Chapter - 16
Trying to Grow

- Firdaus Kanga

Question- What is the Indroduction of Firdaus Kanga's 'Trying to Grow'?

Answer - 

Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow' was first published in 1990 and recently reprinted by Penguin India is a partly autobiographical account of his coming age in 1970s Bombay and his struggle with the rare condition known as osteogenesis imperfecta. It meant multiple fractures before he was five years old, atrophying limbs perpetual wheelchair confinement (even though the disease burnt itself out by the time he reached adulthood) and never growing beyond four feet. The story was subsequently turned into a BBC film in which he played the lead role. 'I haven't seen the film, but I can't think of many other books that are so moving and effortlessly funny at the same time.

"Trying to Grow' begins with a father likening his son's teeth to glass windows. "You can look through them, see?" he says casually to the man sitting next to him on a bus. This is followed by a funny little episode involving a visit to a holy man for a miracle cure. Within the first 20 or 50 pages of the book we know two things: One, that narrator protagonist Daryus Kotwal suffers from a serious physical abnormality and two that he can be droll about it and about life in general.

Kanga's fluid writing style and sense of humour bring to life a rich cast of characters, beginning with the family kotwal, who are never less than believable, multi-dimensional people even as they live up to every endearing parsee stereotype Such as the ability to talk or holler unselfconsciously about things that would be taboo in most Indian households; Brit and his sister Dolly address their parents by their first names, use, the occasional cuss word in front of them and discuss sex openly. Exasperation and affection justle for space in Brit's relationships with Dolly and with his parents Sum and Sera. From his part-time teacher Madame Manekshaw he learns the valuable lesson that it's what you learn that counts, not what you study" and also that "precious things are brittle". Later his friendship with the smart cyrus and with Cyrus's girl friend Amy puts him on the road to understanding what it means to grow up.

It is an understanding that doesn't come easily. Though Trying to Grow' unfolds as a series of episodes in Brit's life-roughly between the age of eight and his early twenties - The chapters don't have convenient headings that establish the time period in which they are set: It's only through close reading and extrapolation that one discovers how old he is at any given point. This is appropriate, for a major theme here is lack of development, the overall effect blurring into each other while this protagonist at their centre remains frozen in time. Brit in his wheel chair, motionless, while all around him his family and friends grow up, marry, move elsewhere, get exciting jobs, travel the world, grow old die. (It is a bit like watching a crowd scene in fast forward, with people scutting about busily, but with a single stationary element in the middle of the frame.)

According, the process of growing is more complex for Brit-and the yardsticks much less difined-than for "normal" people whose bodies undergo obvious changes with time and whose lives proceed in orderly stages from school to college to office and so on. On the book's opening page someone mistakes. Brit for a child of four when he is really eight, and this sort of thing continues for most of his life, even though he is in many senses more developed mentally than most others of his age. This complicates his relationships too.

All of this probably makes Trying to Grow' sound very sombre, for which I apologise. It's a lighthearted, warm book, full of riutous throwaway discriptions, affectionate glimpses of 1970s. Bombay and insights into the Parsee community. There is also a running joke about the idea of Karma: more than once, Brit must contend with sanctimonious "Sympathy" founded on the idea that his condition is a punishment for sins committed in a past life.

The ruder aspects of Brit's narration reminded me of jaanvar the memorable hero of Indra Sinha's 'Animal's People'. Comparisons between the two books must not be taken far they are very different in tone but both narrators have enormous vitality, and there is nothing martyred or self pitying about them. This means that we can see them first as human beings with the insecurities even baser desires that we all have, and only then as people whose physical limitations make them "different".

In Brit's case, we only gradually learn about the real implications of his condition what it means for him on a day-to-day basis, and how debiltating it must be for him as well as for those he depends on. An example of this is his off hand remark, made more than three-fourths of the way through the book, that he never sat on a toilet seat because "I was too small, too terrified of falling in; at home, I had a special ring that fitted on". Another book might have taken care to underline an everyday inconvenience such as this, to present it upfront but this one treats it as a conversational aside. Even though Trying to Grow' does fleetingly lead us into the dark corners of a world where not being able to reach the top of a cupboard for something you urgently need can become an all-consuming problem, a testament to total helplessness, the book's defining quality remains its brightness of spirit. At the end when Brit says "I liked the way I looked", you believe him.

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