I was five years old when a teacher slapped me on the face for accidentally breaking a flower vase in the classroom. I remember it was a hot day and we had just come back from our lunch break. The classroom was dark and cool. The teacher hadn’t arrived yet and most of the students were still trying to settle down. I was standing by the window trying to work out how it could be so hot outside and so cool inside when my elbow accidentally jostled the flower vase and it fell. A few seconds later the teacher walked in. I told her immediately. Before she asked me any questions, she slapped my face and it stung.
‘Why did you break the vase, you stupid girl?’ she hissed.
‘I didn’t, miss. It was an accident,’ I replied through a mixture of tears and snot.
‘Get out of my class,’ I was told and sent to stand outside for the rest of the day. The teacher called my mother and in the late afternoon my mum came to pick me up. I don’t know what the teacher said to her, but my mum was visibly angry and wouldn’t speak to me on the way home or even later.
Phuphee had been staying with us for a few days. When I came home, she saw my tear-stained face and hugged me. My mum told her about my transgressions and left. Phuphee sat me down, wiped my face with her headscarf, and from the pocket of her pheran produced a handful of basrakh (a deep-fried confection made of sweet dough). I sat with her for the longest time, trying to work through the confused tangle in my head. I couldn’t tell you what my exact thoughts were, but mostly there was shame and confusion.
‘Now tell me exactly what happened?’ Phuphee said as she lit her two cigarettes. ‘And don’t leave anything out.’
She sat patiently as I told her. In between my retelling, I would break down again and cry, but she listened quietly without interrupting. When I had finished, she gave me a hug and said, ‘I believe you.’ I sat in her embrace for a while.
During the course of my childhood, almost every adult I knew would discipline us in the same way as the teacher did. When we did something naughty we were either scolded or given a ‘tight slap’, as it was called. This behaviour seemed normal. No one else questioned it and neither did we. In fact, we adapted to it. We changed our behaviour. First, we tried not to make mistakes or do naughty things and if we did, we did our best to hide them. At school, I stopped going anywhere near the window.
The only person who didn’t use slaps and scoldings was Phuphee. Whenever I did something that was classified as bad behaviour, she would always ask if it was a mistake or had I wanted to be naughty? If I replied that it was a mistake, she would say ‘it’s okay to make a mistake. We all make mistakes’ and if I replied that I had wanted to be naughty, she would ask ‘how can you try to be less naughty next time?’.
‘What we are really trying to do when we slap and scold is make lives easier for us as adults, we aren’t really thinking about that child.’ | Photo Credit: Illustration: Zainab Tambawalla
I remember other grown-ups would often say to her that she was ruining all of us, that we would grow up with silly ideas and no respect for elders, but Phuphee would ignore them. When we behaved like little demented demons and got on her nerves, she would often hold our little hands in hers, close her eyes and take deep breaths. It’s not that she didn’t discipline us because she did, but she never punished us for being who we were — children.
It wasn’t until my little boy turned two that I realised that my parenting had been hugely influenced by her behaviour towards us when we were children. At two, my son’s personality had really started to show and while most of it was adorable, some of it was hard or excruciatingly painful. Children are capable of testing the limits of saints, but it is pretty much never done with that purpose in mind.
I asked Phuphee once before my son was born why she never slapped or scolded us when we were little. She said she hadn’t wanted to stop us from making mistakes. People who fear making mistakes eventually become afraid to even try anything, and those people die much earlier than their actual death. ‘I wanted you all to have the courage to try anything that you wanted to try and if you succeeded, well and good, but if you failed, I hoped you would learn that by me accepting your mistakes, you would accept your own mistakes and learn to move on and try again.’
Last year, I scolded my little boy after he accidentally broke an electronic device. Except he wasn’t trying to break it, he was simply trying to understand how it worked. I realised that this is what childhood mostly consists of: of trying to work out how the world works, how people work, how emotions work, how your own mind works. But mostly, we adults do not understand this. We often label a child who is curious, expressive and strong willed as ‘bad’ and a child who does our bidding as ‘good’.
What we are really trying to do when we slap and scold is make lives easier for us as adults, we aren’t really thinking about that child. And while the punishment might seem to work temporarily, in the long term we are slowly but surely strangling the spirit of that child.
I was lucky to have Phuphee. Over the course of my childhood, I inadvertently learned from her that it was okay to make mistakes, and that I would still be loved in spite of them, at least by her.
Saba Mahjoor, a Kashmiri living in England, spends her scant free time contemplating life’s vagaries.
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