| rauniyar |
Posted
on 08-Apr-04 06:46 AM
hi all,
the length of the article runs little long, but it is worth reading.
Like father like daughter I say.
Uhi Rajeev
CT, Amrika
Daddy, read !
By SAMRAT UPADHYAY
- At three years of age, my daughter loves to read. More accurately, she loves it when I read to her. But both are the same: when I read to my daughter, her engagement is so animate, so filled with pleasure and wonder that it’s irrelevant who deciphers the letters and sounds out the words. Something magical happens. The sounds emerge from my throat, spread in the air between us, and my daughter’s awesome expression (I can see the words hitting her cheeks, the corner of her eyes) tells the rest of the story.
“Daddy, read!” she commands, throwing a book on my lap, while I’m sitting on the sofa, tired after a day of work, and I rouse myself to oblige. My thinking: even if I fail in every aspect of being a father, I can die happy if I can instill, and sustain, in my daughter this love of reading. I will have given her a wand that’ll light up to reveal alternate paths in her life.
I began reading to my daughter when she was still in her mother’s womb. Yes, yes, idealistic and a wee bit sentimental, but I’d read a magazine article or two about fetuses listening to violins and growing up to be musical geniuses. Or maybe I’d seen a movie with, let’s say, Susan Sarandon where she reads to her unborn, and the child exits the womb singing sonnets about love and a red red rose. So far my daughter hasn’t exhibited signs of being such a prodigy, but she loves to read, and, in this rapid-image world of television and video games, that in itself is miraculous.
The moments when I’m too busy to oblige, she picks one of her books and pretends to read, a story different from the one on the page because although she knows her letters, she hasn’t yet learned to put them together to form words. She does know how to concoct stories out of the haphazard scribbling she has scrawled on a piece of paper, and I have a wonderful videotape of her reading to her mother one such story. At the end of every sentence she cocks her head and repeats the sentence in a whisper to her mother, as if there were an alternate story being told within her story—as if without the mysterious whispering her mother would not understand her tale’s complexity and subtleties.
My daughter especially loves those stories where the imagination goes berserk—stories that were sadly lacking in my own childhood in Kathmandu. Apart from those in the heavy-handed school texts, not many children’s stories in Nepali were available to me when I was growing up in the sixties and the early seventies. Radio Nepal had a children’s program in the afternoon, but it was, if I recall, not very child-friendly. The person talking to the naniharu was at best dull, and at worst, patronizing. And I’m learning, in my challenging days as a father, that if there’s anything children hate, it’s being patronized. If my voice starts taking on a condescending tone, my daughter’s eyes turn dark and narrow, and I can instantly hear her thoughts: Who do you think you are?
I have a faint memory of receiving as a child a book translated into English from Russian, carrying stories about boys and girls with names such as Nikita and Vladimir who have adventures during a family vacation or who discover something strange in the woods behind their house. But by the time I was in second grade, my reading diet consisted of the legend Gulshan Nanda. My mother, like many educated Nepali women of her generation before television in Nepal, loved to read Hindi upanyas, and, since reading is contagious, I too devoured the novels of Nanda. So, I had read his novel Kati Patang before I watched the movie version starting Rajesh Khanna and Asha Parekh. Because a child’s mind is much more open to texts, without some of the nagging questions posed by an adult mind (am I smart enough to get it? what symbols are being used? is this something I want to invest my time in?), I deeply absorbed Nanda’s superb sense of drama, something that still informs my writing today.
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