Veranda Tales-LEGO wars
Storytelling has been an integral part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to stories during the hot summer evenings and nights with my cousins. Mothers and grandmothers would gather all of us children for story time. It was usually pitch dark except for a very faint light coming from the flickering candle. Power cuts were as frequent as the hot and humid summer days. We all spread out on a cool concrete floor or bamboo mats on the veranda intently listening to fascinating stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, and peasants alike. Stories about love, life, families, and people entertained and taught us life skills. These stories transported us to distant worlds, strange yet familiar. Often the same story told by two people sounded different as storytellers added new twists and turns adding their personal style and flair to the stories.
Storytelling wasn’t limited to summer evenings and bedtime. I was surrounded by adults who didn’t pass up an opportunity to share their wisdom using the art of storytelling. These rich vibrant oral traditions include songs, poems, stories, and సామెతలు (Sametalu are proverbs in Telugu). Men and women sing songs as they work in the fields, grinding grains and spices and doing other daily chores at their homes. Stories are often used to teach important life lessons, interpersonal skills, and survival skills. These stories and the time spent listening to them made our lives richer leaving an impression on me. This series is all about reliving those memories as I share these stories.
విడవమంటే పాముకి, కరవమంటే కప్పకి కోపం (Vidavamante paamuki kopam, Karavamante kappaki kopam)
Our home transformed when my spouse and I had our first child. Our family room was reasonably clean without clutter. That changed overnight when we brought our two day old little one home. For the first few months we were very busy feeding, changing diapers, and walking around rocking the baby all hours of the day and night. I didn’t have time to warm food sitting in the refrigerator, leave alone cooking. We turned into zombies getting barely six hours of sleep every single night for the first four to six months after our little one was born.
The six hour sleep was interrupted once every hour and half to feed, change, and rock this precious creature whose communication skills included different tones of crying and gurgling noises. We were getting better at deciphering the differences between, “I am hungry”, "I am thirsty”, “My diaper is dirty”, “ or “ I want a hug” before the vocalization began.
Our house transformed into a haven full of soft toys, board books, and alphabet blocks. Soon large LEGO blocks joined the party. As our baby grew, the size of LEGO pieces shrank while the number of boxes of LEGO pieces went up year over year. We had LEGO pieces everywhere in the house and they were spread out on the floor where the LEGO creations took shape. It was hard to walk around without stepping on a piece or two. Vacuuming took so much longer as it required picking up the LEGO pieces which were left behind after marathon building sessions.
Our second child arrived six and half years later into a house full of thousands of LEGO pieces of all sizes and shapes. We were no longer strangers to the sleepless zombie state. It was a challenging act since we had a school going older one to care for in addition to the little baby. Our second child learned to crawl and walk surrounded by LEGO pieces. He started crawling a lot sooner just to keep up with his big brother. The big brother became super protective of his little brother and made sure he couldn't get hold of small LEGO pieces he could swallow. He started to build legos keeping the box of legos on a table to keep them out of reach from the little brother.
Our little baby started to walk and climb chairs and tables in due time. One afternoon, when he was barely two years of age, I found him holding his brother by his hair face down on the dining table beating him with a red LEGO brick. The tiny little guy was standing behind his brother on the very chair his brother was sitting on building with LEGO pieces. I had to rescue my older child from the tyranny of being beaten by a piece of LEGO. After rescuing him, I asked him why he was sitting still taking the beating. He said he didn’t move because he was afraid that if he moved his little brother might fall off the chair and get hurt. It was very touching.
As he got older our second child joined his brother in the Lego building. Our home transformed into a LEGO museum over the years. We have LEGO art displayed everywhere in the house. Once built, they couldn’t be taken apart and ended up on the mantel and shelves. We have these LEGO creations from a decade ago still on our mantel.
Even with thousands of pieces of LEGO, it was common for my two adorable boys to need to use the same LEGO piece in their creations. On several occasions my two boys would be arguing over a precious piece of LEGO they both needed for whatever they were building. I had to go around looking for an identical piece in large stashes of LEGO pieces sitting right next to them. I would go on a quest to find the right piece to keep the peace.
Asking either one of them to give up the LEGO piece would have been like “విడవమంటే పాముకి, కరవమంటే కప్పకి కోపం (Vidavamante paamuki kopam, Karavamante kappaki kopam)” sameta. It means, “Asking a snake to let the frog go would make the snake angry and asking the snake to bite or eat the frog would make the frog angry”. Thankfully I could find an identical LEGO piece to make both boys happy.
Even though this sameta aptly describes the mundane LEGO wars between my two boys, it has a deeper meaning about serious situations that don’t have a clear answer. Nature is full of such examples. One one hand, asking a snake to go hungry giving up the frog it just caught isn’t fair. On the other hand, it isn't fair to ask a frog to give up its life to become a snake's meal.
It indeed is an ethical conundrum. When I see birds finding worms in the backyard, I wonder if I should be happy for the birds for finding food or sad for the worms dying so the birds can live another day. While watching a lioness chase a deer, whose side would you be on? My heart invariably sides with the underdog. But then what happens to her helpless cubs waiting for their mother to come back with a meal?