It seemed like an innocuous chancing upon of two stranger kids in the passageway of the AC 1 compartment of a train, both, on their way to the ‘hills’ for a short break with their respective families. Until words floated into my ears which made me look up from the book I was engrossed in, suddenly alert and all ears.
‘Are you a Muslim?’ asked the girl in pink Barbie tank top and purple tights, not very much older than my six year old daughter.
I could not see my daughter from where I was sitting, but the awkward pause in the conversation told me she probably was fumbling for words, and even more, for getting a hold over the ‘meaning’ of what she had been asked.
‘I don’t know, I’m not sure…I’ll ask my mother when I go in…’ Something in the way she replied, the tentativeness, the volume, the diffidence, told me instantly without even looking at her that my otherwise super confident cocksure girl was not comfortable fielding this query.
‘How dumb of you not to know even this!’ said the other girl gently swinging from one of the coupe window iron bars, or some such. ‘How old are you?’
‘Six,’ said my daughter, the discomfiture still writ large in her tone.
‘GOD! So old and still don’t know whether you are a Hindu or a Muslim! But anyway, I hope you are not one M.’
‘Why?’ came another feeble word from my perplexed daughter.
‘Because they are all bad people. Very very bad people. Paapi, as my maasi calls them…’ she said giggling and grimacing as if a terrible stink had suddenly whiffed through the passageway.
‘What’s paapi?’
I wanted to get up and intervene, not because I felt my daughter’s mind was being fed with an unqualified bullshit which had no business being there, but because I felt the other girl needed to be shown the prejudice that had been forced down hers.
But I waited a while. It was a long journey, and the conversation could wait. It was more important for me to first gauge the extent of this malaise in her young impressionable mind. However, there was an abrupt break in this exchange because breakfast arrived and the girls ran into their respective cabins to eat. My daughter whispered in my ears, ‘Mom, am I a Muslim? I don’t want to be one.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Sejal says Muslims are bad people as they kill and eat cows. Tell me no please. What are Muslims?’
Distressing as it is to see the origins of the deep-rooted seeds of intolerance lying very much (also) among the so called educated elites, one shudders at the mere thought of the extent of the spread of this mindless blinding bias. Sejal is the quintessential urban educated child with a set of parents both with plum corporate jobs who spend close to a lakh a year on their daughter’s ‘good’ schooling needs. That an eight year old may have already formed such a staunch anti-Muslim opinion in her mind is also a telling sign of the all pervasive subliminal reach of this conditioning. The seemingly innocuous tidbits that work at slowly poisoning the mind are all around us, waiting to be picked up and assimilated. It’s simply in the way you and I believe and talk and discuss and listen. The specific targets might change – Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Harijan, Biharis, Madrasis, Dalits, Pakistanis, Chinkis, blacks, whites, whatever – but the insidious nature and sting of the venom remains largely the same.
When I later sat with the two girls to help them dig deeper into the purport of what they were discussing, I felt I succeeded sooner than I’d expected. Children absorb information at lighting-speed, but they also are willing to squeeze out the unwanted and reabsorb the desirable that much faster. Since Sejal had grown up hearing that Muslims are sinners for slaughtering cows and eating beef, that was the only line of argument her mind could forward.
‘What’s wrong with eating beef,’ I asked her.
‘My dadi says it’s a sin because when they kill the cow, who will give milk to the calf?’
‘Do you eat chicken and mutton at home?’ I asked. She nodded. I pointed out to her that she or her family were guilty of the same crime that she was accusing the Muslims of. Wouldn’t the goat’s little one also not be denied his mamma’s milk if we went ahead and ate her up?
The intense yet faraway look in Sejal’s eyes told me her young mind was trying hard to distill this new way of looking at the situation. She saw sense in what was being said, just as she’d seen reason in what she’d heard earlier. But something about the way the facts were put forth before her assured her that there perhaps was more sense in what she was hearing now than what she’d learnt earlier.
That point onward, it my task became easier. I sat there explaining how certain beings are sacred to one religion, and not to another. How different religions adopt different ways and means of getting to that same one goal of loving and getting closer to their respective Gods. The girls sat there, with rapt attention, oblivious of the train thundering through a long tunnel.
Thus far, I had still not addressed my daughter’s concern: was she a Muslim?
And so, after having sat with the girls for a while, I posed them a couple of questions, one to each: Would you still rather your new train friend were not a Muslim? And would you still rather you were not a Muslim?
The replies, not surprisingly, to both from both was a spontaneous No.
And then, turning to my daughter, I told her she was not a Muslim.
‘Oh, doesn’t matter mom,’ she shrugged. ‘Would I still have you and daddy if we all were Muslims?’
Yes, I said.
‘Then it really doesn’t matter mom!’
A shorter version of this piece appeared in Tehelka magazine, October 1, 2011.
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main50.asp?filename=hu011011PERSONAL.asp
