"People say," said Mrs. Kralefsky, "That as you get older you slow down. But that is not at all true. It is not that you slow down, but that life slows down for you. There is so much more time to notice things." 

     I had been reading Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" to Bui and Teetee at bedtime. They both settle down in Bui's high bed. I make myself a cup of tea and come up with it to Bui's room, being careful so as not to spill any on the carpet. But there are no children to be seen! From all the wriggling inside the comforter and from Teetee's barely-suppressed giggles I can tell that they are hiding. And I say with a very puzzled air, "Now where did my babies go?" 

     Then Teetee's head pops out from under the comforter, and he laughs, and he laughs, and he says "here I am Baba. And Deh-deh is also here." 

     "Why do you have to tell him about me!" Bui complains. 

     Teetee's teeth are triangular. Shark-like. He won't need to bother flossing I suppose. They look very wicked when he laughs. Abha says that his teeth are just like her bua's in Lucknow. 

     Then I kiss and hug them both, and make sure that Teetee has not appropriated an unfair share of Bui's pillow, and that Bui is sharing her comforter fairly. I turn on the table lamp. Switch off the overhead lights, and settle down to read. 

     My first question everyday is "So where were we?" 

     Bui puts her best bookmark in the book I am reading. Often it is one she made especially for me with paper, tape, and painted flowers. The evening reading time is very special to her, and she will do anything to not have this privilege withheld. 

     I sit on a red chair near the bed and read to them for twenty minutes. Sometimes forty. Bui's little chair that I used to sit on has developed a swivel-leg problem, so I now use the red chair from the next room. The bad chair is still there in Bui's room. It usually lies face down and finds many uses it was not originally designed for. Sometimes it's a horse. Sometime it is dressed up in a t-shirt and sports a necklace or two. While I am not above puncturing balloons that I find lolling about on the floor --- and Abha says that that's a most wicked thing to do --- I don't have the heart to throw that chair away. 

     Teetee is new to our reading group. He lies closer to me, and is always as full of questions as a porcupine is of quills. Sometimes he will ask a question for every sentence I read --- if he's not close to sleep. 

     "What is what is 'undulate' Baba?" 

     "What does it mean 'spawn' Baba?" 

     I often have trouble following Teetee's questions because he also likes, while listening, to drink milk from his bottle, or to suck at his "nussi" or "thussi" (a pacifier). He has just about outgrown his bedtime bottle of milk, but the nussi remains indispensable this time of the day. So I ask him to spit out his nussi and ask me again in his silly foreign baby accent. The next day he will try out some of the new words he learnt the night before. "That is ridi-cloo-ous," he'll say, pointing grandly at his toast. 

     His questioning often get Bui's goat. She considers Teetoo an interloper who has insinuated his way into a ritual that used to be exclusively hers. "You are wasting my time," she tells him. 

     I think that "My Family ..." is the funniest book ever written. We read through it once, and then we read through it once again. And it was such a big hit with both the chit-pits that we read Gerald Durrell's "A Zoo in My Luggage" next. And now we are making our way through his "Birds, Beasts, and Relatives". I have also committed myself to reading Bui something by Gerry's brother Lawrence sometime soon. Gerry's family has become almost our own. "What's mother doing Baba?" Teetoo will often ask some two minutes into the reading, whatever the context. 

     "She might be gardening," I say, "maybe she's cooking. We'll find out soon enough." 

     "What is she cooking Baba?" 

     "Why don't you let him go on." Bui interjects, "How is he to know?" 

     Teetee ignores such comments. When I read any sentence with the name Roger in it, Teetee invariably asks "Roger the dog, Baba?" 

     And I say, "Yes, Roger the dog." 

     "You know that Roger's the dog," Bui says. 

     "Is that Roger the dog, Baba?" Teetoo asks again, when we encounter Roger the dog again in the next few lines. This troubles Bui a lot, and Teetee knows that he is beginning to get under her skin. 

     To twist the knife some more Teetee will pick on any word at random in the very next sentence. "What's a 'tree' Baba?" he asks innocently. 

     "You know what a tree is! What's a tree Baba? What sort of a stupid question is that!" Bui shouts. She is beginning to get vexed. Teetee knows that, but his expression is deadpan. He sucks calmly at his bottle. 

     In the middle of the very next sentence Teetee asks, "Baba, what's 'water'?" 

     Bui elbows him. Teetee hits her smack on the head with his bottle. She punches him on the arm, but pulls her punch a little. He kicks her full force in the stomach. She screams and starts pummeling him with her fists. The brawl is well under way. We stop reading. 

     I separate them physically. I ask him to apologize for hitting her, and her for hitting him. They kiss and make up. Bui is a little reluctant about making up, but Teetee kisses her most enthusiastically --- and also pats her on the head for good measure. Good Deh-deh, he says, sweet Deh-deh. Peace made, we settle into the reading again. Then after two or three minutes Teetee starts again: "Where's Roger the dog, Baba?" 

     Sometimes Teetee will start giggling for no reason at all. Then Bui and I start giggling too. And we have silly-time for a few minutes till we are all run out of giggles. 

     Sometimes we branch off into a heavy discussion, the book forgotten. But that is possible only if Teetee has dropped off to sleep. He looks even more innocent and lovely in his sleep than he did when he was busy riling Bui. It is very difficult to look at him then and imagine how he could have driven her crazy. And so calculatedly too. Rani Pahwa in St. Louis once said of her two-year old daughter Sasha, that whenever Sasha drove her crazy, she'd look at Sasha's shoes and wonder how someone that wore that size of shoe could ever make her so very mad. 

     Margo kisses the dead Saint Spiridion's toe and asks him to cure her acne. Do Saints exist? Can they fix acne? Some Sundays Bui goes to church with her friend Kelly Braddock and the rest of the Braddock family --- if she had a sleepover at their house the night before. I think she enjoys going to church, but she will not admit this to me --- knowing as she does the dim light I hold religion in. Does God exist? Can he cure a headache? Is it a He or a She, or a fifty-fifty? 

     My view of all this is very simple: if It don't move a needle on a meter then It don't exist. "But he is out there Baba," Bui says passionately, "Have you been out in the Space to see him?" 

     I tell her that there are also pink polka-dotted elephants out there, and can she say they are not there? Has she been out there to not see them? Anything her god can do, I tell her, my pink elephants can too. And I don't even mention the green penguins and the laughing lollipops. I might note, in the passing, that pink elephants get the religious folks' goat every time. Their eyes pop at the computational burden this thought places on their grayware. They can't even begin to fathom the colossal stupidity of placing God on an equal footing with Pink Elephants. To me the pink elephants just show up the necessity for an Occam's Razor kind of principle. 

     Bui argues against the existence of divinity when she is with believers. But she argues for its existence when with me. I think she's doing a fine job of making up her mind. May that which makes more sense win. "It is written in a very nice book. Kelly showed me," Bui says. 

     Many things are written in books I say. We have read Alice in Wonderland so many time, and enjoyed it thoroughly too, does that mean that we should set up an Alice statue and stab at it aggressively with aggarbattis every Sunday? It is weak-minded I tell her to confound fiction with reality. 

     Where does the religious impulse well from? In this connection I reproduce two entries below from the "Bui-namah", my sparse and sporadic diary of Bui, from the time when she was two years old. 
 

January 4, 1994

     I asked Bui, "Tu kaun hai? Tu kahan se aai hai? Tu kahan jaa rahi hai? Aur tujhe kya chahiye?" ("Who are you? Where have you come from? Where are you going? And what do you want?") 

     Bui said, "May guddi hai, aur mujhe kuchh nahi chahiye." (I'm a doll, and I don't want anything.") 
 

March 15, 1994

     A few days back Bui saw a dead bird on the driveway and asked what was wrong with it. I said it had died. "Everyone is born," I said, "Then after some time they die. People are born. Then people die. Other animals are born. Then they die. Plants are born. Then plants die." 

     "Will I die Baba?" 

     "Yes you will die. Someday. But it's a long way off." 

     "Will you die Baba?" 

     "Yes, I will die." 

     "And Mai?" 

     "Mai will also die." 

     She went through a list of everyone she knows, one person at a time. Sarah, Miss Michelle, Miss Marie, Douglas, Shinbin, Jonathan, Tory. I said that every one will die but it isn't anything to worry about. Its quite normal, I explained. Everything dies, and everyone dies, I explained. Then its parts become a part of air and the clouds and water and the grass. Of potatoes. Even of stars. Then new babies are born with bits and pieces from things that had died before, I explained. Bui let the subject drop and went on to other things. I thought I had done a very good job fielding that. 

     That night she has a nightmare. She screamed like she's never screamed before. "Mai, take me away. Mai, Mai!" 

     It was 2 o'clock in the morning. Abha got her to our bed, but Bui wouldn't sleep between Abha and I, as she usually likes to. When I tried to caress her she screamed even louder and slapped my hand away. "Won't you go to Baba?" Abha asked. 

     "That's not Baba. Baba is dead." 

     In her nightmare both she and I had died, and the bodies were lying on her crib. It took us a few hours to calm her, and to persuade her that no one had died. I was surprised to learn how deep-seated the fear of mortality is, even in a two-year old.

     Sex is another subject that comes up regularly now. It is one that makes a whole lot more sense to me than does religion, or the fear of death. Gerald Durrell writes at length about the amorous activities of all sorts of animals: spiders, scorpions, snails, tortoises, and people. Bui is beginning to appreciate some of the mysteries of sexual reproduction. She knows that she was born with a lifetime's supply of eggs in her body, many thousands of them. She knows that if a daughter is born of her (a little girl, well in the future, who we have tentatively named "Komdeh"), she would likewise bring her eggs along when she arrives. Bui knows that in many plants and animals the mother chips in an egg, and the father some semen, and that the semen must "fertilize" an egg before the fertilized egg will divide, or a baby develop. We have examined the sexual parts of some flowers under a magnifying glass. The word "fertilize" is a bit of a stumble, though, since I also fertilize the lawn every now and then but I have absolutely no intention of making babies with my grass. 

     How do the egg and the semen come together? I have shied away, so far, from explaining the mechanics of the process, and all the necessary fixtures, and the plumbing, as it is found in the animal world. It appears so much more wholesome to explain how plants do it. Animals can be so very naughty! But I have promised, under duress, to explain the animal methods one of these days with drawings on a piece of paper. So help me God! 

     Teetoo is not at all happy with the idea of a wife. If you tell him that someday when he's grown up he will have a wife, he bristles and says that he will never ever have a wife. When Abha talks of Mrs. Claus, Teetee says that there is no Mrs. Claus. That Santa goes home to his mommy and daddy. So how will he make babies if he has no wife? 

     Abha's sister Shubha Varma and her husband Sanjeev Kaul visited over the Thanksgiving break. Shubha is pregnant and it was explained to Teetoo that that meant that she was carrying a baby in her tumtum. He was very curious about that. His eyes grew large and round. His mouth turned into an 'O'. How did the baby get in Baba? How will it come out? Did Foshie (Mausi) eat the baby? He was asked to reserve all his questions to ask Shubha when she came in. 

     Now Teetoo has decided that he has three babies inside of him. They play inside his tummy, and they climb up and down the ladders. The ladders are his ribs, which he can feel. And he can also feel the babies at play inside. Sometimes the babies come out and run around all over his body, as he will demonstrate with his hands. When he drinks chai they bathe in the chai inside of him. Ms. Mary Marek, his nanny, when Abha was working at her job with the Mental Health and Mental Retardation department of the State of Texas, said that she was surprised to see how tender he was with dolls and how he pampered and babied them. He'll make a very loving dad I should think --- if he'll only get over his aversion to the notion of a wife. 

     Under Gerald Durell's influence Bui has decided that she'd like to be a vet. Teetoo, who had so far wanted to be a carpenter (he is very attached to his horde of hand tools), also now wants to be a vet. "You are such a copy cat!" Bui says. 

     I asked Teetee how, if he were to be wet, he would keep dry. That threw him for a bit of a spin. 

     I wonder if this is good time to begin to introduce Bui to the chemistry of water which I think is the key to understanding the chemistry of life. That should come in handy for a vet I suppose. I have tried suggesting to her how the world is made up of atoms and photons. She has a place-mat with a picture of the periodic table, and we have discussed how all matter in the Universe is made up of these 100 odd building blocks, and how on Earth only about a fourth of these atoms are found in significant numbers, and how, of these 25, plants and animals seem to use no more than some ten to build themselves. 

     The main trick next is going to be to explain ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds. And their directional and isotropic natures. That will prepare us to discuss the transport of ions, the formation of lipid-bilayer boundaries, the structure and function of sugars, DNA, and other matters. It seems so unfair to not be able to see atoms and electron-orbitals directly. And also it seems so ugly to have to rely on her having to take my word for most of these things, instead of being able to see and experience them directly. Maybe a mild shock from a battery might help give us a bit of a feel. What would also help is 3D computer simulations of molecular aggregates in motion, and simulations that take into account the effect of temperature on the creation and dissolution of hydrogen bonds. I would love to watch pictures like that. That would be a project of great benefit to all. 

     I have little love for creepy-crawlies, so I stay away from Bui's real-life bug projects. Maybe she will teach me to enjoy that part of the game. 

     Bui and I had been enjoying Shakespeare when Teetee joined our reading group, but he has no patience at all for Shakespeare. So Shakespeare is out till he grows up some. We are going to go American instead. We have lined up Jack London's "The Call of the Wild" and Twain's "Huckleberry Finn". Also Kipling's "Jungle Book". 

     "Dil dhoondhta hai phir wohi fursut ke raat-din," Ghalib mian wrote. This is the meaning of life I think. To have enough fursut to read to the chit-pits, and to have time to talk about what is read. Maybe some day like Mrs. Kralefsky I will also have fursut enough to hear the flowers talk. 

     Our reading session comes to a quiet close when I carry the sound asleep Teetee to his own bed. And kiss a dozing Bui a very good night. I cover them nicely with their covers, kiss them many times over, and smell their heads. They steal my heart everyday with the way they look in sleep. Like little flowers. And they make me think also, every day, of all the little children in the world that every day go to bed hungry. And children that are not read to. And those that are killed in our Chechnias, Bosnias, and Sierra Leones. And I think of the children that were sold by desperate parents in Bihar a few years ago during a bad drought. Parents who, I have no doubt, loved them as dearly as I love these two. I cannot even begin to imagine their poverty and their desperation.