-Brian Mendonça
The flat across ours is shut and bolted. The windows
shuttered. There are no clothes
fluttering on the line this morning. The
children below who used to cycle are not seen or heard any more. The people
have gone away.
The family had a helper to manage the three small kids. This
helper was scheduled to go back to her hometown to get married – but then Lockdown happened end-March. Since then she has been stuck in Goa. I suppose
she did the rounds exploring means to get back home and get her life back on
the rails. Nothing worked.
So she and her family decided to go back. On their own. With
no transport services operating they decided to walk the 177 kms. to Hubli.
Even as I write they must be on the road.
Without a helper, things were becoming unmanageable. So the
mother scooped up her children and the family hot-footed it to her own mother’s
place in Calangute. There, her parents would offer help, and the house-helps
were there as well.
Meanwhile Dwayne (9) drapes himself on the divan in the hall
and looks out desultorily at the shut
doors and windows –stark in their whiteness -
willing his friend to come back. Every evening he used to wait for him
to come down to play. They would cycle
together around the block, and would go to school and return together.
Luckily Dwayne is a voracious reader. But his stack of Wimpy
Kid books is not something I endorse.
The dour humour paints a wretched picture of life in The Getaway. The illustrations are sometimes offensive.
‘But for now, I am stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons,’ complains Greg
out of the blurb of Greg Heffley’s
Journal. A cartoon is also provided showing three students who are made to
look nerdy. Arrows point to them saying
‘MORONS.’ It is only a step away from normalizing name-calling in real life.
In Cabin Fever Greg
filches his gift - a video game - from under the Christmas tree and watches it ‘after
Mom and Dad went to bed.’ In the next page he sends a mail from his mom’s email
account and impersonates her asking all the relatives what gifts they will be
giving him for Christmas.
Wimpy kid stories are set within a privileged cultural context
that is more Yankee than Indian. This leads to readers having a disdain for
Indian content and books which are less slickly produced. ‘They are boring,’
says Dwayne.
The divide between those who can afford the Wimpy Kid books (Rs.
350 each) and read them - and those who can do neither - grows wider.
Happily, Queenie picked up a stack of books from the
Evergreen Stories series by Sunrise Publishers, Delhi priced at an affordable
Rs. 65 each. These books have full pages to colour as well.
Maybe there could be a story of a child of Lockdown 3 – a
child who walked to Hubli.
------------------------------------------------------------Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, Panjim, Goa on Sunday, 17th May 2020. Pix (top) migrant workers denied transport walking home, near Anand Vihar railway station, Delhi, courtesy theweek(dot)in; (bottom) courtesy brown.sbfs(dot)co.uk
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