The memories of childhood have its place in the heart of every person.
The man gets nostalgic when he comes across children of the school or village playing or doing some pranks. His own childhood flashes back in his mind.
If the man is a writer, his days spent in the village or school take a form of an art and result in interesting fiction. “Childhood Days”, a collection of short stories of Paresh K Patnaik, is an anthology of ten interesting stories of childhood.
The stories are set in a remote village of Odisha of late fifties and early sixties of the last century when there was no television or internet or even a telephone connection. The daily newspaper came to the village twice in a week by post. A transistor was a wonder. In the story, ‘An Essay on Radio,’ the school teacher of the village has bought a transistor, the second one in the village.
There is a competition among the brothers and sisters who will be first to see the transistor on the day it is brought home. The villagers, especially the women, visit the house post lunch in the afternoon to the house of the school teacher to see the machine speaking and singing.
The beauty of a child is its innocence. The child’s mind is pure, free from the complexities of mundane affairs and also realities of life.
The child is shocked when it encounters hard realities of life. This is best expressed in the story ‘Experience of a Deadly Day,’ the first experience of a child with an incident of death.
The two sons of the teacher are restricted by their parents not to go out and see the dead body of a beggar woman, lest they would be scared. But both the brothers have sneaked into the place where the beggar woman was residing.
The body has been taken away from that place. The two brothers cannot express in words, but feel the absence of the person who would be no more to be seen, and they silently weep.
The children have their own world and in that world they have men and creatures different from the world of the elders. In the story, ‘Bamboo Queen and the Iron Lady,’ the child discusses an iron lady having legs below the knees and from elbow to fingers of iron and the rest of the body is of flesh and blood.
The lady challenges that she will marry the boy who defeats her in a kabaddi match. The children of the village make plans, devise ways to defeat and marry, and possess the lady. Nobody has seen her as she is believed to be staying in the town a few kilometers away from their village and nobody could go and reach her also.
The bamboo queen is a girl who climbs the top of the bamboo and rotates there. She does not appear. A sorcerer has made her vanish. The children expect her to return. They erect a bamboo so that the queen could return to its top, but she never returns.
Every person has a child in his heart. In the story, ‘The School Days,’ Abhiram comes to the window of the school and acts like a monkey. The little students chase him away, but he returns the next day also. During recess a mad woman bathes in a pond near the school.
The children tease her. She gets furious and hurls abuses at the children. A man, twice sarpanch of the panchayat, playacts as told by the children and makes them laugh.
Later, the writer visits the village after many years, meets Abhiram and the ex-sarapanch. He realizes that they were behaving so to go back to their own childhood being in touch with the children in any way.
The world of imagination is vanishing with the advance of science and technology. Spread of television, internet, mobile phones, etc shrinks the world and does away with mystery.
The writer wonders whether the children of the village now discuss the iron lady or bamboo queen and the sorcerer. The stories of the book are interesting to the adults and have the power to take them back to their own childhood.