yashoda looks inside

यशोदा

The complaint was ordinary: he has eaten mud. And Yashoda did what every mother has done since the invention of mud — took the small chin in her hand and said, open.

Inside the mouth she saw no mud. She saw everything. The wheeling stars, the oceans, the three worlds turning, time itself — and somewhere inside all of it, herself, holding open the mouth she was looking into. The whole universe, in the gap of a missing milk tooth.

And then comes the story's tenderest piece of engineering: she forgets. The tradition is careful about this — the vision is gently withdrawn, so that she can go back to being his mother. Back to the ordinary outrage about mud, the wiping of the chin, the calling of everyone to dinner. The story understands something that parenting books circle for chapters: a parent cannot parent an infinity. Love requires the child-sized version, and the forgetting is a mercy, not a failure.

Every parent is issued a Yashoda moment or two. Some evening the child says a sentence from nowhere, or you watch them asleep a moment too long, and for one vertiginous second you glimpse the entire unknowable person — the decades of them you will never see, the rooms they will stand in without you. And then it is time for dinner, and this too is correct. Going back to dinner is not the loss of the vision. Going back to dinner is what the vision is for.

Wipe the chin. Serve the food. The universe keeps.