Baby’s cry

The baby is not crying.

He depended on his mother for the last 9 months for oxygen. But he cannot do that anymore as the umbilical cord will soon be cut. He has to prove to the world that he can breathe and live independent of his mother. That he is not needy. The first cry is that proof.

Isn’t he not crying because he wants some attention? Possible! Who doesn’t like some attention? The doctors turned him upside down, massaged him, spanked him and what not.

And when he finally got the attention he wanted, he cried,

“Kwaah, Kwaah”

In the next few months, he developed new sounds of cries.

One for hunger, one for a dirty nappy.

One for sickness and one for boredom in general.

It is the parents’ duty to make sense of these new sounds that the baby experiments with. Of course, they wanted him to cry to a few months ago. They better deal with it.

The baby learnt to speak now. So he is expected to communicate hunger or a dirty nappy in words and not cry.

Newton told something about inertia. New habits take time to form. So he continues to cry, at least till his teens.

But he gets chided a lot for crying now. His mother slapped him when he incessantly cried in a supermarket for a chocolate. His relatives don’t do “ayyo” or “awww” when he cries now. Apparently he crying is not so cute anymore.

The teen baby is slowly coming out of the parental cocoon now.

He has learnt a few words, but he still doesn’t know how to use them to tell about his hunger, boredom or want of attention. Moreover, there are new pains and chemical storms in his body for which he lacks vocabulary.

So the baby continues to experiment with new sounds of cries. Of anger and arrogance.

But it’s not anyone’s duty to make sense of these sounds now. That he is yet to realise until he becomes an adult.

The baby became an adult.

He has to now prove to the world that he is independent of his mother, not just for oxygen but for emotion as well.

The first cry is a proof of independence. The adult cry is not, he thought. So he tries a new experiment. Of Silence.

He cries inside bathrooms with the tap turned on. So that his mother cannot hear the breath of his cry. He experiments with tearless cries, lest he is called not man enough.

Soon, he forgot to cry.

One day, he goes to a cinema because he needs an escape.

He watches a sad scene and he finds many other babies crying along with him. And they smile together looking at each other’s tears.

He finds that there are a few babies who wipe his tears, and he wipes theirs. These babies, he calls them friends. He is surprised to find his mother and father in these babies, crying.

And there ends his experiments.

He proves to the world that he is independent of his friends and family not through isolation, but through co-dependence.

Not by ceasing tears, but by wiping each other’s tears.

Crying after all is his first sound of taking breath; of being alive.