deepu, i bought raakhis for our cousins yesterday. i guess this is the first time we’ve not had to buy them as a pair, as we do each year. i missed you di :’-(

i was missing gayatri so much today i called her up and stole an umma from her. then i undid the band that bound the bead-curtain, and giggled to myself as they clattered aloud, happy to be free. it’s true…the joys of life are in the living 🙂

“you will blow this whistle when you are lost. and you will do it loud and clear so i can hear you and come to find you. do you understand that?”

at the hemel hempstead station waiting for my silverlink train to london-euston, i couldn’t help overhearing a mother repeat these instructions to her daughter and older son, as the father watched quietly. hours later the same the evening, as i walked back home, a girl in her late teens, three studs on her brow, approached me.

“do you have a pound on you that you can spare?” she asked. holding her hand was another little girl of about four or five, a rag-doll clutched to her chest. the two girls did not seem to be poor at all…both wearing bright jeans studded with little stones, while the little one wore a pink striped t-shirt and a red skirt. “i need to get her home to her sister”, the girl continued, pointing to the little one, “and i have run out of change for the bus.”

my instant reaction was to give her a pound, but as i searched about in my handbag for loose change, i wondered if she was telling the truth, and then i wondered why she would be lying. i noticed another man around us now…bearded, stout and scruffy looking, he almost looked like an egyptian crook, and i remembered seeing him watch the girls from a distance just minutes before the girl stopped me. when the man saw that he had been spotted, he walked past us at the footpath where we were standing, and stopped by a bend in the road just a few yards away. had he not turned back to look, i would have put away the doubt lurking in my mind, that somehow he was connected with the girls.

hemel is a small old town, with ducks and swans that laze around in the water gardens surrounding the town, shops that shut early for the day and buses that don’t ply after five in the evening. it was for that reason that i was walking home and so, i asked the girl if she would find a bus at that hour, and where she was going. she said she would and added “why don’t you take out all the money that is inside your purse so we can see if you can add up the change for me.”

that did it. something inside me said not to trust this girl, or the man (who was still waiting there), and i showed her the 15 pence that i (deliberately) managed to find. i lied to her that i had just used my change for the bus myself and so i cannot find any. “can i keep that then?” she asked sweetly, looking at the 15p in my hand. yes you can, i said, and dropped it in hers.

three years ago at commercial street in bangalore, i was faced with a similar situation. i was looking for a little bell-string and stopped at a bedspread store to see the intricate designs the storekeeper had. amid the moving crowds outside, i saw a woman looking at me across the narrow road. she had a kind face but she looked like she was lost. when i came out of the shop, she came to me and smiled, asking if i could understand kannada, the language spoken in karnataka.

“yaenn aaitu?” (what happened?) i smiled back and asked. somewhat relieved, she hurriedly narrated that she lived very far, and that she’d forgotten her wallet at home when she went to drop her kids at school. she had tried to walk back all the way but it was getting late and in two hours her kids would be waiting for her at school. finally she stammered what she really wanted, and i could see the moist humiliation in her eyes when she blurted out “10 rupees kodteeya?” (will you give me 10 rupees?)

i knew she was telling the truth, and not wanting to make her feel any more bad for the money she had to ask from a total stranger, i nodded yes.

no. i finally told myself as i walked away from the girls…i wasn’t feeling guilty for not having helped this european girl today. she wasn’t telling the truth. was the little girl accompanying her really her sister? i will never be able to find out.

it saddened me to think of what they must have been up to. i wondered if they were in some kind of trouble, and if i had made it worse by not giving them any money.

the pied piper is not dead.

what is it about the children in this country that some of them just disappear? we hear of teenage children missing, abducted or raped almost once every two weeks, and these are just the reports that have reached the bbc. the disappearance of 13-year-old milly, or amanda dowler in march this year perhaps was the rare case that received a lot of media attention…and it helped. even though she’s not been traced yet, her pictures still haunt in the form of posters everywhere, reminding every parent to take care. even so, the missing-children files in the uk is only increasing. the most recent one being the double disappearance of two ten-year-old friends — jessica and holly.

“if they haven’t done nothing bad, they are not wrong are they?” said a visibly shaky classmate of two girls over the evening news today. it really is heartbreaking. apparently the school had warned children and their parents just two months earlier, that a suspicious-looking couple had been lurking around the school grounds, and to be extra careful.

i suddenly recollected seeing a similar couple stand behind a bush outside the moss hall nursery school that i come across on my way back from office. i was curious why the duo were hiding behind a cluster of creepers to watch tiny children play football in the mud. then i had thought perhaps they were parents of a certain child and were simply watching him/her play. i shuddered to think if they were the same suspicious-looking couple the newsreader was talking about.

how would children be able to know the difference between a ‘good’ person and a ‘bad’ one i thought, if grown-ups themselves could not. little wonder then that the soft toys children normally carry around, are being replaced by shrill whistles.

the next afternoon, as part of my training projects at my new workplace, i had been laying out the story of the pied piper of hamelin for children in the hindi language. i secretly wished he were still alive and had moved to london. and that he would play a ‘reverse’ tune that would bring all the missing children back.

i watched a breezy little leaf race past a solitary me last evening. it made me wonder about entelechy…because this journal actually just got me a job!

learning of the day: easy come… easy go.

most of the unpacking is done. i’m finally settling in my new home, silently hoping to shake away my blogger’s block soon.

van driver breaks his leg at the last moment. praveen and zubin leave immediately — very excited. after all, they’ve never driven such a huge thing before. sigh… boys.

two more days before we begin to shift, and i haven’t got beyond 40 percent of the packing yet 😮

reading daughter’s daughter by indian author mrinal pande brought my own memories of childhood, and how nasty children can be…

like anita. she lived in a bungalow next to our three-storey building, and she always smelled of dog fur and flies. so did her little brother, whom some of us used to tease because he had a speech defect. no, he didn’t stutter or stammer, but he seemed to have difficulty with any word that began with the letter ‘p’…so pankha laav (in marathi, it means switch on the fan) became fanka laav, please became flease, and the most unforgettable of them all f-words was when once he said “frofessor gupte“…

anita and her brother loved animals, and you’d find at least three pet dogs in her home at any time. besides she also brought home wounded or hungry stray dogs who invariably whined in front of her. her father was a milk distributor (perhaps still is), which explains why there were always huge blue containers of plastic milk bags and three steel drums stocked with milk — with the constant buzzing of flies all around the house…on the tables and chairs, on the sofa sets, around the milk drums, on the wounded dogs, and on anita. but of course, we were all kids, and none of us did mind. we enjoyed playing with the dogs, and our mothers collected milk from their milk-shop every morning.

sometimes we played hide-n-seek in her big house or watched anil kapoor- or dada kondke-movies on her video. sometimes we played catching-cook or dabais-pais in our society or on the terrace. when we were not playing, we were narrating ghost stories or tales of strange grandmothers or uncles or grand-aunts who never returned from somewhere…it could get very eerie, yet it was at the same time, well, very childish.

apart from being the only quiet and wide-eyed non-maharashtrian pair in the noisy gang, (by their standards) my sister and i were known for having the “strictest” parents in town.

it wasn’t their fault…no matter how interesting a game or how less time deepu and i had been outside, we were to report home by 7:00 pm, while the others enjoyed play-time till 8:30; we were not to play under the sun during weekends and other holidays, while the others happily got tanned all afternoon and screamed till their voices got hoarse. there were more of these rules, but you get the point.

anyways, we were indifferent to what they thought about us — i loved the storybooks and endless amar chitra katha comics my parents got for me to devour at home, while my sister was still too young to even know what ‘strict’ meant. she was to find out soon enough, but in what way…

one evening we decided to play on the terrace. my sister and i had some extra time that day, because my parents had gone shopping and would return by 8:00 pm they said. the terrace, with all its tv antennae, cables and water-pipes sticking around, was not the best place to play jhatapatti — a game where one person catches another, and then the two together catch another, and so on…thus forming a ring to catch the last player. we had never played this game on the terrace before, but we decided to try anyway.

about 20 minutes into dodging and running in the exciting game, we heard a dull thud and a yelp, then followed by a loud wail. no doubt, it was my sister. she’d fallen on one of the water pipes and hurt herself. luckily, the aunty living just a floor below was also on the terrace with a neighbour that evening, and they immediately carried my sister downstairs to examine and treat her if necessary, pacifying her all along that she would be rewarded with a chocolate if she stopped wailing, and that mom and dad will return soon with icecream, and so on…

fortunately there was not much damage to be concerned about. after some soothing iodex and sweets, she seemed alright, but strangely quiet…

soon my parents came back from the market, and she was sitting on my father’s lap, narrating what had happened. after dinner, she went to bed early. i was doing my homework, when i heard some muffled sobs behind me. i turned around to see my kid-sister finding great difficulty in crying without a noise (which was very unusual). a little surprised and amused, i gently asked her what was wrong.

she first shook me away, refusing to even look at me. now i was really curious, and pressed further, threatening her that if she didn’t tell me i would never speak to her again. i think that worked …for a while, the sobs increased with more intensity, and finally she looked up at me with red eyes full of big tears and said “oh what are we going to do? our mother is a stepmother”.

i was speechless, stunned no doubt at how much my otherwise bubbly, noisy and quarrelsome kid-sister suddenly seemed to be falling apart in just four years of her existence on earth. i asked her if she knew what it meant, and why she felt so. in between sobs, she explained to me that stepmothers always scold children, they’re always ‘strict’, and that our mother fit the role perfectly.

by now i was thoroughly amused, and also sure that it was somebody else’s imagination that was running in her head. i told her firmly that’s not so, and that she’s our real mother and that i could prove it to her. getting my parents’ wedding album from the next room, i flipped the pictures one by one, and then realised that wasn’t really the appropriate evidence…because the very next sentence that popped out of her was “but can’t you see chechi (elder sister), we’re nowhere in any of the pictures!”

having seen just three more vacations than her, i wasn’t really a big girl myself, and could see the situation was getting out of hand. i explained to her again, that our mother really loved us, that’s why she scolded us. i was just wondering where she heard the new words from, when she wailed again “but anita said our mother was strict because she’s our stepmother! why would anita lie to me?”

some fifteen minutes later when she calmed down, half wondering if she should believe me or anita, she told me not to tell this to our mom, or “she’d throw us out of the house”. i promised her i wont breathe a word of it to amma, and gently stroked her hair till she fell asleep.

switching off the lights and tip-toeing out of the room, i took my books and went straight to amma, telling her what happened.

i think my mother really laughed that night.

hey!! i just got featured on guardian for having one of uk’s best blogs! hmm, now encouragement of this sort…i like, i like :-))