Reyu Draws a Ganpati
Molding a child to fit the world—and the world to fit the child
📣If this newsletter appears truncated in your inbox, please click on "View entire message" and you’ll be able to view the entire post in your email app.
Reyu creates. He draws dinosaurs from across eras in serialized written collections. He draws fish, of saltwater and freshwater origin, in many batches of detailed sketches. He draws airplanes of various classes—commercial, military, and recreational.
Reyu colors. He uses pens, markers, acrylic paints, white charcoal, and soft pastels. Across black and white paper sketch pads of varying dimensions and thickness, he renders his paintings. He keeps them stacked in the storeroom, his paint brushes ziplocked in Ikea bags that show signs of wear.
He collects cars, trucks, dumpsters, JCBs, earth movers, and earth-moving equipment of assorted origin. He builds and hoards paper planes and Iron Man suits, and also what goes into those exhibits—cardboard, thermocol, milk cartons, packing paper, chart paper.
He compiles the eponymously titled comic strips Hydro Yeast and Grey Black in eight neatly divided panels, sheet after sheet, until they make chapters that make a book. He has written many more books than the three he has published—The White Oak, The Paper Plane, and Danny’s Adventure.
He captures his gratitude for the everyday joys of his life. He convenes his memories from endless hours spent immersed in his hobbies of sketching, painting, cooking, reading, writing, building, and making superhero costumes.
Reyu loves making origami to calm himself down, art before exam days, and knick knacks of all kinds and for all purposes.
He loves designing games. He makes Sudokus, swapping digits with symbols. He changes the constraints for the game and in doing so changes the game—“Draw a chair: in 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes.”
He loves putting his grandmothers to work, having them write down all that he narrates as stories as he paces up and down the living room with his hands behind his back and eyes narrowed in focus. He deifies his father, sends his little sister into raptures with his handmade windblowers, and serenades his mother with lines like “in all our trips around the sun I’ll always be your number one.” For his mother’s fortieth, Reyu put together a gift bundle of forty items. Enlisting his father into the exercise, he spent days lending shape to his largesse: some books on Greece (the family was going there for a holiday), clothes for the trip, a couple of cartons of Sepoy & Co. peach lemonades that his mother loved, birthday cards, tickets for two to a couple of exhibits at the Museum of Art and Photography, and finally—the clincher—a single titled Your Number One, described on YouTube as an “alternative rock release by the Bora Bora crew.”
Reyu loves performing. Once, he spent the entirety of his family getaway at The Radisson, Mahabalipuram, organizing a puppet show on the occasion of his parents’ wedding anniversary. While the rest of the family — his parents, both grandmothers, a grandfather, an aunt and her husband — accepted the definition of a holiday wholeheartedly, Reyu put the pedal to the metal. Without whiling away time by the infinity pool or stuffing his face with confectioneries at the breakfast buffet, Reyu worked with gusto. For the show, Reyu gave each of the supporting cast of family members a part to play, including that of moving props or administering sound effects. The show was called A Motorbike Called Frank and an Owl Called Headwig.
He loves launching business enterprises. For such ventures, he enjoys making Powerpoint presentations, graphs, and forecasts. He organizes tasting ceremonies for new recipes before they appear on the menus of his food brands. He loves quantifying risk for events he is organizing (“94% baby crying, 29% watching phone, 89% people not focusing”). Once the dust has settled on a marquee event, he conducts thorough after-action reviews with questions — dozens of them — for all involved.
While running his business ventures, he loves being the boss, by his own admission. He assiduously assigns designations and makes adjustments to the core team for the annual flea market they host called the Mall project. The point of this periodic exercise is to match new opportunities that emerge from his expanding vision for the Mall projects with what core team members bring to the table. He is forever rattling off names of abbreviated C-suite positions (CVO for Chief Video Officer is his latest), as he reorganizes the team, eliciting the subtlest of eye-rolls from his parents.
And yet, at night, for the only hours that he is not up to something, what brings a sense of order to his world is the feel of a parent’s limb under his own.
The first time I heard about the Mall project, in July of 2024, I found myself amused at the thought of a child turning his house into a bustling mall that people came to; wandered around; and ate, shopped, and entertained themselves at. The more I came to know about it — for instance that everything in that mall from the food to the products was made by kids and none of the products from books to recycled paper were store-bought or that this was not even the first time the kids were doing it — the deeper I felt the need to dig.
After all, at the time, Reyu — “the owner and manager of Mall” as he likes to introduce himself — was still a month away from turning nine.
THE DAY OF MALL 2024
Never much of a sleeper, Reyu was up by half past six on the morning of July 13, 2024. It was the day of Mall 2024, or marché aux puces (French for flea market) as the Powerpoint promos announced, and the first thing on his mind took him straight to the kitchen. After countless tasting events all summer with focus groups of family members, Reyu and his friends had curated a menu. Foodoes, the food brand at Mall 2024, was the outcome of months-long experiments by the kids and tremendous restraint from the parents through the period. It was not uncommon, in the words of his mother Archana, to find “odd things mixed together and frozen in some corner of the fridge.”
On his mind this morning was the Ultimate Chip. Three different sauces plus parmesan, chaat masala, Himalayan black salt, Maggi magic masala, and oregano—all loaded onto a single wafer-thin potato chip. Archana had with great exertion convinced Reyu to ditch his plan to make the sauces from scratch on the day and pre-make and refrigerate them instead. Having acquiesced, Reyu feared he had compromised on his process. Having done that the day before, Reyu’s misgivings this morning were rising to the surface. Thankfully, he had both grandmothers at his service. Reyu, along with Amaani and Arjun, fellow organizers of Mall 2024, taught the grandmothers how to prep the ingredients for Ultimate Chip, Nacho Mini Pizza, Mini Pizza, Ultimate Breadzza, Oreo with Cream, Monaco Chat, Chocolate Cube, Frozen Banana, and more. The grannies responded to the instruction with appropriate professionalism.
The pièce de résistance on the menu was the Veg Spring Roll (Vietnamese Style). It was an homage to a family trip to Vietnam at the end of 2022 where Reyu had taken a cooking class on a cruise liner. The following year, he put that knowledge to use by making spring rolls with rice paper sheets at a live counter for house guests.
Fueled by encouraging responses from adults through focus group events, Mall 2024 promised the whole hog: shopping, dining, art gallery, magic shows, and piano shows. Food was just one category; Foodoes, just one brand, albeit with a tagline that aimed to make the ubiquitous action of eating synonymous with the brand name (“let’s Foodoes”). Then there were handmade paper pen stands, bookmarks, pigeon scarers, and other knick knacks from Estrella (“spoil your inner child”); scented soaps and air fresheners from Fresca (“I likey soapy soapy”); books of The Dorky Beetle Bookstore (“find that corner and curl up”); recycled paper from Dhunda Mifflin Paper Company (“sustainable solutions for a greener tomorrow”); and juices from Betty Beavers’ Beverages or BBB (“drink smoothly and enjoy”).
Reyu’s idea of keeping a grip over the proceedings was to pick horses for courses. Amaani, the Chief Executive Officer of the flea market, was good at art, so she and Reyu teamed up on Estrella. Arjun, the Chief Risk Officer, had the license to raise red flags on anything that threatened to scupper their plans for the day. Johnsy, a sports freak who lived on the same floor as Reyu and was one of his first friends at Apurva Plaza, was not into arts and crafts. In the run-up to the day, he had not found too many ways to contribute, so Reyu made him the Chief Security Officer. Thereafter, Johnsy was in charge of managing the crowd and maintaining order.
Their designations notwithstanding, the key members of the Mall team frequently answered to a flexible job description. They did what was needed, be it making soaps or tasting dishes or running errands.
The person Reyu relied on the most, who was his right-hand man, was his father Himanshu. Besides stress-testing Reyu’s ideas in the months before, on the day, as the Chief Marketing Officer, it was Himanshu’s responsibility to collate all the ads and run them on loop on the family’s television. He also had to print out menus, labels, and soap covers. As a father, he bore the burden of giving Reyu a bath and making sure he had his meals, which proved to be like writing in sand. Each wave of distraction would wash it away.
Much of the prep had already been done. Of what was left, the kids ticked things off as the hours went by. For the art gallery, Amaani and Reyu did the final batch of knick knacks. Arjun joined hands with Reyu to put the finishing touches on Fresca. They wrote down the name of the scent on the pre-packaged soap bars and air freshener bottles: butterscotch, saffron, rose, turmeric, chocolate. All the kids together emptied the bookshelves in Reyu’s living room and, following Reyu’s hand-drawn schematic for the display of products, arranged the pigeon scarers (cardboard cut-outs covered in reflective aluminum foil), painted envelopes, paper planes, Mandala designs, games books, theme-based books on plants, vehicles, aircrafts; and scented soaps.
Final rehearsals were done for the live performances—the magic show and the piano show. As the to-do list shrunk, the kids started getting finicky. They began demanding perfection from the adults helping them out, finding newer i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Every once in a while, Archana and Himanshu had to put their foot down on the persnicketiness as the pressure of organizing an event — the biggest of their young lives yet — showed on the kids.
A key measure of success of Mall 2024 would be the money made. As the scope of the event burgeoned and a nontrivial amount of capital went into its organization, expectations swelled. Befitting the scale of the venture, numbered tickets had been printed out, with a hand-drawn barcode and the logo of a lip-smacking face stamped on it. On the day, a cash register was set up on a small desk. A calculator was procured. Reyu gave a tutorial to fellow employees on how to use the billing machine—a wooden replica of an actual point-of-sale machine.
Mall 2024 had generated a buzz among parents thanks to its pre-event marketing. The kids had dropped off pamphlets outside doors in the days leading up. They had performed and recorded a dance announcing Mall 2024 that did its rounds on WhatsApp. The product ads made on Canva by fifteen-year-old Gungun didi, a resident of the same floor and an honorary participant who lent her design skills to the kids, had piqued interest. On the day, everyone was in agreement about those ads that played on the big flat television screen. Featuring left-of-field choices such as using Reyu’s nine-month-old baby sister Isha to embody the freshness of bath soaps or using montages of kids making handmade paper to urge the virtues of recycling, heaped anticipation on the mood.
Visitors started streaming in a little after four. Foodoes and BBB kept them sated and slaked. Fresca sold like hot cakes. Estrella longed for more takers. Dhunda Mifflin ran out of products. To make recycled paper by hand, the kids had come up with a process involving soggy newspapers—one that needed constant adult vigil in the house. The team only had time for that many manufacturing batches under adult watch, leading to no inventory.
As evening descended, the shows kicked off. One of the crowd-pleasers at Mall 2023 had been its magic show. This second edition was an improvement upon it. For weeks, Reyu had practiced his script and sharpened his misdirection with his father. Such rigor in practice coupled with Reyu’s ease with performing for an audience meant that his routine proved to be the right mix of funny and intriguing. He offered a selection of tricks, along with peppy stage talk, that had the audience enrapt.
The piano show was another highlight. The team gelled well, with Reyu and Amaani playing the keys while Ahaana, the Chief Financial Officer as well as Arjun’s younger sister, sang. During the performance, perhaps thanks to the brush with crowd distraction the previous year, Reyu showed composure in keeping smaller kids at bay who seemed to want to take literal stabs at the keys.
By the time the evening wound down and the plates were cleared and the furniture was rearranged and the visitors had returned to their homes, the small group of kids and the two adults who had made Mall 2024 possible were out for the count. Except for Reyu.
He was buzzing.
CAMPSITE AND COMMUNITY CENTER
Crumpled in the pocket of Reyu’s shorts, fresh from a wash, was a folded piece of paper that tore along the creases upon opening. Dated 27th November 2024, in his handwriting, it went:
Mall - the hardest thing I have ever done.
Mall was a show-stall. I founded it with my neighbours in 2023. We had a lot of companies like RAAJA, Fresca and Books. In 2024, we did another mall called marché aux puces and had new companies such as Estrella, Dhunda Mifflin, BBB, Foodoes, etc. In 2025, we are going to have ACP, Movshow [movie show], etc. In 2023, we did a magic show, airplane show, space show, etc. In 2024, we had a piano and magic show—
The text trails off the edge of the piece of decrepit paper.
It is an early November evening — a few weeks before this note will be written — when I visit Reyu at his home. Flat 1203 in Block B of Apurva Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Bangalore is a ganglion. Through the afternoon and evening, kids run into and out of it. All of them—Arjun, Amaani, Vihaan, Johnsy, Ahaana, and Reyu—are in primary school. They are key members of the Mall 2025 team. For this upcoming edition, things are already in motion. The core team has been bolstered by additions such as Vihaan with potential tryouts for more. On this Thursday, the kids share meals, sneak in and out of rooms to discuss pressing matters, or just sit on the couch and shoot the breeze. For these kids, Reyu’s house is their campsite and community center rolled into one.
Reyu has arranged for me to meet with the team. Archana who is back from work is amused by her son’s role as liaison officer. She lays on the glass-topped dining table, around which all kids and two adults have gathered, an assortment of snacks. Reyu tells me that the Mall project was a natural step up from the many shows they used to do and all the art and crafts they used to make. From the time of COVID, he says, this group had been doing the Ramayana, solar system, and magic shows. They had thrown open the odd art gallery. What then got them interested in Project Mall, I ask? My question draws furtive glances. Probably my journalistic props of pen and paper daunt the kids. They sit opposite me in silence. I point the question at Arjun. He hesitates, then says that the idea of learning how to make different things felt interesting. I turn to Amaani, who is quieter than the boys but has eyes that belie mischief. She says she’s always liked doing art. Vihaan who is a new inductee into the Mall group and wasn’t there for previous editions, appears equally interested in my question and looks on at his friends. Slowly at first and then swiftly, the kids’ reticence thaws and, unbidden, they drop names of their individual favorites from the events of July 13, until it seems reasonable to infer that through the buffet of offerings, each found in Mall something or the other they were good at and enjoyed doing.
As bowls of snacks get replenished, more details emerge from the kids. Like any good sequel, Mall 2024 was mounted bigger, better. The kids had taken the good ideas from the first edition, polished them, and added on to them. Apparently, as I had heard from Himanshu and Archana, the parents had been left aghast as the months wore on, like a teacher who’s had her syllabus for the year steadily and stealthily expanded, at the growing burden of supervision. Having heard such parental lamentations, I wanted to hear the kids’ version. So I ask them about how they had broached the topic of the first ever Mall.
My questions seem to release something in Reyu. He jumps off his chair and begins to arrange people around furniture in a manner that can only be surmised as establishing vérité. He drags his mother who’s just popped a few balls of makhana into her mouth to a position next to the couch, and asks the fellow core members of the Mall team to fringe him.
Reyu breezes through a question to his mother (which I cannot catch), and then, scratches his arm an inch above his elbow, apparently in a high-fidelity recreation of the response of his mother more than a year ago in 2023. It is clear that, whether or not he remembers what he asked his mother, what’s getting his jollies now is a re-enactment of that exchange. By now everybody is in splits.
Through this reproduction and the subsequent retelling, I come to know that Mall 2023, which had happened the previous November, had coincided with the naming ceremony for Isha, Reyu’s baby sister who had been born in October. Not accounted for in the planning for the day were a number of baby-related interruptions. The adults had fawned over the baby when she gurgled or bawled. The kids had tried their best to bring the event back on track but a baby proved to be tough competition. This experience had had the effect of an unscratched itch.
Even in its incipient avatar, the Mall was no cinch. It may have been run by seven- and eight-year-olds, but it was neither childish nor designed for children. As the remit for the Mall project has grown with each edition — for 2025, Reyu already has new brands lined up — it has been built around an unchanging core. That core is that it is an adult enterprise. Adults have money, adults make their own decisions. Adults are the true test for the business venture. So, why were the adults so distracted on the day of Mall 2023? Reyu was perplexed in the aftermath of last November. His parents had sat him down. It was just bad timing, they had explained, imputing the adult inattentiveness to Isha’s naming ceremony. He fawned over his little sister so it wasn’t that hard for him to catch the import in the clear light of day. If you want to grab adult attention, his parents had said, you’ve got to give them an experience they cannot turn away from. They had said this to cut their child’s sulking short. The counsel stuck like Blu Tack in an eight-year-old’s head. On it Reyu attached the blueprint of his burgeoning ambition: Mall 2024.
And now, less than a year hence, having pulled off a second edition of their flea market in 2024, it seems to me, as the chatter around me grows cacophonous, that any lingering doubts in the kids’ minds may have vanished. The kids have turned air into wind once, and they want to do it again. The high mark of Mall 2024 is not a laurel to be rested on. It is an invitation the kids cannot refuse.
DOCUMENTARIAN
One afternoon after school, Reyu gives me a tour of his oeuvre.
A bunch of sixty-two A5-sized sketch cards are held together by a pale-green chart paper sheath with cellotape around the spine. Across the cover is scribbled VEHICLES with a blue sketch pen, with Reyu’s name on the bottom right. The sketch cards are stiff enough to serve as a hand fan, though it would amount to gross negligence to put them to that use for each has on it hand-drawn, with a pencil lead that is the right mix of hardness and darkness so as not to crumble under the pressure of scores of short strokes, a finely detailed drawing of a vehicle of transport.
Helicopter, car, hovercraft, bicycle, motorbike, excavator, locomotive engine, sailboat, canoe, submarine, container ship, some sort of a wakesurfing boat, hot air balloon, inflatable banana boat, cruise ship, a tank, a commercial airliner, fighter jet. The vehicles ply across air, land, or water. In the final third of the lot, we see a cop car that breaks the monochrome of grey-black with patches of red and yellow. The reverse of some cards carry drawings too but mostly the design is limited to one per card. No two cards repeat.
The sheaf for fish is markedly distinct. For starters, it has multi-colored drawings that leap out. The cards are marked, from the common goldfish to the exotic koi fish, with the weight for the adult of the species and the lifespan written on the reverse for some. From the tiny anchovy to the enormous whale, the sketches cover the size spectrum. Some elicit extra attention, like the sword tail fish (scientific name (Xiphophorus hellerii) and higher classification also thrown in) or the goblin shark (“The goblin shark is a rare species of deep sea shark. Sometimes called a ‘living fossil’...”). Fish number sixty-eight suggests a curious departure. “Bonnethead shark” is written on the face in the assured longhand of an adult. The description on the back continues the adult break-in. Of all eighty-five cards, this is the only evidence of adult intrusion.
No adult intrudes the actual sketches.
The Air Planes series, serialized until five, shows signs of evolution. The first part is listed simply as Airplanes and is mainly text that can at best be seen as an introduction to the topic. Under a cascading hierarchy of headings and subheadings (how aeroplanes work and under it lift, thrust, and types of wings), run simple explanations:
The air molecules bump on the wings. More air molecules go under the wing. On top there is a slope, so all the air molecules above slide down and push the plane up. And with more air beneath the wing the plane goes up.
The expositions have been left as is, and the writer’s voice retained, by the overseeing adult. Lapses have been identified and corrected such as…
Examples of jumbo jets passenger planes are a jumbo jet passenger plane.
The book closes with a step-by-step visual tutorial on how to make a paper plane.
Airplanes 2 repeats much of the text from the previous part while also deconstructing the plane into its components — parts of a tail, facts about the nose, facts about wings — and ending with a deconstructed sketch of the parts of a plane.
Airplanes 4 retains the visual treatment while covering commercial planes, and 5, the final one, suggests a return to the basics studied in parts 1 and 2. It goes into some depth about the forces of lift, drag, and thrust.
The third in the airplane series is an entirely visual work that ventures into military aircrafts. Heavily shaded with dark pencil, which covers my fingertips as I leaf through, it sports on each page a different fighter plane. The shading lends volume and shape to the sketches while also directing the gaze to the focal points. The viewer is no longer an observer. She is drawn into an experience that approaches a conversation. “Here, come into my world,” Reyu seems to be saying without saying a word.
When I ask Reyu about where he learned about all the fighter jets he has drawn and written on, Reyu says, “That’s a very good question. No one has asked me that before.” Mostly Google, some books.
The Transformers series is a graphic novel that hits the ground running from the opening page — “On Cybertron where the transformers lived, there was a thing that changed people v/s people and brothers v/s brothers. Optimus Prime and Megatron were brothers.” — leading immediately to the conflict — “Optimus Prime was constructed as a prime and Megatron felt bad.” The initial pages are written in beautiful cursive, suggesting a grandma’s analog efforts. Wherever the story demands, Reyu makes room for sound effects—“Roooooorrrr!!! Dhoooooom Dhaaaaam” or the onomatopoeic “Dhiskyooo.”
Transformers bears evidence to a reversal of the power dynamic between adult and child. From time to time, the grandmotherly scribing is subject to close attention. Small edits are made here and there in a child’s scrawl.
Although there are no margins on the ruled sheets, the consistent indentation suggests this wasn’t the participants’ first rodeo. With Reyu as a creator, his grandmas had turned into dutiful scribes, committed if not to the vision of the project then in their love for their grandchild.
When I ask Reyu about Plants, the fattest of all sheafs, he says that he had been working on it for years. It has pictures of plants he knows by memory, those he draws by following a reference, and finally those he has seen around in Apurva Plaza’s precincts that he has reproduced over multiple summers by sitting and drawing them on sight.
His Dinosaur series — one through four, with part two missing — is encyclopedic in scope. It contains a catalog of dinosaurs of all eras and sizes, and it carries on, as if whetted in appetite, to include trivia such as “The first fossils of Achelosaurus were collected in 1987 in Montana by a team led by Jack Horner.”
As with other book projects, the dinosaur collection evolves to reveal higher orders of organization.
Part 3 is designed as a workbook, filled with exercises for the reader to do: join the dots and name the dinosaur, draw the missing half of the dinosaur, and slapstick dinosaur riddles (Which dinosaur sleeps all day? The dino-snore)
Part 4 carries a table of contents with corresponding dates of entry for each specimen. Reyu breaks the pattern to feature “some of my favorite paleontologists.” I scan through the list for a familiar Ross Geller when I realize how out of depth I am.
Some Interesting Superheroes is A4-sized and carries detailed sketches of luminaries from the worlds of Avengers, Justice League, and X-Men. Wherever the superhero attire allows for the face to be revealed, I see a likeness to Reyu. When I ask him if the effect was intentional, he smiles and says, “These were done so long ago.”
Because the storeroom is stuffed to the gills, we have hauled the archives onto the couch in the living room. Some of the contents of the half-a-dozen boxes spill over to the floor. Reyu’s hoarding is a point of contention in the household. With a second child, Himanshu and Archana are finding their three-bed flat too cramped. “Keep, throw, or donate?” is a question that rings around the house during declutter weekends. Every three months, the family makes a trip to a shelter home with a bag of hand-me-downs, none of which are items of clothing.
Reyu’s now showing me paper mockups of Android Craft Phones, or ACP as he likes to say, the flagship brand to be unveiled at Mall 2025. In a bi-folded sheet of paper, that opens up like a foldable phone, one of the two facing pages has a search bar, a music gallery (Linken [sic] Park, BTS, Coldplay, Boney M, The Weeknd) and a news section with a polemic headline (Amit Shah proclaims Article 370 to never return). The other page has Calendar, Notes, and Messages. These supposed app icons are not drawn on paper. In a skeuomorphic touch, Reyu has pinned miniature replicas of a calendar, a notebook, and a manila folder on the page.
Inside, in one of the bedrooms, Archana works. She works from home twice a week. For over two hours, Reyu and I have been poring over his stash. Reyu’s still in his school uniform, a sky-blue collared t-shirt and grey shorts. We’ve been through his itemized books, his paper planes, his art supplies. We’re yet to get to Reyu’s Iron Man suits, thirty-six of them.
I ask Reyu why he preserves his drawings, his writings, his notebooks, and such. He utters a word that sounds disagreeable for a child. He says he does it for “nostalgia.” He says something about being able to see it later when he feels like it.
Our session ends shortly after when Reyu steps out to be with his friends. Later that night, I’m given Reyu’s room to sleep in. Lying on the IKEA bed that Reyu has assembled by himself, my mind drifts away.
There’s little odor of the entitlement of talent in Reyu. He probably knows he is different. That much is clear in the way adults behave around him. But he doesn’t let any of that talent get in the way. Or rather he looks right past it. Writing the fifth book of dinosaurs, making the umpteenth Iron Man suit, or folding the two-hundredth sheet of paper into a paper plane—the fun is in the reps. His father calls this inclination for quantity Reyu’s “count coverage.” Until he has exhausted possibilities, Reyu continues to produce, and for that level of production there’s a commensurate level of consumption. Himanshu has mentioned to me that of twenty reams of paper bought earlier that year, each with five hundred sheets, Reyu has already used up ten. Or the Iron Man suits that have needed a mountain of cardboard and tape. In his list of resolutions for 2024, his mother has made Reyu include a telling one: to only make foldable Iron Man suits.
“As a child,” Himanshu had said in one of our several phone conversations, “we had tried to have no limiting factor on Reyu. We would try to not interrupt him. We were just enjoying the experience of having our first child.” They would sometimes reciprocate to Reyu’s many ideas with a counter-prompt beginning with “What if…” and that would be more than enough for Reyu to fall hook, line, and sinker for it. My shorthand notes buttress this point: “goes obsessively deep,” “naturally nerdy,” “generates new targets,” “bias to be prolific.”
Unlike parents who are the driving factor behind their kids’ propensities, in their case, Himanshu had reassured me that after a time Archana and him had curbed their enthusiasm. Like the time they had to nip in the bud — albeit not entirely successfully given the Iron Man suits — Reyu’s fascination for a YouTuber who made superhero suits.
For Reyu, it is not just a bias to be prolific. Earlier that day, I had asked Reyu why he had included practice exercises in his Harry Potter book of spells. Who was it for, I had enquired. For anyone who’ll read it, he had said with a shrug. Reyu was not making that book for anyone but should it come into the hands of anyone they should be able to have an experience not lacking in dimension or depth. This ability to convey what’s in his mind with minimum distortions so as to have a meaningful conversation with another — a reader, a consumer — shows up elsewhere too. Reyu’s aunt and Archana’s younger sister Neha, a pediatric pulmonologist, reports that during a consultation Reyu’s able to describe his pain clearly using similes. She claims half her job as a pediatrician is done in the first two minutes of meeting him.
Reyu is both a documentarian, faithfully and meticulously depicting what he sees, and an artist, extracting out of his experiences their very essence and fashioning them in tangible form such that they make real what is inside of him. For a child, he has already developed judgment some adults may call taste.
In the early weeks of my curiosity about Reyu, I had imagined the start of it all. Was it an event? Was it a day? And then as I gathered information: Was it this soap set he got as a gift? Was it that science kit? At this moment, laying on a child’s bed, I’ve misgivings about my hypothesis. There may not be a Rosetta Stone after all. No key that would unlock everything. The source of Reyu’s relentless prolificity is not nameable, or, at the very least, my words are too cheap to put a name to it.
At some point after the clock has shown one, I nod off, my thoughts an open loop.
EARLY SIGNS
Reyu has a high forehead and a hairline that seems permanently to be in low tide. The outcroppings of his eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth arrange themselves in half the surface area of his visage. The rest is a smooth forehead that merges into the scalp so far back it rounds the curve of his skull. One can spend a week with him and not make the discovery about the scale of his forehead, concealed as it is by bangs that, as if swept neatly down, fall to a quarter inch above his brow.
There’s a video of Reyu at eighteen-or-so months, before his hair had grown to cover the sweep of his forehead, lurching down the aisles of Sapphire, a toy store in Bangalore. He staggers past all the Barbies and the plush toys. His eyes are drawn without being urged to the shelves full of trucks, buses, and boats. From the same visit there are pictures of him locking LEGO pieces onto a baseplate and fitting them into tall structures.
“With Reyu it has always been the case that he’s been fascinated with what you would call boy things,” says Himanshu.
As soon as it came to light that Reyu liked building with his hands, a steady stream of suitable gifts poured in from family and friends. As the first grandchild, Reyu was the undisputed object of familial doting. A natural progression in the complexity of gifts ensued once word about Reyu’s dexterity got around. The child too showed ease with advancing complexity. In his father’s words, while assembling his LEGO sets, Reyu “would see tiny differences in pieces that no one else would. I would be sitting there with him, helping him put together a new set, and I would miss things—it’s got a thousand details. Reyu wouldn’t. More often than not, he would pick what I had missed.”
In due course, Reyu would finish assembling intricately conceived and themed LEGO sets such as Ninjago, Harry Potter, and Marvel, or be done with Smartivity rocket launchers, extensible hand, and pinball games in double quick time. After a couple of years of this, his parents were not keen to subject extended family and friends to the burden of finding increasingly challenging and expensive gifts, so they took out a subscription to an exclusive LEGO rental service. The service was meant for serious dabblers, which reflected in a rental period of twenty-eight days. Reyu would complete the set and be done with it in two days flat.
The Saturday morning I am with the family, Reyu is putting on a recalcitrant turn. He evades the demand to put his dish back in the sink after breakfast. He makes up some excuse as he stretches out on the couch. It is not outright rebellion but his father’s response raises the stakes. “Put your plates in the sink,” Himanshu says, before dog-whistling, “if you want to unbox and assemble your sister’s tricycle.”
Over the next half hour, following no written instructions, Reyu moves slowly, deliberately, his eyes seldom drifting away from the task at hand. At various points, two adults — his father and I — are hunched over, watching him at work. Neither think there’s anything unusual about the situation. Most of the help he needs is adult strength to mount some unit on the frame or to pinch locks in place. Once or twice when Reyu is stuck, he uses his father’s phone to look at a YouTube tutorial. He does so nonchalantly, absorbed enough to appear absent-minded, and once he has figured out the wrong turn he goes back to the half-embodied tricycle and lends it some more shape. By the end of it, Reyu has put his sister in the tricycle and is pushing her down the corridor outside.
Building, or engineering as he calls it, has not been Reyu’s only abiding vocation through his childhood. Art is another. Archana was clear that she didn’t want her son held back by expectations of etiquette. Reyu had no duty to clean up; he had art supplies as free as running water. A low table in their living room became the communal art center with kids welcome anytime to sit down and spark their imagination into being. In those early years, on most days, the house was a picture of disarray but no one thought the mess was too high a price to pay for watching the child express himself on the canvas. Before long, Reyu got into the habit of making something with his hands—a card, a portrait, a drawing—and taking it along with him as a gift when visiting friends and relatives or offering it as a keepsake to house guests. These handmade artifacts are a reason for the Rao family, which is spread out among the closely set towers of Apurva Plaza, to look forward to birthdays and special occasions.
A few days after my visit, Archana sends me three sketches from July 2022, made by Reyu a month before his seventh birthday. The subjects are his father’s friends whom he has seen come and go over the years. As I recognize the faces I find myself as delighted as a child who has just spotted a rainbow in the sky. I’m surprised as much by the depth of capture on the page as by my visceral reaction to it. The sketches blur the line between portrait and caricature. In Himanshu’s words they are “both exactly like them [the subjects] and nothing like them.”
The sketches are not true to detail, but I would prefer them to high-resolution photographs of the subjects. Perhaps it is because they capture an essential aspect of the subject that makes them unmistakable. The illustration doesn’t score on likeness—a camera would beat it on any day. It extracts the essence of the subjects in a way no camera can. The skill is in ferreting out the precise point of distinction—a slender neck, the shape of the eyes, or the crop of hair—that makes each face that face. I imagine the discernment needed to make such art.
“He had incredible patience,” says Archana when I ask her about what was unusual about Reyu in those early days of art. “He would learn something new on YouTube, and the next thing you know he has painted a layer and is waiting quietly. He understood that that was part of the process.”
I notice that she uses the past tense.
KARA4KIDS
Neither of Reyu’s parents could remember what Mercy, the lady running Kara4Kids, a daycare and playschool in Indiranagar, Bangalore, said but both insisted it was something that put them at ease about entrusting their son in her care. The center was also bang opposite Himanshu’s office at the time and within walking distance for his in-laws. By twenty-one months, Reyu was in daycare.
After being dropped off by his father at the center in the morning, he spent his day there until three in the afternoon when he was picked up by one or both his grandparents. The next couple of hours Reyu would spend in the company of his grandparents before being picked up by his mother on her way back from work. Through a series of handoffs, Reyu’s days ran like clockwork.
Archana remembers her father Mohan Rao, her Pappa, as a meticulous man who loved traveling and wrote a daily journal for forty years. But Reyu’s Ajja, retired from corporate life and no longer the guardian to two daughters, stood apart from her Pappa. Ajja indulged his grandson. He would bring Reyu home from daycare and let himself be shoved into tunnels that Reyu built with cushions and pillows. Ajja and Ajji (Mohan’s wife and Reyu’s grandmother Geeta) would stay in position inside the tunnels while Reyu drew up elaborate scenarios. Or Reyu would create traffic jams in the living room that the grandparents had to navigate through. Or set up a chain of vessels and transfer water from one end to the other. Sometimes, if his creations were part of a bigger undertaking in his head, Reyu would insist that the mise en scène be kept exactly as it was until the following day. If his grandparents tried to be sneaky, arranging their living quarters even slightly, Reyu’s gimlet eyes would pick it out the next day.
In those days, Indiranagar saw a high incidence of roadwork and construction projects. Reyu would pull his Ajji out of the house to the sites and go on to stare at all kinds of earth-moving equipment for long minutes, unbothered by the deafening decibels. When he was not running through the house like a storm or hovering around construction sites, Geeta, who taught high school chemistry and had recently retired as the principal of Sree Cauvery School, would take him to one of the two parks in the neighborhood for any number of romps down slides and lungfuls of fresh air.
If the afternoon escapades with grandparents were a riot of physical activity, Reyu’s morning school runs with his father were a hive of mental stimulation. Just as the grandparents imposed no limits on his physical adventures, his father let him run amok with his imagination. The drive from their place in Cox Town to the daycare in Indiranagar was punctuated with questions on everything that caught his eye—from sewage repairs to how electricity comes home. His father would offer his best explanations, in response to which Reyu would come up with his own take or a suggestion to make things better. Himanshu tried not to turn pedantic on such occasions. “Yes, that’s also possible” is something Reyu heard often in response to his proposed solutions to real-world problems.
Through Reyu’s third year, Himanshu could not keep up with the school drops with regularity. Reyu noticed the change. Perhaps he didn’t mind his father’s preoccupation with other matters because he had another figure to indulge him in the house—his Dadaji and Himanshu’s father Krishan Singh Bora who had started living with them. Back in the day, Krishan Singh’s work had him move around while his family stayed put in Nainital. When he was home, he would quiz Himanshu, his second of three children, from the Manorama Yearbook and encourage in the child a spirit of inquiry that manifested itself, among other things, in a love for physics. As a grandfather, he brought the same love to Reyu, conceivably without the weight of the guilt that parents feel for not being adequately clued in to their children’s changing lives.
There’s a picture of Reyu in the arms of his Dadaji. Krishan Singh has his knees drawn up on the couch as he’s hugging Reyu snug. He has a serene look on his face. Looking at the camera with one doe eye and another tucked into the shoulder of his Dadaji, Reyu is sporting a recently tonsured pate that shows a slight sprinkling of fizz before it merges into that prominent forehead. Giving Reyu company with his own clean scalp is his grandfather. The photo is dated April 2017, five months after Krishan Singh’s cancer diagnosis and well into the chemo rounds.
For the next year or so, Reyu’s life had the same notes of daycare, parks, and play but the melody turned sepulchral. Between countless hospital and doctor visits and their jobs, his parents had little energy for anything else. For Himanshu and Archana, weekends, which used to be about visiting friends, going out, and catching up on life, turned into too-short windows of time in which to fit an expanding list of parental and filial duties. Reyu knew that his father took some time to disconnect from work, but this time it was different. Himanshu seemed to have lost the ability to unwind. At the time, he was a young father and a founding team member at a startup—two roles that demanded every smidgen of his energy. By early 2017, he found himself less available to both as he made space for the only thing that mattered: his crumbling father.
Himanshu describes the version of him during that phase as “a man with a mission.” When his father passed away, after battling esophageal small cell cancer for fifteen months, he lost his mission but carried the accoutrements of a soldier in battle. He would wake up at odd hours and pace the length of the living room, unable to pin his thoughts down. Work troubles, which had seemed unimportant while his father was alive, now seemed irrelevant. “Reyu never really understood what was happening,” says Himanshu about the time. “Only after my father’s passing did he look at his photo and kept asking him to come out.”
AT THE SEAT OF LEGISLATURE
If the twelfth floor of Block B in Apurva Plaza were a country, Reyu’s flat would be its capital, and its living room the parliament. On a Friday evening, the parliament is in session. I’m allowed in as a guest and observer.
At this seat of the legislature, today, an important bill is being tabled: should Mall 2025 have an animated movie?
Reyu has experience making comic books, starting with Grey Black, or GB as abbreviated in the smattering of text in the illustrated panels. GB, the product of an accidental injection, is a figure of largesse who shares (“infects”) his superpowers with his close friends, thus building a team of superheroes who fight and vanquish their arch enemy Dragon Man.
The movie being discussed is an improvement upon the GB series. It is based on the adventures of Hydro Yeast, a superhero born out of an accidental coming together of hydrogen peroxide and yeast. I come to know that there’s already a book on Hydro Yeast, who is the brainchild of Arjun and Reyu, and a script that has been adapted from it.
“So, if you don’t animate,” I ask out of curiosity, “how would you make the movie?”
The alternative is making a movie with “real actors.”
When I suggest taking a vote to gauge interest, the kids raise hands for both options. They don’t know animation and are perhaps unfamiliar with acting. A fog hangs.
At some point during this impasse, Johnsy begins to voice his displeasure at Reyu making key decisions about Mall 2025 on his own. He questions why that should be the case. Not satisfied with the response, Johnsy declares his intention to drop out of the core team and asks Arjun why he blindly follows Reyu. Arjun, in his treble of a voice, responds, though inchoately. A back-and-forth ensues between Johnsy and Arjun.
Archana, the other adult in the room, maintains her silence. I wonder if I should intervene, like most adults discomforted by a disagreement among kids. A minute later, Archana is defusing the tension by expertly orchestrating a quiz of capital and countries that the kids latch onto. The quiz progresses to increasing levels of complexity and runs for the next several minutes before morphing into a know-your-dinosaur version run by Reyu. Before long, the kids have dispersed to their homes and only Johnsy and Reyu remain, watching television and having dinner together.
NAINITAL
On a December day in 2019, there was a healthy trepidation in the air when Himanshu and Archana asked for permission for Reyu to be excused from attending preschool (Reyu had graduated from daycare) for the next few months. Reyu was four at the time. The parents explained to Mercy, who in her capacity as principal of the Kara4Kids center was very involved with Reyu, that they were going to be driving up the length of the country and catching whatever came along the way. Although they didn’t burden Mercy with this information, they wanted to break out of the stasis of their lives that had settled over recent years like silt on a river bed. The idea was not to give their four-year-old son, who loved preschool, a practical education, though that is what Mercy alluded to upon being informed of the upcoming absence. “He’ll probably learn much more on this trip than what we can teach him here,” Archana recalls Mercy saying. Her response surprised the two. Himanshu adds, “And I don’t think they charged us for those months Reyu was away.”
A few months later, on the 12th of April in 2020, Archana published this account on Medium. It is titled “Learning with our child on the road.”
The husband (H) and I decided to take 3 months off work. We needed time to be by ourselves and be free from the all-consuming stresses of city life. The idea was to spend time at Nainital, H’s hometown, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Nainital is 2,500 km away from Bangalore, where we live. Perfect for a long road trip. We’d been on many driving holidays before with our 4-year old, but this one was different– we didn’t plan any of it in advance, and we ended up driving 10,000 km!
R (our son) loved every minute of the trip. Leaving work and routine behind, I felt a certain ease and light-headedness. I started observing more and listening more. R, however, saw, felt and observed way more than I did. He then captured the journey and his thoughts beautifully with his crayons.
I discovered again, after his very early baby days, how his beautiful mind enquired and digested bits and pieces of day-to-day information, things that I had taken completely for granted. Like the time we walked into a restaurant (dhaba) on the highway and he asked for pasta. Normally, I would just have hurriedly said “There’s no pasta here, baby. Can we have roti with dal?”. This time, I happened to tell him that this restaurant serves only Indian food because the chef has this specific expertise. Simple enough, I thought, but this sparked a 20-minute conversation and inquiry around different cuisines in India and the world, why people eat different types of food, and why Nikku mama [Archana’s cousin] can make both pasta and roti. The idea that certain restaurants serve specific types of food hadn’t registered with him, and I hadn’t noticed.
There were occasions on which we had to dodge his questions or leave him to his assumptions. Like the time he saw plenty of fishermen along the coast and remarked to himself that they must all be having lovely aquariums at home. Why else would they be fishing? There’s a separation in R’s mind over the living fish in the ocean and the “fish on a plate, not really fish” that he drew one day.
As parents, we now had the time and mental bandwidth to answer his never-ending whys and hows patiently without reverting to “That’s just how it is” or “God made it like that”. Like the time he wanted to know in excruciating detail how a plant or tree feels.
R: “Will it feel pain if I pluck a leaf?”
Me: “Yes, don’t pluck leaves.”
R: “What if I pull at its root?”
Me: “It will feel the pain, don’t do it”
R: “What if I swing on its branches?”
Me: “You can do that on big, strong trees. They won’t feel pain when you swing because you’re not very heavy.”
R: “What if papa swings on them?”
…about 20 questions later…
R: “I saw a truck carrying logs on the highway na. Why did he cut those trees? Should we call the police or call a doctor? What are tree doctors called?”
— —
Questions on science are comparatively easy to handle. Either there’s a factual and simplified explanation or a straightforward response that these concepts will be taught in school when he gets older.
“Why do birds not get a shock when they sit on electricity wires?”
“Why is there no internet when I can see electric wires?” R thinks electricity and the internet are the same. If there’s electricity, why then would there not be internet available. “How is the map working then? Why can’t I watch Peppa pig now?”
“How can the phone see so far away when I video chat with Johnsy?”, followed by a self-explanation “Oh, it must be recording his face and sending me the recording really fast, and then recording my face and sending it to him very fast”
The harder and more careful conversations are those around concepts he doesn’t fully understand yet — death, God and faith, the existence of “bad bad” people and why there has been violence in human history.
It’s a tricky balance to strike when one wants to teach a child about history and society but shield him from the negative. We couldn’t bear to tell him that there are people who intentionally hurt other people and hurt animals — without this ugly fact though, things get hard to justify and explain. Why did kings build forts and why do the police carry guns? No answer sounds complete and logical.
[....]
One would think that teaching kids about Gandhiji wouldn’t be tough. We had just entered Gujarat, and as was our custom on this trip, we began listing names of famous people from this state. When we got to Gandhiji, I asked R if he knew who Gandhiji was. R knew he was someone important because his face was on our currency notes. H and I stated facts about Gandhiji and our freedom struggle easily enough, but R had quite another take on the whole matter.
“Why did Gandhiji send the London people away? If someone comes to our place, we should give them chai and a gift for the babies na.”
“What do I have to do to become a king like the London people? Do I have to go to king-school? Did the London people go to king-school?”
R insisted on stories about Narendra Modi, because he saw so many hoardings of Modi all over the country. Stories around free gas connections, Swachch Bharat and ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ followed.
“Ohh, do I have to go to school because I am a boy?”
“Is Narendra Modi a king? Did he go to king-school?”
Very simplified explanations of democracy, voting, elections, and prime ministership followed.
“If a country has a king and a prime minister, then who do we have to listen to?”
“Why did everyone vote for Modi? Did Santa say he is very good good?”
Just like he couldn’t understand the concept of inequality between boys and girls (difficult conversation once he heard about ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’), the need for having armed forces to protect our country puzzled him.
R: “Why do we need to have land-police, air-police and water-police protecting our country?”
Me: “Because sometimes there are some bad people that come into our country without asking for permission and they then do bad things in the country?”
R: “Like what bad things? Do they throw garbage on the streets?”
Me: “Yes —er, that too. And maybe some more bad things.”
R: “Why is there good and bad, mamma? What makes something good or bad?”
Excellent question.
— —
Our return journey to Bangalore didn’t quite go as planned. We had a rough route chalked out for our return journey but had to change all plans as the Coronavirus situation started escalating world-over. Our safest bet now was to drive back using the shortest route in the quickest possible way. Of course, we had to explain to R what we were attempting as it would mean 5–6 days of 8+ hour drives and that could be very uncomfortable for a child his age.
R listened carefully to us as we explained our need to rush back home. Then he said “Mamma, do you have Narendra Modi’s phone number? I have some ideas for the virus.”
Idea #1: “Let’s make a germ that will trouble the virus and not us. Then we will be strong, and the virus will grow weak.”
Idea #2: “Let’s ask builders to make a small house without any windows and only one door. Then, we can make the virus’s favorite smell and when the virus gets attracted to the smell and comes into the house, we lock it from the outside.”
Idea #3: “Let’s get some sweet and sticky thing. Germs and insects like sweet and sticky. Like maybe rice and sugar. Then the virus will go to eat it and get stuck, and we can throw it out.”
Simplistic ideas — and the actual basis for some real-world solutions.
R has adapted incredibly well to the drastic change in pace in our lives these past few weeks. Staying locked down in our home 24x7 has not been easy for us, but to R, this is another adventure — a new experiment. He keeps us engaged and on our toes.
In the February of 2020, after a month of crashing on dry-cleaned linen on strange beds, the family of three landed in Himanshu’s childhood home, which had been shut for the better part of the time since his father’s passing. Stepping into a moldering house in peak winter, the couple had their work cut out. Their days would start with shots of whiskey in their coffee, just to summon the blood in their veins, while Reyu, who had by that point on their trip wholeheartedly bought into the idea of wherever I go I’ll draw, would sit happily by himself and trace all that his eyes swept through. While Himanshu and Archana were restoring an old house to a livable condition, what also happened, with perhaps not an insignificant touch of serendipity, was that they found themselves unpacking their own cluttered interior lives.
Compared to the conveniences at Apurva Plaza, in the near-zero temperatures of Nainital, they quickly slipped into a form of primitivism. Whether it was walking in the bitter cold to buy vegetables or staying close to the heater when indoors, their lives were restored to an essential version. The house turned into an observatory and the telescope, a trusted nocturnal friend, as Reyu relished gazing at star clusters and other celestial bodies that played truant in the hazy city sky he was used to.
In the ensuing weeks, Archana’s family took turns to visit them from Bangalore—parents Mohan and Geeta, sister Neha, and her husband Adi. Himanshu honored his deceased father’s wish to show his in-laws around his ancestral village in Almora.
Losing his Dadaji had been a double whammy for Reyu. He had lost not only his dearest Dadaji but also access to a part of his father. Having seen this much, if there was a lie about his father, Reyu could probably catch it. But Nainital was true. The month spent here in his father’s childhood home was the time he saw his father at his truest. The effect of the spell of time there was greater than the sum of its parts for both Reyu and Himanshu. It signaled a return to a kind of life that the father had grown apart from over the years and the son had never had a chance to get close to.
If Nainital was a high mesa, then its steep side was the rushed journey back home to Bangalore as the COVID murmurs grew louder. Reyu responded to COVID lockdowns with sangfroid. Having never been that cranky child at a restaurant, Reyu was happy indulging himself in his multitude of hobbies. Being cooped up meant kids on the floor sought each other out like moths rushing to the flame. Friendships solidified under house arrest. Johnsy, Amaani, Arjun, Ahaana, Reyu. Himanshu was on a career break and Reyu welcomed the prospects of having his father around in an unhurried mental state. He sank into this plush new life like one sinks into their favorite couch.
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
In his memoirs, Reflections, published in 2018, Mohan Rao offers an account of grandparenthood.
“Taking R to the park and stopping or slowing down for him to touch and feel a plant and smell a flower along the way is an opportunity for me to see the world through his eyes and his curious, uncluttered mind. We are fortunate that our house and Archana’s house aren’t too far from each other. We are indeed blessed!”
By the end of 2020, Mohan had started having some trouble breathing. The family pegged it to COVID. As the following March came to a close, they got a diagnosis for him. Lung cancer, late stage. Mohan had been a lifelong teetotaler, a non-smoker, an incurable trekker, and a regular yoga practitioner.
Archana, at first, felt cheated. Battling fear and shock, she gathered herself and her family. In the wake of the pronouncement, Archana had to take a flurry of important decisions, one of which was to move her parents out of their independent house in Indiranagar and into Apurva Plaza where she could take better care of her father.
For the second time in a few years, their lives closed in again. Reyu saw his parents spend more time at home but detached from their usual selves. Their social lives were hemmed in; weekend visits to Cubbon Park dwindled; and visits from his parents’ friends, which Reyu loved, came to a near stop. Communication was functional. Travel, which was the family’s leisure language, acquired a different meaning. Archana would time small getaways with the end of chemo cycles so that Mohan could take a breather with family. Accompanying Mohan and Geeta would be Neha and her husband Adi and Archana and her family. Through the sense of exigency hovering over those months, Mohan kept his chin up.
By this time, Reyu’s association with cancer was barefaced: someone’s going to die. Himanshu and Archana thought they should change the narrative forming in their son’s tender mind. They started telling him stories about cancer survivors. As he heard the adults soothe him, he watched them come to terms with reality.
From Archana’s account of the cross-country trip to Nainital in early 2020:
On one of our stops along the way at a friend’s place, R had a conversation with his young friend about death. R had enquired about death before and he had heard the term being used. He also knew his grandfather [Dadaji] had died, but he didn’t quite understand what it meant. He’d asked H and me a few months ago what happens after someone dies, and we had told him that they travel to a different galaxy and don’t come back because we haven’t built a rocket yet that can ferry people back. This, of course, led to several “engineering” ideas on how that rocket could be built, and questions about whether dead people can video chat with us from their galaxy.
On this trip though, his young friend mentioned to him that we all will eventually get old and die. That led to quite a few bouts of anxiety and sobbing.
“I don’t want to die and go to a different galaxy! Will I be born in a different mamma’s tummy in that galaxy?”
“Can mamma, papa and I hold hands and travel together to that galaxy? But what if my hand slips away from yours and we end up on different planets!”
“Ajji and Ajja are already old. How can we make them young again?! I don’t want them to die.”
This was an inevitable bridge R had to cross one day, but it’s heartbreaking to watch him battle these anxieties. In our desperate attempts to distract him, we tried to channel his thoughts and energy into thinking of solutions and “engineering ideas” to build that rocket to ferry people back to Earth. In trying to do so though, I’m afraid we’ve created a confusing universe that doesn’t really follow any laws of physics or nature. This damage will need to be undone another day.
On the fourteenth of October, 2022, the family had huddled in Mohan and Geeta’s place in Apurva Plaza. Things are not looking good, Archana informed Reyu, asking him if he wanted to say goodbye to his Ajja. Reyu went into the room where his Ajja was, surrounded by family, and bid his farewell. Archana asked Reyu to sit in the living room and watch television.
Later, after everything was over, Reyu told his mother, “I was sitting there watching TV but in my mind I was scared.”
THE REYU WAY
For Apurva Plaza’s Ganpati drawing competition in 2022, Reyu made a Ganesha sitting on a lotus with his hands and legs folded. The trunk veers to the left as is commonly represented. Two pyramids, one on each side of the god, stack up. One is of modaks, the other of ladoos, and neither is colored, suggesting he ran out of time. A mouse with big ears nibbles at some ladoos. For a seven-year-old, the attention to detail is striking.
Reyu won the first prize.
The following year 2023, Reyu, turned up the dial of his artistic interpretation. The Lord Ganesha occupies the center of the frame, but he is no longer embodied merely as an idol sitting with its usual accompaniments. This is a people’s god and he is shown being brought home into the village in a panoply fit for a maharaja. The trunk is ramrod straight, the legs are tucked under, and the deity sits on a lotus bed that is raised to the head level by a couple of devotees. Others around put their hands out as if making an offering to Lord Ganesha as he passes by.
This version brought Reyu the third prize. Not quite a snub; a warning nonetheless.
In 2024, already a veteran at these competitions, Reyu drew the elephant god sitting atop an upholstered seat, his feet on a rug, a ladoo in a half-open palm, a trunk turned left, a crown atop his head, his vahan Mushaka the mouse at his feet, and some bowls of fruits around. Barring a minor aberration — Reyu’s Ganesha has two arms, pared down from the usual four, that open up expansively until they almost straighten out on either side — he reined in his artistic vision. In his third attempt, Reyu colored well within the lines and hoped to be appropriately rewarded.
The rendition won him nothing.
Days prior to this episode, the school had asked students of Grade 4B to do a gratitude project—an endeavor Reyu threw himself into. Choosing everyday joys, travel, friends and family, and special events as his themes of gratitude, Reyu went the whole hog planning and making his scrapbook of memories.
The teacher found Reyu’s scrapbook lacking razzle-dazzle, with other students liberally throwing sequins and glitter on to their scrapbooks. The appraisal was somber, sobering. In his parents, Reyu confided, “But what’s decoration got to do with gratitude?”
Reyu took the outcomes as a debacle. He decided that he wasn’t going to draw anymore. It was a first for his parents. Their son who drew his way out of multiple COVID lockdowns, whose preschool teacher had told them when he was four that art was a native medium of expression for their son, was now growing self-conscious of his primal voice. The parents tried to do an end run around him by suggesting that he should not expect to win every time he enters an art competition.
“Until the age of five or six,” Himanshu reckons, “the world circulated freely through Reyu. He would just observe and express. Reyu may not draw Ganpati at a Ganpati-drawing competition but he will draw a Ganpati procession because it is all very experiential for him.”
Archana says Reyu has an active internal meter—an apparatus that lets him have a tabula rasa about the world he’s a part of. For Reyu, the world just is; there’s no way it is supposed to be. Decoration, tokenism are concepts Reyu has always dispensed with. But the weight of adult expectations seemed to be adding a new tug to life, especially at school.
My interest in Reyu had begun from a position of distant curiosity, from a lone image stuck in my head from three years ago when I had visited the family: Reyu sitting on a mat in the living room with his head cocked to one side and elbow bent on a page of his sketchbook on a squat table as he, tongue dangling out from a corner of his mouth, dishing out versions of Iron Man one after another as the adults around him chatted boisterously over rounds of drinks.
It feels different now. The curiosity is less abstract. In its place, strains of vicarious concern appear. This is unplanned and no doubt stirred by my own experiences as a parent.
“He used to draw to express his artistic bias,” Himanshu says on another occasion on the phone. “Now he cares about losing. Now he draws to win.”
The assessment fits more recent directions. The parents have by and large steered away from putting Reyu under formal instruction, unlike other kids his age who go for art or dance or drama class. They have let Reyu follow his nose, while being within earshot to listen to him. There have been notable exceptions, sports being one.
Football is something Himanshu has tried to nudge Reyu toward but it is not a calling yet for Reyu. Johnsy, his closest and oldest friend, is better at it than he is. Somehow that pollutes what Reyu wants from the sport. The same pattern has unfolded with chess. Johnsy was already enrolled in chess. Himanshu hasn’t been able to get Reyu to care for chess, just as with football.
Reyu senses his father’s disappointment so he dodges Himanshu on the topic. His father suspects Reyu sees more value in bolstering the identity he has already carved for himself. Reyu, the engineer, the builder, the arts-and-crafts guy, the owner of a successful flea market.
“He’s doing things because he’s good at them, not because he’s enjoying them,” Himanshu concludes. The motif is changing. It is no longer just observe and express. It is trending to, he offers another phrase, “express and measure.”
INSTITUTIONALIZATION
For her diminutive size and the fact that she is a grandmother to three, Geeta Rao is a brisk walker. We’re orbiting around the eight towers in Apurva Plaza on a crisp November morning. After a few interviews on the phone, I’m meeting Reyu’s Ajji for the first time. We are talking about how, little by little, a lot of the extended Rao lineage has moved into the condominium. She’s planning a trip to the US next spring with her sister and sister-in-law who live in the same complex.
“I have not forgotten about my homework,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She reminds me that I had asked her to think about the changes in Reyu she has seen in recent years, as he has transitioned to school. Geeta is a career educationist. She was the principal of a public school for fourteen years, so homework is a currency she’s familiar with. Though, listening to her talking about how she splits her time between her three grandchildren, I suspect her life has taken a more grandmotherly turn.
Something she had said on the phone springs to mind. “There’s a lot of power in an adult’s words on a child.” I’m curious about it now as I try and match her pace.
Geeta muses about her own parenting experience. She had limited house help, no time to indulge her kids. The family had moved from Mumbai to Kathgodam to Bangalore before Archana was five. “As a parent, you’ve no time to notice. But as a grandparent,” she says, “you’re helping take care.”
More things she had said pop into my head now. I’m only just beginning to fathom the true depth of it, as I watch Reyu from close quarters go about his days. She had spoken about the glint in Reyu’s eyes when he had just finished delivering a performance. “He would look around for everyone to clap.” In the same breath, she had shared one of the two things she’s worried about for Reyu. “I’m not sure he’s ready for negative feedback.”
Why would a boy of nine need to worry about that, I wondered. But which boy commits himself to a project for seven-eight months at a time?
We’re on our second loop around the block now. The condo has two parks, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a clubhouse, an outdoor tennis court, and indoor badminton and squash courts, among a longer list of amenities. Among the prominent communities residing in the complex are Tamilians, Telugus, Malayalis, and Kannadigas. Each celebrates festivals with escalating fanfare, the result of an undeclared game of one upmanship. Regardless of such communal differences, their choice of schooling for their children is secular and near unanimous. Apurva Plaza has enough kids going to the same school, Reyu’s, for the school to run a bus just for it.
“So what change have you seen in Reyu?” I ask.
Without breaking stride, she says that she admires Reyu’s parents, her daughter and son-in-law, for encouraging Reyu to be curious. She’s not sure if school affords the same liberty. She has heard from the school about their assessment of Reyu as reticent. But you’ve seen him, she splays her hands to make the point. In class, she continues, even if Reyu sees someone else being put down he learns the lesson to curb himself. Many children are not sensitive to such behavior, Geeta opines, if they’re ignored at home as well. Reyu has rarely been turned down for asking questions.
There’s something else I remember from my earlier conversations. “Some children have their brains in their legs,” Geeta had said, implying some kids have excess energy that they burn off running and jumping, “but not Reyu.” Reyu’s inclination toward the indoors has kept her, the grandmother, occupied. Be it building LEGO sets or assembling the Ultimate Chip under Reyu’s supervision, Geeta has been a dutiful apprentice. Whether it is by giving up her pillows or her kitchen utensils for Reyu’s many fabrications, she has indulged her grandson’s appetite for production. And it is not just her, she informs me, it is also Nirmala, Reyu’s Dadiji, who has gone along with Reyu’s plans to spend hours transcribing stories for the Grey Black comic books or acting as a planet in solar system shows directed by Reyu.
I drift off in the momentary ebb in the conversation. Schools encourage thinking in children but not so much to help them discover what is right for them individually as to lead them to what is prescribed right collectively by society. Formal education has way of making students go with a jacket off the shelf without thinking enough about new measurements that may fit the student better. Reyu is beginning to feel the pinch of such a store-bought jacket over his shoulders. He wants to tailor one to his own comfort but isn’t sure how far he will be accommodated.
Geeta invites me to her house for a cup of coffee. It’s in a different tower of Apurva Plaza. Over filter coffee, Geeta pulls out family photo albums. Mohan, her husband, loved traveling and chronicling his travels. Combined, these passions have amounted to a library’s worth of memories and writings. She shows me Reyu’s room, or rather a room he’s annexed for himself where his rules apply (“don’t take post-its off the cupboard”).
“Did you pay Reyu for the pigeon scarers?” I ask, referring to the aluminum-foil-coated cardboard cut-outs that were sold at Mall 2024 as the answer to the pigeon nuisance at Apurva. It was an idea that Reyu had claimed as his. He had asked his grandmother for fifty bucks to use it with due credit.
“I’m anxious about Reyu thinking about money.” That’s the other thing she’s worried about for Reyu.
DÉBROUILLARD
Sometime in August of last year, a month or so after Mall 2024, Reyu did a series of after-action interviews with his core team. The review with Himanshu, which Archana has captured on video, is a bunch of five-minute clips done at the level of detail of a corporate product launch. Just like everything else in Reyu’s repository, these videos are serialized with Reyu mentioning the part at the start of each.
In these clips, following a sequence that he has used on others before, he seeks his father’s evaluation on various parameters—creativity, planning, pricing, by brand, by show, by business function.
At one point, Himanshu sizes: “Any good leader who can scale should know that if I have to do a big thing it shouldn’t always be about me. I’ll find some people and let them run with it. And you did that. You let Gungun didi make those ads. That’s how you get… your… anything you do becomes better when you get good people to contribute to it.”
“So that means I know how to lead?” Reyu says, his eyes lighting up.
“Yes,” Himanshu says, raising a thumb up.
The late Anthony Bourdain was an admirer of the ability in a handful of chefs to pull off the impossible by sheer gusto. No matter what life threw in their way, no matter how often life cut them to size, members of this cohort were unfazed. He evoked the French word débrouillard, meaning to get something done come what may, to describe this quality.
For Mall 2024, Reyu understood that getting his friends to match his level of energy was not going to be a piece of cake. He fathomed this enough to choose to play cricket, which he is lukewarm about, with his friends in exchange for a few hours of their time for Mall, or offer help on something he’s good at in exchange for help he needs from someone. He trained himself to extract latent possibilities from everyday interactions in a manner that took him closer to his goal, which had a gravity he couldn’t shake off. Through such efforts, Reyu learned to see the world through the singular lens of what he wanted to create in it. If he wanted to create a dining and shopping and entertainment experience in his flea market, he looked at everything as a means to that end.
Like Bourdain’s débrouillards, Reyu doesn’t choose to be this way. Reyu has a flame that burns most intensely in him. This flame doesn’t need a match. It is always there. He cannot snuff it anymore than he can stop himself from breathing.
The day after the discovery of the washed-out Mall note from the pocket of Reyu’s school shorts, I had asked Archana and Himanshu about their points of tension during Mall 2024.
“Managing emotions,” Himanshu said.
“That is true,” said Archana. “Even Reyu was stressed and anxious that day. I mean, he’s usually never like that.”
For some time leading up to the event this year, both parents had been priming Reyu for the day. They had implored Reyu to temper his expectations, pointing out the very real possibility that no one else shared his stratospheric level of enthusiasm and excitement.
“The challenge was that,” said Archana, “Reyu wanted the adults to be interested and focused. That’s not something adults are good at. They tend to get distracted especially around groups of other adults.”
“He kept raising the stakes on this event,” his father chimed in. “I was so relieved when it was over.”
The review videos that I’m watching follow a consistent format. In them Reyu asks a question to his father that is bifurcated into an ask for a qualitative estimation followed by a numerical score out of ten. Himanshu, time and again, shares not just his appraisal on the specific parameter but also commentary on an underlying principle, such as the one about leadership. Perhaps such pedagogy comes with the territory of a parent.
As I go through the videos one by one, I find myself marveling at the fastidious detail with which the sessions are conducted. Reyu seems to be noting down not just the score but his father’s words verbatim. Off camera, Archana reminds Reyu to not bother with the transcription but the child follows his process anyway.
“Art is now an expectation from you, Reyu,” says Himanshu in one of the clips. “You will be known by your failures, not your successes.” His words are dramatized though not untrue. Whether it is the handmade cards he has made for guests or the art galleries he has hosted before, Reyu’s reputation as an artist precedes him. People expect a lot from him, and he’s comfortable with that. Following his own compass in his art has allowed Reyu access to a process of continual unfolding. Up until now, his parents have helped him with the preservation of that process. They have let him go wherever he has wanted to.
Now, with the Mall project, the stakes are higher for Reyu than they have ever been. In his efforts to run a profitable business venture, Reyu appears to be seeking the firm ground of adult validation. Graph after handdrawn graph carries forecasts and targets for various product lines. Perhaps he is measuring himself by this target unmet, this product unsold, this show marred. That is the fear his parents have.
How to tell a boy of nine that adult validation is inherently capricious, polluted by polite indulgence and disingenuity? That the world at large that is right at one time can be wrong at another? Or that there may forever be a conflict between what we want and what the world asks of us, and that it is okay to ignore the latter but not dogmatically?
While I was visiting Reyu at Apurva Plaza, I had heard talk of kids having to sign forms in triplicate to be inducted into the core team for Mall 2025. His parents had tried to dissuade him from the paperwork. Somewhere Reyu had got it in his head that paperwork is what adults demand as a proxy for commitment and hence had gone on to demand the same of his friends. Will the new joinees to the cast and crew of Mall 2025 have to sign triplicates? I do not know.
In the coming months, as the preparations for Mall 2025 gather steam, the débrouillard in Reyu may face his sternest test.
CONVERSATION, NOT SOLILOQUY
While I’m with the family, Archana tells me that a day before my visit, Reyu realized at eight in the evening that he had to by the next morning deliver a model for the respiratory system that his Aunty at school (they call their teachers Aunty) had asked him for a couple of classes back. His exact words: “Aunty is counting on me. I’ve got to make the model.”
The teacher in reminding Reyu had told him that the model would be used for students in Grade 3, a year younger, and so, perhaps noticing whom she was addressing, had specified that it must not be complicated. The stipulation had thrown a spanner in the works for Reyu. Some time ago, he had made a replica of the human breathing apparatus for his aunt Neha, a pulmonologist. It was accurate enough to find a home in the doctor’s clinic. Despite having a ready replica, on this occasion, Reyu decided to not use it and instead have a fresh go in keeping with his teacher’s condition.
With help from his parents, he made a simpler replica with two polka-dotted balloons for lungs, another one cut out and made into the diaphragm, and two straws for the trachea that ran through a hole at the bottom of a paper cup, connecting the mouth to the lungs. The lungs were contained inside a bottomless plastic barrel with the diaphragm wrapped around its open bottom. In a video Archana shared with me, Reyu holds the cylinder in his fingers like a recorder and blows into it. With each breath, the polka-dotted lungs bloat and collapse, pushing the diaphragm out and drawing it in alternatively, all the while letting out bus honks. Along with the acoustics, the twinkling lights that Reyu has left in the balloons glow, creating a striking sensory effect. A simple model made in three-quarters of an hour that, the following morning, the teacher had approved of.
In the expanding surface area of his exchanges with the world, Reyu is discovering, uncovering, other indices than his family. He is working out ways to come good on them. This is not by way of selling out but by a deepening understanding that good work — much like a sketch on paper — is not yet a living thing. It needs an audience, someone to commune with, to come alive.
Perhaps in the fullness of time Reyu’s early brushes with adult reality, such as during the Ganpati competition and the gratitude project, will not only teach him to be sensitive to what feels interesting to him — a sensitivity he is already in possession of — but also be alive to what the world finds interesting. Maybe he already understands that when Aunty asks him for an uncomplicated respiratory model, she is curious about what he can do while sticking to her brief. Maybe he doesn’t see this as a conflict, a fundamental chasm, between his own appetite and what the world offers him. Maybe he sees it as an invisible hand that can guide him. Maybe he will continue to indulge his appetite for production instead of questioning every half-formed thought like a poet who has been booed off stage too early in the journey. Maybe he will continue to welcome his own uniqueness and continue to find those in the world with whom it resonates most.
Find a world that sees you for who you are? That is the ultimate hope.
On my last morning at Apurva Plaza, Himanshu tells me about his childhood friend Mishra. The two shared a love for programming. “The moment you put Mishra in front of a keyboard, he would obsessively produce games.”
Back in Nainital, Mishra was perhaps the most maladjusted kid Himanshu knew of. He was also famously spaced out, the kind who would get color pencils for a literature exam because he thought it was the day of the art exam. As we sip from our cups of coffee, Himanshu shares with me a high-school story about his friend.
It was English composition class that day in the ninth grade. A new teacher was in the classroom. He asked the class to write a piece based on a cue. The brief was to write a sketch of a boy in a boat with a whale lurking underneath. In Himanshu’s words: “The story he [Mishra] wrote was a very skit-like conversation between him and a whale. All of us had written an essay in the indoctrinated [way] with proper prose-like style. Mostly about terrifying sea travel. He wrote it like a back-and-forth with the whale. The teacher picked out his story as a standout and put the spotlight on Mishra which was as rare for him.”
Mishra turning in a quirky piece did not register in Himanshu’s mind as much as the teacher’s reaction. It took a rare teacher to give his friend a win that day. It was the only occasion he remembers from school when any teacher had positively reinforced Mishra’s innate tendencies without trying to curb or correct them.
Their paths diverged soon after. From time to time, Himanshu would recall his friend, wondering how life had turned out for him. It was a relief for him to learn, many moons later, that Mishra had gone on to earn a dual degree in computer science from the US. Today, he works for Google. Mishra has, by all external scorecards, made it.
Himanshu leaves me to join a work call. It’s Monday. He’s working from home. Archana has gone to the office. The two alternate their remote-working days to have at least one parent at home on weekdays.
In the days after, I take Mishra’s story to be a cautionary tale for those who do not learn how to play the game. I’m visited by a question: Was it a parable for Reyu? Reyu has a much better read on people. He has this ability to read the room and give people what they most want, be it via a masterclass on paper planes or a bunch of nifty sleight-of-hand tricks. I cannot help but think that if Mishra was a soliloquy, Reyu holds the promise of a bracing conversation.
Why then, for Himanshu, did Reyu evoke memories of his old friend Mishra?
It is anybody’s guess.
🙏Thank you, Himanshu Bora and Archana Rao, for letting me in.
🙏Shout-outs to Rohan Banerjee, Nitesh Jain, and Sarthak Dev for reading drafts and sharing their thoughtful comments. Your input led me to choices I would have otherwise ignored.
PS: This is a piece of long fact. To protect the privacy of the children in this sketch, however, names and other identifying details have been suitably altered.
Wow, so glad I came across this on Rohan’s notes. What lovely and honest writing!
The most affecting thread is how Reyu’s journey is set against deeper family events, illnesses, grief, and the demands of everyday life. That he continues to produce art and plan grand creations in the midst of real, sometimes painful, adult realities speaks volumes about the resilience inherent in children’s imaginations. It raises a question about what might happen as he grows older. Will he continue to find that sweet spot where his passions meet the world’s expectations? Or will he bend, as we so often do, to more “conventional” paths? It was moving to see him test his own boundaries, search for validation, and yet remain anchored in his own sense of wonder. I’m left feeling hopeful that if we keep giving children the room to dream on such a grand scale, they’ll keep handing us glimpses of the world that are bigger, braver, and more vividly drawn than anything we grown-ups could imagine on our own.