Stories

"We make stories and stories make us."

- Dr Shelja Sen

April 2011

The dining table is entirely occupied by something other than food. The family has been eating all meals at the coffee table, only occasionally able to glimpse the wood for the Tree. What had begun by being a little tree had turned into an artwork of life-size proportions.

This was the last activity of the Family Therapy Course conducted by the stupendously insightful Dr Shelja Sen of Children First in New Delhi. In the Narrative Therapy segment of the course, we had been asked to create our tree of life, individually. The task was one originally formulated by Michael White and David Epston and been very successful in nurturing (and enhancing) stories that would otherwise have been very sparse, bleak and perhaps dismal to the lived and the more so to the beholder.

The result in the Banerji-Doyle household is pictured above. A seven-foot tree from roots to treetop, filled with the experiences of a lifetime. An unwieldy artwork that was difficult to preserve from the tests of time and space, and has only survived all these years because my first-born, Sara, has staunchly refused to let me preserve photographs while junking the rest. The leaves are real sal leaves, collected by the second-born, Tyger, and I on one our visits to my friend Maya's school in Dehra Doon - we dried and painted on them and they lay around the house waiting for something more to happen to them, till this tree-making came along.

On the roots, I wrote about where I came from, the culture(s) I grew up in, people who populated my childhood and youth and had a large impact on my story as it formed: of particular interest was - Hiking, Buddha and Books! On the trunk, I wrote my beliefs - and I chose to write them in short sayings that are still the foundation of my life - like, It's good to have strong views; it's great to change one's mind. The branches had thoughts on what I wanted to do. The flowers and fruits had what I considered my achievements and activities I have enjoyed doing - and one of these came out in the form of a poem. The leaves had all the significant people in my life - all those who continue to warm my life with their stories - it's a really long list so I should not bore you! The worms had all the challenges that I wanted to conquer.

April 2017

My tree looked like this:

Far more manageable in A3 size! A lot of the content had changed, many flowers and fruits had been added, and some of the worms had gone away.

December 2017

A fast-forward, of course, but the time-lapse is necessitated by the publication of Dr Sen's second book, Imagine: No Child Left Invisible subtitled "Building emotionally safe spaces of inclusive & creative learning". 

Few writers write with the flair that Dr Sen's has, her pen flowing over ideas and concepts with the ease of a master. She states right at the beginning that she has avoided the tone of an academic work and "tried to reduce the clutter in [her] narrative by not bringing in piles of research in every chapter". A breath of fresh air, that. More importantly, a narrative that is accessible to the non-academic mindset; a reaching out to the practicing populace. Learning facilitators who need this enthusiasm, these alternatives to the straitjacketed narratives available to them. 

Straitjackets that constrict and confine, lunatic to the point of being a menace to the nurture of creativity and growth. Straitjacketed narratives that we must lock up, throw keys far into oceans to settle down at peace in the coral reefs where they can no longer do any harm.

May 2018

Midsummer, and Not a Word

A feeble pen dried prune-like

and a fly on the wall, of an existence - in a straitjacket...

Utterly odd - something written after almost six months of vegetation. Where does time go, then?