So much has happened in little Raghav's life in the past few months, and he has all taken it in his busy stride, not stopping for a moment to ponder.
We are now back in Delhi, and have left Singapore and Raghav's first real friends and first real school forever, and he doesn't even realise it yet. Till a few days back he was still collecting rubber bands for his friends Fefe and Dawn.
But he goes to the big school now, and knows the name of his school also when you ask him. He got a bit overwhelmed on the first day when he saw all the children at primary school lined up in the foyer, and perhaps we too were expecting too much from him, thinking he would take to his new school like fish to water, since he has always been such an adjusting child, but it took him a few days of clinging while we were there and crying when we left before his teacher recommended that we don't enter the classroom with him, and say bye to him at the door itself to allow for an easier transition. And it has worked since then. It is also a way that he was used to in Singapore, where parents were in any case not allowed to enter the classrooms, and we would just let him carry his bag and go in by himself. So he does the same now and is very happy at school now. Teacher Treeya has been replaced by Swapna Ma'am, and his best friends Julien etc. are slowly slowly not being mentioned that often.
The first thing he came back from school and told me was that everyone knows Chota Bheem and the song. He seemed quite happy with that. Also he has noticed how people speak Hindi here, and that roti is served at lunch (things he never saw anyone else speak/eat at Singapore).
The first person he got familiar with at school was a boy named Arjun, who is not a Pandav, apparently. It's so interesting to see his world of comics and books come alive in India. We cross the Yamuna river to get to school, and he says "from the Krishna story?", and we go to the temple almost everyday and he sees all the characters he has read about in his comics -- Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Lakshman, Krishna, Radha.
He has also seen his nani fold her hands, close her eyes and mutter something, and he does the same, when I ask him what he says, he says he's just moving his mouth, like when he whispers in our ear now he just says "phus phus phus phus" and only very recently has started realising that one says actual sentences while whispering in the ear.
He has been collecting sticks, day in and day out, and then uses them as weapons, sometimes it's a sword or a trishul, a trumpet or a drumstick, or just a weapon. Playing with toys is again at a low, and he just loves to either watch his favourite Chota Bheem on TV, or play fighting games with his weapons.
Manipulating with cute talk is at the highest now, and everytime I am angry with him he keeps asking him if I love him, and then one day when I told him mamma will always love you, even when she's angry with you, he now says in the middle of my loud scolding "when you angry with me do you still love me?" . Forget about the topic at hand, all that he is concerned with is whether he is loved or not.
He has been rattling off dialogues from Chota Bheem.. "Yeh chota sa bachcha.. tum ise gajar (takatwar) kehte ho?" And also loves to sing the Chota Bheem songs and also the Mowgli one, in his own lyrics which he has understood on his own.. But he sings with gay abandon and with a good head for tune.
He has almost stopped reading simple stories like Dora, Diego etc and loves to read comics instead, Chota Bheem ones or Amar Chitra Kathas. We started with Hanuman to the Rescue and then went on to Rama, Garuda, Churning of the Ocean, Prahlad, Tipu Sultan, Abhimanyu.. He even pretends to read by himself when I tell him no more stories and that we must sleep now. He even does a good job at it. His principal at this new school was quite surprised that he reads comics, saying that children his age usually just go from one page to the next, whereas Raghav can actually follow a story from one small box to the other. He reads with extreme concentration and if you tell him something different from what you told him the last he corrects you. In fact, he also does a lot of monkey business while reading familiar stories now, so once Nalin read the whole Hanuman story as Hanumanu. He gets a big kick cracking these jokes!
