All of us are children once; so this piece does not seek to
portray the child as a monster, but to lend colour to a side in him which is
seldom understood, much less studied. Children till the time that they develop
an irritably rasping adult-child voice and shoot up suddenly leaving them with
big misshapen knobs for knees and a disposition decidedly veering towards the
testy, are generally regarded as lovable cherubs. Babies and young children
attract a kind of affection, wonder and indulgence which I suppose, we accord
to God in some measure.
There is another side to children though – and it is not
pretty. One of the iconic (and most
violent) films in the Western genre, ‘The Wild Bunch’ opens with a powerful
scene. An outlaw gang rides into town past a bunch of children gathered around,
observing something with smiling faces and twinkling eyes. The camera shows a
couple of hapless scorpions whom the children have evidently trapped and thrown
right in the midst of a squirming colony of red ants. We see snatches of this
torturous diversion for the kids; the kids are all smiles and subsequently all
fun having extracted from this macabre exercise, the kids pile straw
on top of the squirming ants and scorpions, and set the insects on fire. This
sequence shown as a motif I suspect, of the patina of mindless violence which
pervades the movie, is also revealing of how children sometimes seek and derive
a pleasure from means which are to say the least, extremely cruel and
evil-hearted.
As a child, I was often subdued, meek and quite dull-minded.
I stumbled and stuttered my way around adults and kids my own age; I guess,
people who knew me a child would have called me ‘colourless’. It was this dullness and absolute uneasiness with
most of the stuff in that life I suppose, which gave rise to an extremely
violent and perverse streak in me. I was filled with the most blood-thirsty
ideas of how to divert my mind, and animals invariably, were the easy targets.
Animals and I confess, some of the people around me too – typically the
servants and their children. If I saw an insect, I would chase it around till I
cornered it and squashed it; if there was any pretty trinket which my younger
sister possessed, I couldn’t wait to forcibly snatch it from her and hide it,
even break the thing sometimes. As I grew up and learnt to observe others, I
saw so many other children who had that same violent, senseless streak –
anything pretty belonging to someone
else had to be defaced, any kid younger had to be bullied and any
creature small enough had to be terrorized. And kids, as the opening of ‘The
Wild Bunch’ suggests, may be most brutal when they are in a mob.
Acclaimed British write Rumer Godden, who possessed such
unique insights into people, particularly children says “….children can turn into monsters”. However, classifying children
as either strictly belonging to the harmless, lovable stereotype or conforming
to the violent and cruel mould, may be wrong and what is more significant,
reeks of a mindset extremely opinionated and unlearned. How then should we view
and treat children? I found the answer in one of Godden’s stories. (A child is a layer cake, just like an adult
but oftentimes with a shining purity which is rarely found elsewhere.) The
story is titiled ‘Lily and the Sparrows’; a group of children thoughtlessly kick
around a tiny peke dog who was the only companion of a dowdy, lonely spinster,
till the poor creature is reduced to a dead, bloody mess. One of the children’s
father apologises to the elderly lady saying, “They didn’t mean it. They didn’t know what they was doing. You mustn’t
think that. Not bad kids really.” Later the old lady, distraught and
extremely grief-struck at the renewed solitariness of her grey life, prays
before God saying, “Father, forgive them
for they don’t know what they do.”
In the sensitive, understanding words of the child’s father
and in the old lady’s sympathetic prayer beseeching forgiveness, I curiously
find redemption for the heartless antics of children and for the angry kid that
was me so long ago.
[CPq has explored the theme of playful cruelty among
children earlier in this piece about boys and house lizards]
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