Baby’s Day Out
By: Mosam Shah
Tags: Outdoors, Covid 19, Travel, Baby, Beyourself

She looked out of the window seeing a branch of a tree, for long days and long evenings. It shed leaves and then grew new ones. She stared at it till the days became short and the new leaves shed again leaving behind a bare branch. She looked at the speakers, the blank tv screen the way I looked at mountains and sea, long and hard as if in deep thought. She made friends with the inanimate toys sitting on her desk. She saw the faces of only counted people, even after having a large family; for she was born in the times of Covid-19, right in the middle of the lockdown. Where there were plans of friends gathering at the hospital for her birth, no one could visit her for months together. Where there were plans of decorating our space as she came home for the first time, we made do with diyas and pictures printed from a colour printer.

She went from one home to another, seeing the outside world only through the tinted window of her car. From her home, her outside world was only that branch of the tree and the limited plants. This went on for 6 months, at the end of which, I thought “Enough is enough”.

I have always been a person who has loved the outdoors. But the times of COVID plus delivering a daughter had me down and out. I craved the outdoors. And I craved to introduce my daughter to the outdoors, to see her reaction to the sea and the mountains and everything in between. My grand plans of my daughter’s first trip to Goa were squashed like potato in bhaji pav. These days venturing out of home itself felt like an adventure, so Goa was completely out of question.

As I sat at home, complaining to my husband about this deadly disease, he took matters in his hands, as he discovered a place that fit my criteria. A sequestered place where I could sit surrounded by nature, in form of greens of the trees and blues of a water body and sky covered with bright clouds taking on varied shapes. And to my surprise, this place was only 20 minutes drive away from our home. I wondered how we had not come across it earlier.

So, we decided to initiate our 6-month-old daughter to the outdoors with a trip to this lovely secluded lake, surrounding an island. Our view of the lake and the island came from under the cool shade of a large banyan tree which spread its reach far and wide. With not a single another soul in sight, it was a place where we could hear the chirping of birds and the holy sounds of the temple bell. All we could see were the water, the greens, the white birds and the mirror image of all of the above in a calm lake. As if one set of all this wasn’t enough. The early morning outing at 7am lent a chill to the air and freshness in the breath.

As I sat under the banyan tree with my husband and daughter, who sat in the rocker, all three of us looked out onto the reflections in the lake. My daughter kept trying to find the source of the chirps. Ever so often when a truck or a car zoomed by, she would turn around and try to find the source of those sounds as well. As it turned out, while I was going crazy trying to introduce her to nature, she was more interested in the moving vehicles than the stillness of the lake. Children! So, my husband ended up sitting on the other side facing the road as I continued to look into the lake to write this piece.

As I write this, I hope that as time passes Meher loves the stillness better than the movement, nature and jungles better than the city, the silent treks better than the zooming car and in her, I find a partner for my plans of travel, food and staring into nothingness.