The Home of Childhood

Basti starts off with the child protagonist describing the sky and the earth as pristine and pure; precisely this, for the protagonist, is a strong indication of the fact that his time was not far removed from that of the ancient times of the fantastical mythologies. He traces the call of the peacock to have come from Brindaban; he, upon seeing a woodpecker, thinks that it had delivered a letter to the Queen of Sheba’s palace and that it was on its way back to King Solomon’s castle and he associates the black stripes on the back of a squirrel to the “mark of Ramchandar-ji’s fingers”. In his fascination with these mythologies and his subsequent linking of them with the present, he effectively injects in the present the fantastical nature of these mythologies, something that made the present, for him, very much exciting to live in.

For the child protagonist fiction, therefore, became facts and those facts became his ways of rationalizing. Take for example his perceptions that elephant could fly and that they hatched out of eggs. When his grandmother provided scientifically rational reasons to prove his perceptions wrong, he just defended his position on the basis that because Bhagat-ji said so it must be true; Bhagat-ji was an old man who, by virtue of the sacred thread around his neck and the caste-mark on his forehead, seemed ancient and hence, to the child protagonist, was a much more sound source of knowledge. That he took fiction to mean factual information is also pretty much evident from the fact that he believed that earthquakes occurred because of the reasons put forward by his father and Bhagat-ji; the deeply fictitious nature of these reasons and their deep roots in different traditions are indicative of his willingness to gulp reality up as a fantastical story.

When sounds of the slogans destroy the flow of memory for the protagonist of the present, one instantaneously realizes that he is very much not at home in the present; why else would he choose to divulge in his memories as opposed to prepare his lecture for the next day? The fact that he chose to, yet again, delve into his memory, despite the fact that he had responsibilities (that is the lecture he had to prepare) in the present is an indication that for him his “forest of memories” was home. That combined with the fact that he obsessed over his own beginning, a time in which his perceptions of the world were most pure and unburdened by strife, is an indication that for him, his childhood, by mere virtue of its simplicity, formed the most stable home.