children dressed as cows and cowherds and
village lasses – all of them forming a background for the village
scene in which Krishna, the butter-thief was being reprimanded for
his mischief.
"They have put Akash right in the
middle of the stage," Vanaja whispered to her husband, who
nodded. Someone sitting in the row behind her said, "Look at
that wonderful tree, with the red balls that look like fruits."
Vanaja glowed.
But in spite of herself, she had to admit
that Prajwal looked charming, with the little tiara and the peacock
feather stuck into it, and that stung her.
On the stage, the play progressed - a
group of little girls dressed in sarees scolded Krishna for stealing
all their butter and curds.
Just then, one of the boys in the play,
dressed as a cowherd, got bored with standing around, and was
attracted by the round red balls hanging from Akash's branches. The
little cowherd sauntered across the stage, went up to Akash, and
plucked one of the "fruits."
Akash's hands were not free, and so he
stuck his tongue out and made a fierce face at the cowherd. The
cowherd plucked one more fruit, and started bouncing them on stage.
A titter went through the audience.
Akash was angry now. He lifted one leg and kicked the cowherd on the
shin. The cowherd turned and kicked Akash back.
A few people laughed. Akash tore off the
tree from his shoulders, and hit the cowherd with it. The cowherd
pummelled Akash with his fists, and in the next moment, the two tots
were rolling on the ground, screaming and clawing and pulling at each
other's hair.
The audience was in an uproar.
Meanwhile, the play was still going on, Krishna had being tied to a
heavy stone mortar as punishment for his mischief, and he was
dragging it along, but nobody paid any attention to it. All eyes
were on the tree and the cowherd until a teacher ran out from behind
the curtain, and dragged the two little fighters away.
The audience laughed and clapped, while
the play ended unceremoniously.
"Disgraceful," muttered
Vanaja's husband. "Why did he have to fight like that?"
But Vanaja did not hear him. She was
floating on a cloud of supreme triumph. Nobody would have even
noticed Prajwal. Akash was the star of the show.
***
