By Vijay Phanshikar :
 
    “Powdery rain,
    Hazy hill in distance ...
     ... Father’s stories ! ”
- Self

EVERY child has this memory -- etched indelibly on the mind. Father’s stories -- and mother’s and grandmother’s as well -- give every child a company for life. No story ever leaves the memory bank. No lesson learned then ever goes stray. Such is the power of those stories. When the afternoon is wet with powdery rain and thin haze obliterates the view of the hill in the distance, the stories any elder tells sitting at the window, get engraved on the mind’s slate, ingrained in one’s being. Just as every word counts, every pause also does. Long silences, long stares into nothingness in the thin rain outside, warm breaths of the elders (on whose lap the little one sits) brushing one’s cheeks -- everything has a special presence in the scene. Everything matters. Nothing else matters.

 

 

For, in those stories the little ones find everything -- valour, courage, humour, music, past, present, future, dreams ... what have you ! So, everything in the story matters. Nothing else has any meaning in those electric, mesmerising moments which often become the child’s lifelong treasure that she -- she -- never wants to forget. The rain outside has so many characters emerging in a psychedelic manner. The hazy hill in the distance, too, forms the sanctuary of imagination for the little one. For, from that haze appear gods and fairies and even demons -- and then all those characters assume a realness that can never be erased from the child’s memory. The details may become hazy, all right, as time passes. But, on this is sure, that the little child in any adult has an uncanny ability to come alive in passage of years of life later on. Those stories may never have any great and verbose sermons, but each does leave on the child a distinct an imprint of right and wrong and an innate ability to make the choice.

 

Later, as vagaries of life torment the individual, those little non-lessons wake one’s sense of personal morality and hold the child in a safe embrace of the family-elders who spent so much time and energy telling stories when it rained outside. My father’s stories were enlivened with strange, verbal incarnations of gods and demons and animals and heroes and brave girls and courageous boys. Invariably, as I sat listening to those stories, our pets, too, would sit around listening in rapt attention -- as if they understood every word, every nuance (which we could guess from their moans and sighs). Even as life’s years act dauntingly on one’s spirit, those afternoons behind a glassed window when a powdery rain danced outside, come alive in memory. Eyes, then, get misty, throat chokes, and face and arms experience goose bumps. Such is the power to those moments.