A couple of days ago, I was talking on the phone in the parking area of my office when I spotted white flecks on the trunk of a tree a few steps away. Immediately curious, I walked towards the tree, between two parked cars, and realized, to my delight, that what I could see only as specks from the short distance, were actually small mushrooms growing all along the trunk. They were like small pearly white sea shells, sticking perpendicularly out of the bark. I followed the line of mushrooms up the trunk and saw that they went upwards quite a bit. (In looking up, I also saw three massive jackfruits on a tree next door.) Back to the tree in front of me, I saw that there was a second variety of fungus—also pearly white, but more like a thick carpet to look at and touch—growing on another branch.

And then, when I looked down, towards the base of the trunks, I saw tiny mushrooms--very delicate, translucent stalks, and small delicate caps with dark stripes—growing there. I was soon on my haunches, peering at them, growing increasingly fascinated, oblivious to other people walking around in the parking lot, casting me strange looks. I even went around a bit to peer at the trunks of the other trees—there are many of them—to see if there were mushrooms growing there.

This past summer, I have found more madhobilata creepers in Bombay than I ever imagined. I have become so good at it that I would first detect its intoxicating fragrance, and then look frantically around to spot the plant. I always found them… in the busiest of crossroads, in sleepy bylanes, in the narrow, congested road through a slum… they are hardy that way. The first one I spotted was near my office—I had actually seen it about three years ago while walking to the station. It grows in the neighbouring building—the one with the jackfruits—and spills over the boundary railing. Every season when it is in bloom, I have stopped and smelled its heady fragrance every time I have walked past. Passers-by have stared at me. And then, one evening, I saw a woman who gave me that what-on-earth-is-she-doing look and then stopped to smell the flowers herself. I smiled.

Now that it is raining, I often stand at my widow watching the pigeons. On the roof of the neighbouring building, where water collects in small pools on top of the plastic sheets covering the terrace, the pigeons put up some of the most entertaining displays of their love for water. They spread their wings in different ways, in different directions, letting the rain seep in between the dense feathers; they squat like roosting hens in the pools and refuse to budge when some other bird wants a share of it; they dunk their heads in the pools while furiously splashing their wings in it. They always make me smile. Like they have for so many years.

There are many people I know who would never—ever in their lifetimes—notice things like these. They can barely tell the difference between a cow and a buffalo, or a hibiscus and a lily, or one bird from another; they will not be able to say if there are stray dogs on their street (unless they hate them and want them killed), or if there is a tree in their building compound. And, if you really have some kind of intellectual debate about it, you could argue that this is really no big deal; that these are, after all, such ordinary and mundane things around us; there are always so many more important things to think about and do in our important lives. You would, perhaps, be right.

But, fact is, if you don’t have the capacity to see this world around us—this world where mushrooms and jackfruits grow on trees in the midst of corporate buildings and where pigeons play in the water and fragrant flowers cascade down creepers along smoke-choked roads—you are missing out on something truly incredible.

Something that makes us, humans, as much a part of the world as the mushrooms and pigeons; a world most of us never really acknowledge, let alone appreciate.

I had written this four-and-a-half years ago, probably in a fit of exasperation. A lot of things have happened since, most of which makes me believe more in what I wrote.

***

This is something that is still really dawning on me: A realization that parents usually have very little idea about what their children are really about.

I mean, think of it. The mother of a 35-year-old man lets out an exasperated (even exaggerated) sigh and says, “But why doesn’t he like the clothes I buy for him?” You would think that in those 35 years she would have, kind of, figured out why. She hasn't. Clearly. And I fail to understand how.
But buying clothes is something relatively harmless, sometimes even amusing. There is serious stuff to worry about.

So, her – some 30-year-old’s – parents got separated when she was about eight or nine and she lived with her mother. I knew this and never asked. But there were her other friends who would – initially harmlessly and unabashedly and then with winks and elbow nudges – ask where her father was and she would make up some excuse. Perhaps something like him being out of town on work. He remained out of town on work for more than a decade or so.

Would it not have been easier for her to say her parents did not stay together any more? No. Not for an eight-year-old perhaps, especially if her mother never quite told her what to tell her friends if they asked. Did her mother never realize that her daughter’s friends would increasingly get curious? Or did she think children don’t get curious about each others families? I am not quite sure and I will perhaps never know what her mother thought, if anything, about it. All I can see are the effects.

And then there's another friend. Another childhood and teenage spent shutting out utter mayhem in the family. Another life being spent trying to not repeat the parents' blunders. And the parents? Utterly bewildered by these reactions. It seems that parents live their lives under the delusion that their children don't understand anything. That just because they usually keep to themselves--and the more the discord in the family, the more the children keep to themselves--they are oblivious to what is being wreaked around them.

Most people seem to have children and go through the motions of raising them – feed them, clothe them, send them to school (make sure they wear monkey caps as soon as it is November if they are Bengali) – without quite figuring out the effect (the damage, rather, in many cases) of their actions, or the lack of them.

From our parents we inherit their fears, prejudices, likes, dislikes, family feuds and, the worst of them all, their failures. And then we spend the rest of our lives proving we will not make their worst fears come true. That’s seriously such a waste of a life: To spend it disproving a non-existent theory.

Earlier, I would laugh at how the Americans were weird in blaming the strangest of things on childhood trauma. We’d laugh and say, yeah right, if a guy picks up a gun and shoots children in a school (and that still seems to be happening in the US), it must be because he was denied an ice cream when he was four. Now, I don’t laugh any more.

Things I was told as a child – apparently innocuous stuff – are etched in my mind. I remember the scene in which the line was delivered, the setting, the audience and most of all, what I felt. In some cases, I still feel what I felt then. They still sting as much as they stung then. But no, all these are not unpleasant memories. Some are truly joyous. They still make me want to sing, as they had done then. But yes, I remember. And I am sure I am not alone in this remembering.

What surprises me further is that parents themselves remember what their parents had told them as children. Some of these are bitter memories too. And they, too, feel the same sting they did decades ago. Why would parents with nasty memories of their own want their children to have similar memories when they grow up? Is it one of those traits in humans by which we want to inflict – knowingly or otherwise – the pain we have endured themselves? Or is it that everyone is so caught up in being a parent, that they forget what they themselves were like when they were children?

I can’t help but wonder if parents think at all about what they are giving their children – monkey caps apart.

I had never really thought about this aspect of our lives, our nature, before. And then I found myself talking with people about what their childhoods were like. I have always been quite happy with mine and almost everything about it. That does not mean everything was great and everyone was happy. Far from it, but nonetheless. I heard friends I thought I knew say things I didn’t know, or even thought possible, about their childhoods; things their parents had said or not said, done or not done, realized or not realized. If, somewhere in our thirties, we wince at the thought of a casual, unthinking comment made more than two decades ago, then it is not something to laugh away.

And now, the flipside: The parents.

They can be quite a traumatized and confused lot themselves, but, more often than not, they are too proud, adamant, scared and old to admit any of it. They had their own cranky parents, and crankier in-laws, to deal with; they usually became parents at an age at which we knew little beyond the college campus; access to anything they wanted – information, jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, counseling, friendly advice – was far more difficult than for most of us; and society at large was still far, far more stuck-up.

How often have we seen our parents frightened, shit scared? I recall one solitary instance. But does that mean they were never scared? Of course they were. Of so many things, I am sure. But how come we grew up thinking that our parents are these invincible beings who can never do wrong, and have the correct answer to every problem that life chucks at them? Now that we are adults, we will (hopefully) understand if we are told what their fears are, their doubts and uncertainties are. As children, too, we would have understood. Children are not dumb. They are just small. Not stupid.

Parents and children don’t usually see each other as human beings. We just see each other in the roles that we are born into or have thrust upon us. And we spend our lives rarely being able to live beyond these roles.

Rather unfortunate.