Local Correspondent, The Daily Onlooker.
This weekend, the Rizvi family home was in a quiet crisis – 7-year-old Ahmed, who had always been a quiet and cooperative sleeper, had told his mother that he was “kind of tired of the tortoise one” and wanted to do something different at bedtime. It has been done without any of the usual warnings, tears, or tantrums, and the family are having trouble putting their finger on what just happened.
His mother, Ayesha, was still trying to take it in that “they” had read him the tortoise and the hare story every night for the past two years. It’s not even that good a tale, that the hare falls asleep — that’s a coincidence, but that’s what we read. Now, he’s just like… he wants something else.
A timeline of events
Reconstructed accounts of the incident show that it had started innocently. The storybook was opened as usual, Nana Jee cleared his throat in the traditional way, and the words appeared on his page: “Can we do a different one today? There was a moment of silence afterwards. Nana Jee apparently raised his eyes above his glasses, looked at Ahmed and then at the ceiling, as if to see if it heard the same thing.
Nana Jee remembered, “It was so simple; he said it so simply. This wasn’t in my toolkit for a request, in my experience; kids either take the story or cry about it.
Expert Commentary
Child psychologist Dr Bilal Chaudhry told the Rice County Sheriff’s Department in a statement that parents might be overthinking a request for a book for a child’s bedtime story. As one might expect, this idea was overthought.
Ahmed’s aunt Nusrat, who was not part of the conversation, appeared on speakerphone and said, “With respect to the doctor, it’s the tortoise story today; it’s not wanting the karahi on Sundays; you have to nip these things early in the bud. Structure is love.”
A meeting of the household was called for, ostensibly over tea, to discuss what to do. Options tabled included:
Reviewing the school libraries’ story schedule annually and introducing a new one for the next year. Giving Ahmed a short list of three alternative stories, all of which can be found on a list, but he is not allowed to choose one of his own personal creation. A retention policy in which parents refuse to let their children put down a pet tortoise even though they might have the right to do so, because “it made his father strong.
After 40 minutes of deliberation and one brief aside about how tablets were to blame, the family came up with a compromise: Ahmed would be allowed to pick a new story, but it would still have to be “still educational and not one of those ones where the mouse is rude to the elephant for no reason,” as his grandmother put it.
Since then, Ahmed has asked for and received a story about a fisherman, with its values reviewed and cautioned about by the family. Although Nana Jee admits that the new story is “actually not bad,” she says the tortoise “will always have a place in this house.
Meanwhile, it appears Ahmed is oblivious to his mild preference for variety in the narrative that brought his family to a summit, and has now come up with a second, separate opinion on pyjama preferences.
The family is in attendance.