We had read "The Wild Robot" together, way back in 2017, in those cold winter nights, cozy, under the fluff and warmth of our black and white comforter, a white glow from the bed stand lamp inundating us. The white nondescript lamp was the last piece on the McGuckin store-shelf. Unfortunately, the price tag had gone missing. But, I had loved it so much that the representative found it hard to resist selling it to me without a tag and we agreed on $10 as its price.
As the story unfolded night after night, one chapter at a time, and sometimes more (of course it was me, unable to stop), it became more and more my book and my read rather than my son's. Entrusted with a newfound responsibility that she was unprepared for, Roz and I embarked on this journey of realization together, much like the countless women before us. By the time we finished the book, my son was not happy at how the story came to a heart-rending end as Roz was ..., well let me not spoil the story for you. Let's just say it did not go the way he had wanted it to go.
When the sequel came out, "The Wild Robot Escapes", for obvious reasons, he was not enthusiastic about it at all. On the other hand, I found it hard to resist reading what happens to Roz, in my mind "Me", eager for the tarot reader to finally show the cards. So, I went ahead without my son and read it by myself and was secretly glad that I had done so. You will know when you read it.
Days grew into years and the Wild Robot got consumed by Calvin's jokes and Artemis's plans going awry, and then suddenly "The Wild Robot" popped back into our conversations yet again. The Reading Challenge for Neev Literature Festival 2024 included "The Wild Robot Protects", the third book of this series. Nibir, my son, had no choice and went back and read the first two books and then the third, and now, since he was also double the age and knew Roz better, came to love the trilogy. I remembered how even a year back he had resisted me reading out a chapter from "The Wild Robot" to his class on the World Read-Aloud week.
I was glad that he got to know Roz, how she made her world, the island, a better place to live in and how important it is to keep faith and hope in each other.
Given that we had such an aged relationship with Peter Brown's trilogy, it is a surprise that it took us quite a few weeks to land up watching the movie in PVR last Saturday. I was a little apprehensive as the story was so close to my heart. But as soon as Roz was freed from the abandoned crate (which had washed up on the shore) by a bunch of curious otters and she started bouncing and rolling along the jagged rocky coast, learning from the crabs to crawl up the huge monolithic face of the island, I was free from all the premonitions that occluded me till then. Holding on to my 4D chair, I found myself rushing deep into the island with the beaver family, Fink and the big bear.
As I watched and wept and held my son (he, of course pushing me away, wanting to be in no part of the PDA), I found the adaptation so vivid and close to the story that it clinked a toast with that part of my brain which had stored the memory of how it had felt the very first time we had read it together.
Times like this when we are fraught with changes that make our lives move drastically from one end to the other end of the spectrum, "we" finding ourselves standing with backs against "them" - fictions, movies, fantasies are the only way to tell us and remind us how "kindness" is the greatest survival strategy. They show us how this humble quality can be so hard to practice and yet absolutely non-negotiable to survive. The choices that are proffered to us by our own microcosmic orbit may not always make this an obvious one in our quotidian. So sometimes, we need an extra push, an external agent, as strange as an artificial intelligence imbued robot.
Roz demonstrates how to unlearn in order to learn things that matter, how observation still holds the key to decipher the mysteries surrounding us, and infer how the primal forces like fire can still keep us from dying and how kindness can thaw and melt the cold within, to survive with each other even if it is for a day, a week, a fortnight, a month, a quarter, a season, a year, a lifetime.
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