T H E B I L L B O A R D..... A short Story

I grew up in India, When I was a mere kid not more than 3 or 4? I had already been exposed to several dialects, accents and three different kinds of language. The first one is my native language or my mother tongue, Hindi. The second one, the language I’m writing this language and literacy narrative in, English and third a kind of language no child should be exposed to, crass and vulgar language But not gonna lie the third one was the easiest to pick up and learn, to the point, crisp and conveys emotions in moments of distress and anger accurately. In the midst of this environment, I had recently shifted to a new school, where I was the only one who couldn’t properly read sentences. It wasn’t because I suffered from any learning disability but simply because I was the youngest in my entire class by a whole year. While a 4-year-old toddler Aaryan was able to grasp that, his 30-year-old mother couldn’t.

It was the bane of her existence, her biggest worry and her life’s motive to make me learn to read in both Hindi and English fluently and fast because time was running out. I’m still not sure where was this time running out and how and what exactly would happen if I didn’t learn it fast but that’s just how it was with her. It would also not be enough to just learn how to read correctly. She needed me to read better than everyone in the class, because what’s an Indian parent without an unhealthy competitive obsession? So if it wasn’t hard enough to learn to read in two languages quickly at once, I also had to be better than an entire class of people older than me, who had been reading for a few months now.

As a child, I used to spend the majority of my time apart from school in a car because my parents drove a lot and refused to leave me and my sibling at our home or with a babysitter. The process of my mother making me learn how to read started in the car only whenever we would be stuck in a traffic jam ( which is often in a country of a billion people) she would point out of the window to a gigantic billboard and tell me to read what it says. I could spell it, see it, and even copy it word for word in my notebook but not fluently read it. She would slowly go over with me on each and every alphabet trying to make me say one word at a time. I used to watch a lot of television as a child and there used to be a lot of ads in between cartoons so sometimes I would even recognize the celebrity and the logo and know the tagline and say it in a half confident, half proud and full fear manner. But my mother knew it too because there was no other reason why I would be able to narrate an entire slogan from far away sometimes but still struggle to read a sentence visible right outside of our car window.

Each day, hundreds of billboards and all of them my mother asked me enthusiastically and supportively thinking is this the moment her son will become a prodigy and spit out words so coherent it would put Shakespeare to shame. As time went by I did gradually get better and better at being able to read after breaking each word into small chunks. And these interrogatives over-the-edge, sudden billboard tests became lesser and lesser as she was more and more at ease.

One day she was taking me to a bank with her. We crossed one road and waited for the green light to turn red so that we could cross the other one. Just while standing on that road I randomly read what a billboard said like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing to her, she was surprised, shocked, emotional, happy and proud all at once. She felt more proud of me in that moment than she probably has in the rest of my life combined. It was as if the 4-year-old me had freed the nation from the British and in turn, colonized them.I was a 4-year-old hybrid of Gandhi and Rishi Sunak to my mother. Ah what I would give to make her feel like that again .