The death of innocence
Selma Carvalho
The day unfolds slowly and comes to life. Mothers with their children’s tiny hands held tight, walk to school. The headmaster welcomes them. Little girls in grey skirts and green cardigans form knots of three and four, giggling amongst themselves and planning the day’s intrigues of secret clubs and code words. Boys gambol about, aimlessly kicking a football back and forth or climbing a blue-painted metal frame. Then reality sets in. The huge, heavy iron gates of the school clang shut. The only way to get into the school is by an electronic buzzer at the front office, where you have to state your purpose, sign into a register and wait until a teacher can attend to your query. All this, because every parent now lives with the dreadful fear that any day, a gun-slinging mad-man can walk in and end life or a stranger can rape innocence. This is the reality of our parenthood.
I did all my schooling at the parochial St Mary’s Catholic High School in Dubai. When I started, it was a mere huddle of a few rooms, one or two of which had rusted iron-sheets for roofing. In the early days, the school was run almost entirely by a contingent of expatriate British and Goan teachers. The Goans were always immaculately dressed in matronly skirts and blouses, hair neatly coiffed back, speaking in the crisp, efficient, self-assured accents of Bombay’s finest convent schools. Most of our day was spent exploring the sprawling grounds of the school, a stretch of barren land donated by Sheikh Rashid. The sand-dunes had been flattened to build the school, and some of the construction debris of nails and wood lay buried in abandoned mud-piles, which we in our childish delight imagined to be mountains to scale.
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At the far end was the beautiful St Mary’s Church, founded by the Italian priest, Father Eusebius, who had a particular fondness for Goans for his entire staff consisted of them. The church gates were always open as was the church. Early morning church-goers would straggle in to attend services; we would watch them from behind the eucalyptus trees Father Eusebius had planted or the small garden he tended, where hardy bougainvillea and thick-leafed shrubs were the only things that occasionally flowered. Neither our parents nor our teachers had anything but a vague idea of where we were during break-time or after school.
This is the innocence of childhood that our children are robbed of. To go off on wild exploratory trips of self-learning; to plant little flags of Independence on sand-hills and claim them as their own space in this universe; to imagine that moonbeams can protect them and keep them safe; to negotiate the trust of scruffy-looking strangers and turn them into life-long friends. Our anxiety-driven parenthoods can never allow for this, because the indecency of humanity has betrayed us. And we want to trust, we really do; but that trust cannot come at the cost of our children. For this death of innocence, somehow the world will pay a price. Or perhaps children are so resilient and full of unwavering hope, that they will reinvent the world for us.
