A wonderful piece of writing by my sister!!!! Wanted to share this with all.
Being confined to my home for the past 2-3 days due to ill-health, gave me some precious time with my sweet little niece. She is 6 months old and it is a pleasure to simply watch her do nothing !
There is a saying in tamil (or so I hear !) that babies and the sea are 2 things that you can never grow tired of watching. How very true !!
Life is very simple for her. Her only tasks are getting fed, sleeping and playing in between the previous two tasks. Her emotions seem to be very simple too. When she is hungry or sleepy or is not comfortable due to any other reason, she cries and when we make faces or rock her gently or mouth absurd sounding words of endearment, she laughs. Complexities like greed or jealousy or anger have not yet crept in.
She is amused by every single thing and displays her curiosity about an object by putting it into her mouth immediately. She never seems to doubt the capacity of her mouth and makes a go at trying to bite at anything irrespective of the object’s size. To her, my mom’s nose is no different from my dad’s slipper. My palm and a speck of dirt on the floor seem to appear the same size to her simple mind.
To her, the whole world probably seems like a big bag of toys, made to amuse her ! Put an object in front of her to draw her interest and she immediately tries to crawl towards it, but always manages to swim away from it and this does not seem to bother her. To her, there is no pressure in achieving targets. Everything is fun. If she does not get the object, she turns her attention towards something within her reach.
She seems to need no reason to be happy. She lets out yells of pleasure all of a sudden and shouts at the top of her voice simply to hear herself ! Simple things like calling out her name makes her scream with laughter.
She eats to satisfy her hunger, not to please her taste-buds alone ! She can still not speak in words but it appears as though words are not even necessary for her. She speaks with her eyes and we understand her completely. Her complete vocabulary consists of sounds like ‘tha tha’, ‘goooaa’ and many more words for which no alphabets exist.
I suddenly realize that my headaches have not been haunting me for some time now. Worries about my work or on-site visit simply dissolve into thin air, the minute I enter the house. All I want to do is watch her play or even sleep. Calm descends over me immediately. Minor domestic squabbles seem like bad dreams. No one at home is able to stay angry for long, since the minute one sees her, everything else is forgotten.
I am now working on filling myself up with her and her actions. I leave in 2 weeks and I am not going to see her for another year ! She will be cute for sure, after a year too, but would have started her journey towards a not-too-innocent adulthood. This time with her is precious and I wish I were equipped with photographic/videographic memory that I can use to record every minute with her and replay it over and over again when I am all alone in the land of plenty!!
BTW, you can visit her blog link at "https://rathi-says.blogspot.com/"
