On my fifth birthday, I was given the first volume of a collection of fairytales written by Hans Christian Andersen. The book — a hard-bound edition with an illustrated, maroon cover— comprised stories translated into Bengali by Leela Majumdar. Since then, my hours of leisure have often been spent immersed in a world teeming with such wondrous creatures as a nightingale with a dulcet voice, a spinning top that fell in love with a ball, a daisy that befriended a bird, and the one-legged tin soldier who had set sail on a paper boat. It was the tale of the tin soldier that happened to be my favourite. In it, in a particular passage, Andersen describes how, when the light of the day waned and the shadows began to grow, the residents of a toy room — tin soldiers, a nut crusher, a writing slate and a wooden pencil— sprang to life. The din raised by the toys would even disturb the sleeping Canary, which would then start chirping. As a child, I had been fascinated by this dual transformation, not just of day to night but also of seemingly lifeless creatures into living beings.

Years later, well into my adult life, I remember reading the same passage, once again. This time though, the notion of a room full of living, noisy, playful toys — inanimate objects invested with every conceivable form of human emotion — left me with a chill that was difficult to describe. Why had I been disturbed by the idea of toys coming to life? Why had my infantile wonder turned into a form of inexplicable terror later in life?

The charm of Andersen’s tales lies in their capacity to not only open up such intriguing lines of enquiry but also challenge conventional ideas concerning children and adults. Childhood is often perceived to be the realm of irrational fears. Yet it is the child — both in fiction and in real life — who remains utterly fearless while imagining living dolls. In “The Philosophy of Toys”, Charles Baudelaire observes how “little brats” prise open dolls to search for their souls. Is this not another testimony of children’s comfort with the uncanny, a phenomenon, which, with its capacity to challenge reason, ends up terrorizing adults? Significantly, in his essay on the Uncanny (“Unheimlich”) Freud, too, suggests that children are unwilling to distinguish between living and lifeless objects. (Bengali fiction has also been enriched by some of Satyajit Ray’s short stories — “Fritz” in particular — that explore the theme of adult terror with living dolls/toys).

The progress to adulthood is synonymous with the development of a rational outlook and the embracing of the scientific temper. Yet, in spite of fortifying the mind with reason, adults remain strangely vulnerable to the terrors exercised by a grey, unexplained world. Does this not make children, and not adults, far more receptive to the unexplained? Is not this adult terror a symbol of the limitations of the culture of reason itself? Perhaps the world of adults and its institutions should begin to examine children’s ideas in a manner that is far more respectful. Freud explains the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Does childhood then signify a return to a way of life that harmonizes reason with the irrational?

The other remarkable feature about Andersen is the horror and cruelty that mark the world he creates for children. The tin soldier melts and dies; the top forgets the ball when the latter turns old and withers; the daisy is thrown out on to the street after the death of the bird. Andersen’s unwillingness to shield his young readers is certainly a reflection of his respect for, and equitable treatment of, children. Significantly, the children in Andersen’s stories are capable of inflicting great pain as well. In fact, the tin soldier melts to his death after a child, inexplicably, throws him into a cooking stove.

The lines we lay with care to separate children from adults, terror from beauty, the good from the bad, become muddled in Andersen’s stories. This leaves us dizzy with, but also wary of, the knowledge that nothing is as it seems.