My Childhood.

As a child, my parents always tried various ways teach me to be a better person. Force and violence were the most popular.

My dad would threaten me with "I am going to stick a pipe down your throat, so that it expands and you would eat faster!!" (I was a slow eater. VERY SLOW). Had I been smarter at that age, I would have proved my Dad wrong then and there and he would have never had the face to tell me such childish nonsense again.

But I was/am not. So that threat worked. But try as I may, I could not meet their timing. It became like a challenge for me. I knew my plate had to be empty. So I would drop food all over the table in a feeble attempt to make the food on my plate look less. Sometimes, rearrangement helped. Like if it was rice, I would spread it thinly all over the plate, so it looked like (to me at least) I had eaten most of it, and only a few grains were left.

My mum often got sick of me. She would look at me, her eyes wide with anger and I knew that meant I was going to get the beating of my life, soon. I could cry just looking at her. She was the personification of one of the crazy tribal Goddess who will set me on fire just looking at me.

But after the multiple beatings for various reasons, (she used to strike the days I used to get beaten by her on the calendar and for most months, all the days would be marked.) I had accepted the fate. Like when she threatened to beat me, I would give heave a sigh, take a deep breath and accept my fate.

Getting the beating of your life is a normal part of an Indian child's life. It really is. And I had accepted it...(But until I did, I truly believed with my heart and soul that I was just some child that my parents had picked up from the garbage dump)

Then one day, she got really angry and threw me out of the house. I should have walked out. (I was 9). I knew I could be a Bollywood star, in search of her future. I could see the captions of the movie in my mind...If, by any weird chance that did not work out, I could beg. I had seen others doing it. I was thin enough to pass off as underfed.

I should have just turned around and told my mother she did not know what she was missing by kicking me out. But instead, I stood outside my door, crying my eyes out. Banging on the door. Knocking on my neighbor's door, begging them to let me in...so I could embarrass my mother or in case, my mother decided to really kick me out of the house, I could perhaps earn the sympathy of my Chinese neighbors and they might adopt me, seeing how pretty a child I was, how innocent and how wrongly judged.

But my own mother took me in. After leaving me out for 3 minutes (but at age 9 those 3 minutes seemed like 2 hours), she pulled me into the house by my ears and told me to clean up the mess I had made.

I still think that kicking me out of the house for playing with all her kitchen utensils, trying to make Chapati with wheat flour and Johnson baby powder, leaving wheat flour all over the kitchen floor, making dough and sticking it all over the kitchen walls IS NOT JUSTIFIED!

I mean, I knew my mistake and that's why I had poured soap water all over the kitchen walls and floor, to start cleaning up the mess I had made (I have always valued my integrity).
It was not my fault that my mother did not see the huge puddle of water on the floor and fell.

It was her mistake. If anything, I should have scolded her for not looking before walking.

But such unfair beatings are part of the Indian child's life. And I know I will get my chance to discipline my children as well.

Patience...Patience...I will pay it forward.