The heart is a child

“Baba, my friends were saying that little kids died in ‘Conticut’!” Noori, the 1^st grader, was quite charged when she related that to me. I, as usual, was oblivious to that factoid although I work in mainstream America. I mostly work night shifts so when I picked Noori up from school it was technically bedtime for me. Some blame could be laid on the 3^rd flu-like illness I was suffering through in a 5 week period. Being an ER doc in a busy children’s hospital, the frequent colds were the necessary evil I was exposed to. I had loaded myself up on multiple medications to control my symptoms partly in an attempt to survive that night‘s shift in the ER.

The 1^st query that arose in the dazed and drugged mind of mine was: “Noori, what or where is Conticut?” The massacre of the children took a back seat for the moment.

“I don’t know! But there were lots of guns and blood – Ella said so”. Ella was Noori’s equally excitable and worldly friend.

It was then that my mind gained some clarity. She was not fibbing. Something serious had happened and it was worth investigating. The last time Noori had given me an update about dying and death had also been ‘for real’. Then she was a kindergartner and she had relayed to me that baby Avery, the child with the bucket list, had died.  Avery was well known to her and the rest of her kindergarten gang as the baby’s mother happened to be their class teacher.    

It wasn’t hard to feign ignorance, so after distracting Noori from her somewhat morbid fascination with gore we started our trek home. It was then that I received a phone call from my work place. The first dreaded thought that crossed my mind was that it was the ER calling me for back up duty. It wasn’t. It was Ayesha, my wife, calling from the child psychiatry clinic at the same hospital. The joy of sharing one’s workplace with one’s spouse is a story for another day. Ayesha, somewhat frantic, gave me an update about what had happened that morning in Connecticut. That explained Noori’s description of the events. I told Ayesha that I had already been updated by a 6-year-old about the nation’s most recent episode of inexplicably senseless violence. She was not all that enthused that Noori had been the messenger. Ayesha was saddened, as was I, about the violence against innocent elementary school children. She had been contacted by a local radio station to issue a statement about how parents could address anxiety in their own kids stemming from the abominable act on the East Coast.  

After Ayesha hung up, I looked at Noori who was lost in her own world while walking home, intermittently stopping to pick wild flowers from the sidewalk. I thought about what had happened. Kids in a primary school of Connecticut being gunned down might have been an anomalous, random event. However, when kids in 1^st grade in Houston, far away from the site of the massacre, heard about it, the fear of something similar happening in their own school would be palpable. 

I didn’t think it was lack of gun control at the root of it. Nor did I think that a putative increase in psychiatric illness in teenagers, adolescents and young adults could adequately explain it. I thought that societal fabric was tenuous the world over. So called educated and enlightened societies like the U.S. were struggling with random acts of violence as were presumably uneducated and unenlightened societies in the 3^rd world. However, these debates matter little when several kids in an elementary school in an affluent neighborhood of the U.S. are gunned down, or when a single child is gunned down for her advocacy work for education in a rugged poor locality in northern Pakistan. In either case, humanity, irrespective of enlightenment, has failed miserably.

As I was struggling with the loss of innocence in mind of the precious child, I heard Noori humming the lyrics of a Bollywood song as she skipped around, ‘Dil to bacha hai ji – the heart is a child…’ But it was the following line that connected with me even more ‘Thora kacha hai ji – it’s a bit naïve..’   

I was brought back to ‘reality’ by another child - my own. A reminder to protect her innocence and to cherish the precious time I had been given to be with her.

[from the Kindergarten Diaries]

Acknowledgment: This article was first published in the Houston Inner Looper Newspaper (January 2013).