Corn and lemon and some other things all in a paper cup. I was six. Maybe seven. We walked through Pune and I wore my white hat. The white hat is now long gone, torn lost dead. It was my grandfather's, the kind that umpires wear. He wasn't an umpire but he could have been.

I didn't want to eat the corn. It was too sour. But when I said that I was silenced with stories of children dying of hunger. So I ate all of it and my nose leaked and my vision got all blurred. I didn't throw the paper cup away, because I assumed there are children in the world without paper cups.

I came home and planted a plant in the cup. My grandfather let me borrow some of the soil from his garden. "Do you want me to help you?" he asked. I said no and watered the small soil filled cup for a few days until the cup turned to mush and the plant looked dismal.

A few leaves shot out a week later. They smelled of lemons but not of corn. It died eventually and I threw the whole mucky package into the dustbin. I was sadder than I thought I'd be. But not as sad as the children in the world, I was told.

The little girl with the cropped hair danced in the middle of the street. Her head was wrapped in a red cloth with butterflies. When she stopped, her face was red and feisty  like a child warrior taking over the world.

Her parents, standing close by, looked on with pride, as their daughter jumped around without a care in the world. They clapped along, uninhibited, because their child looked happy and perhaps that all they wanted. The rest of the people threw her a generous glance, maybe a small smile, and went along their lives.

Once she was done, she walked away, holding her parents' hand, saying something in a manic chatter, where her words tumbled out without pauses. The parents understood her perfectly. They asked her questions and made comments. It was clear that all she needed was the right audience. 

The dead bird

They brought down the broken bird from the shelf.

The wings were chipped in a few places. They blew at the wounds and chalky blood remains fell before them, in a fine layer. The eye of the bird was expressionless. Its head, the colour of cherries, glinted in the white lights of the room. It a had a gaping hole below the neck. You could look in it, into the dark space within.

“Who broke it?” The man asked. His face was sweaty and tired. No one answered. The children stood behind their mother. They looked at their feet and their sickly legs trembled.

The silence was broken by the uncracked voice of the little boy. “It died.” He said and thick tears formed at the sides of his eyes. His mother patted his head but that made him sob.

“Yes, yes it did. It’s never coming back now.” The father said, the anger in his voice was unmasked. He kept the bird on the table and walked away.

The kids buried their heads in their hands and cried, the guilt and bereavement wringing their insides with a tight grip.

We are surrounded by tottering piles of papers. I have lost track of the number of sheets I have looked at and number of staple pins I have torn apart to be able to read the document easily. The back of my neck is burning up; a feverish reaction to both the stress and the heat. We have been in this storehouse since morning, but we haven’t found the document we came for.

The storehouse is a square shaped building with a tin roof. There are hundred of shelves, going all the way up to the ceiling. A scrawny boy with the agility of a monkey goes up and down a ladder if you point to some document you’d want to see but is beyond your reach.

The enthusiasm we showed when we started petered off within the first hour of entering this dungeon like place. After a couple of hours, I began to lose judgement. Everything seemed like the right document. The letters formed one large mass, like ants attacking a sticky toffee, and the papers started crumbling under my sweaty palms.

Now, I felt like I was caged in and I could never leave. It had been five hours and the document was still on the loose. There was one last box of papers left on the top shelf and I asked the boy to get it for me. He went up the ladder, breathing heavily, and tried to come down holding the cardboard box. He fell off the ladder at the same moment that I started to warn him that he would.

After we picked him up from between the boxes and their contents, we realized that the little accident had brought on a graver one. The piles had all collapsed and there was no way of now differentiating the papers we had gone through from the ones we hadn’t.

I walked out of the storehouse, into the blinding sunlight, and kept walking until the urge to shoot someone had passed. Behind me, somewhere in the storehouse, the monkey child continued to swing from shelf to shelf without a care in the world.

The picnic wasn’t going well. They made the children, all twenty nine of them; stand in a single file, their arms crossed across their chests. This was because, in the absence of this instruction, the kids would use their hands to pull hair and yank arms, none of which was acceptable. Now, even though they kept chattering, at least they weren’t causing each other any bodily harm.

The thirtieth kid was missing. They last saw him walking around by himself near the pond, possibly looking at ducks. The teachers assumed the worst. That he had stolen everyone’s cupcakes and was sitting somewhere behind a rock consuming it. He could also have drowned, but when it came to dealing with a class of five year olds that could wail as loudly as church gongs with their daily dose of sugar gone, it was shamefully confusing as to which was tougher to deal with.

The teachers jogged in different directions calling out his name, while one young teacher, who was interning with the school, stood with the kids asking them to remain silent. They didn’t listen to her and instead starting emitting a variety of animal sounds, calling out to their lost animal friend who could have been anything from a hyena to an injured dog.

They didn’t find him near the ducks and the pond seemed tranquil, leading them to believe that there was no instance of a floating child. They didn’t see him near the animal cages and the monkeys looked too pleased to have been recently poked at by a child. They finally went over to the play area but the swings looked untouched and the see-saw had one end wedged into the mud. They walked back, patting their forehead sweat with polka-dotted handkerchiefs, wondering whether they should alert the parents or the park authorities.

The screaming of the children suddenly went up several notches and the teachers jogged over to see the lost kid appear from behind the trees, looking rather peaceful. The intern teacher ran over in anger and dragged him, holding his shoulder in a steel grip. The kid, ignoring the act of rage, walked over to the kids and stood at the end of the file, as he would have had he not been lost. The teachers shook him and tried to ask him where he was but he froze and refused to answer.

They found him many years later, sitting alone at home, his head hidden behind a laptop and his house unvisited by friends and family. He looked at ease, just as he had the day at the picnic when he snuck away from his classmates so that he could go to a place where he wasn’t constantly spoken to.

The children, on the terraces of the buildings opposite ours, are flying kites. From where I am, they look like different coloured dots, paint stains on palette. The kites get intertwined with each other and flutter around aimlessly. They are beyond the control of the children, I assume. The children come together and move away, playing and talking, an inadvertent choreography of sorts.

The sky looms behind the glossy sky scrapers. It is going to rain. It has been a long day and I have watched the sky change colours. The dull yellow morning light quickly gave way to the monsoon sky and now the mournful colours swirl around; the sky divided into multiple shades of grey.

The children slowly disappear and the building tops stand bare under the steely rain. The rain starts out harsh, then backs down just a little bit. There are tiny faces, or maybe only in my head, at the windows in the distance. A kite peeks from behind a tree, left behind and forgotten.

The street lights come on and it looks darker outside from here than it probably is. The silhouettes of the dancing leaves beckon, offering my imagination their untold stories.

The boy on the train

I first met Mushraq on a Churchgate-bound fast train. It was a Saturday and the train was relatively empty. I had just plugged in my earphones when I felt someone tapping my knee. I looked up and all I saw was the bright eyes. They glittered with innumerable stories to tell. He chanted something while balancing the pile of books he hoped I’d buy. I took off my earphones and realized that it wasn’t a chant. It was the nine times table. He belted out multiples of 9 with the enthusiasm of a choir singer. He stopped to breathe and I asked him his name. “Mushraq Ahmed. Class 3 A. Roll no. 22. Ismail Yusuf School.” He said, answering all the questions I hadn’t asked. “Book lega?” he asked. I laughed at the child-like aggression. He noticed I hadn’t answered him. He pointed at my I-Pod and said – Gaana nahi sun-ne ka. Books padhneka. School jan-ne ka.” I bought a couple of books from him. Books that I’d already read. Somehow, that didn’t really matter.

I met Mushraq several times after that. He was on the same train every day. I was the irregular one. Sometimes I’d see him reading some book himself. Moving his finger slowly on the page, he’d string words together. Once, he had it figured, he’d proudly say the sentence out loud. Sometimes he’d sit on an empty train seat and count his money. He’d neatly arrange the tens together and then the fifties. He’d neatly fold the hundred rupee note, sometimes two of them, and put it in his shirt pocket. He’d stuff the coins in his shorts’ pockets; they’d make a jingling sound when he ran around. Sometimes, he’d gently chastise yet another college- goer for choosing music over books. And yet another person would become his loyal customer.

Often, I’d catch him eyeing the fruit that some women ate in the train. However, he’d never accept any food that any of us offered him. Once I offered him a chocolate. He shook his head and quickly moved to the other side of the compartment. I had tried to ask him about his family but he didn’t volunteer any information. I didn’t dig further, worried that I would stumble upon some painful story which I would eventually regret asking. He didn’t seem uncared for, though. His hair was always combed and his face always looked scrubbed. His clothes were old, but not unclean. He didn’t seem malnourished. He didn’t seem sad, either. Evidently selling books made him happy. He didn’t update his stock of books to often; but that didn’t cause his clientele to dwindle. The fact that he sold so many books had more to do with his endearing nature than the books.

Eventually, I switched jobs and I took the train at a different time. I didn’t see Mushraq at all. Sometimes, I would think of him if I saw another book seller; but it was left at that. So imagine my surprise when I heard someone shout – “Didi!” as I stood near the Andheri Bridge to cross the road. It was Mushraq, of course. He was flanked by a miniature version of himself. “Yeh- Salim” he said, introducing me to his younger brother. I smiled at both of them and asked him how he was. He tugged at my hand and kept smiling. I asked him if he lived close by. He nodded and at a distance I saw a number of make shift huts. The empty space under the flyover served as a settlement of sorts. As I looked around under the bridge, I realized it housed several families. Women bustled around the space as if it had been their home for a long time. Children slept in hammocks made out of old saris. A few men were crowded together, a foul smell and silver smoke forming a haze around their huddle. I stood there and many thoughts suddenly crowded my head. Had they always been this poor? Had they moved to Bombay abandoning their slightly bigger
houses elsewhere to earn more money? Were they happy?

I met Mushraq’s parents. They sold flowers at the Dadar flower market. After meeting them I realized, much to my relief, that there was no obvious painful story. His mother smiled when he said, “Ammi- yeh train wali Didi hai.” His father nodded and moved away. His mother told me how he was a smart boy and had now gone to class 4. “Bahut padhayenge isko.” She assured me and ruffled his hair. I smiled. I briefly enquired about his school, his books. He told me that more people bought books now. I told him his scolding them had worked. He missed the joke and nodded solemnly. I said goodbye to Mushraq and his family and went my way.

The thoughts that remained with me that day weren’t of Mushraq alone. They were thoughts of this dimension of Bombay that is much talked about. The poverty and the people. But it wasn’t the poverty that remained with me that day, long after I had gone home. It was the fact that Bombay somehow brings out such strong emotions in people that their faith in the city is unshakeable. The pack their lives into boxes and come to Bombay bright eyed, like Mushraq. It is their faith that lets them believe that something brilliant will happen for them, even if it means living under a bridge in the mean time.

Typical.

The teacher has a kind demeanour. She wears a summery dress that has butterflies printed on it. Her eyes dart around the classroom while she teaches grammar.

On the rather dusty blackboard, John eats a mango. A few lines below, John is eating a mango. Dangerously close to the edge of the board, in cramped handwriting, John has eaten a mango.

The children don’t care. They colour pencil shavings with wax crayons. They squeal for no apparent reason. They stand up and say, “Teacherwaterteachertoilet.” The teacher ignores them and calls on one tired looking boy to write out answers on the blackboard. He walks up to the front of the class, stopping on the way to thwack another child’s head. The class laughs manically. The teacher doesn’t look particularly kind anymore.

The boy stands near the blackboard, playing with the chalk, making geometric shapes with his finger. The teacher, in a calculated sweet voice, asks him to write out the sentences in the past tense. The boy turns to his classmates for help. They stick out their tongues at him. The boy who he earlier hit has a triumphant look and is raising his hand chanting “Iknowthenaswer”

The teacher gives up and sends him back to his seat. She has already taught them tenses thrice in the past week. She sits in her chair and looks defeated. One child stands up and holds up a picture of a mango he drew and coloured when he was supposed to be studying grammar.

The teacher sighs, turns her back to the class and starts erasing her writing.

By the time the bell rings, the children are throwing pieces of chalk at each other. John, his preferred fruit and the teacher grudgingly make their way to another classroom.

Mira.

The beginning of monsoons was the saddest thing, when I was 7. It meant the onset of school and the end of a glorious summer that had been spent playing cards and drinking cold milk. More importantly, however, it meant that Mira would go away.

Mira was our maid’s daughter. She was my age, give or take a few years. She was short with long hair tied in an untidy plait. She had big, watery eyes and a small smile. When she craned her neck, you could see a sharp, cocoa- coloured collar bone.

Mira was the youngest in a family of 4 kids. Her mother, our maid- Malti couldn’t imagine raising her kids in a heartless city like Bombay. She feared that if she kept them with her in her shed-like house, some danger was bound to come their way. If it’s not the rains, it will be some dreadful disease, she told my mother emphatically one day. So they lived with their uncle in a small village in Kerala and came to Bombay for a month in the summer.

Mira wasn’t like my other friends. For one, she was very curious about my books. At the end of every summer, she would take back a few old books of mine. I am not sure if she read them, but they would make her happy. Unlike the rest of my playmates, she had an odd sense of loyalty towards me. She would beg to be on my team when we played carom. Even though I lost almost every game back then, she seemed to want to lose with me, just the same. I taught her to play scrabble. Naturally, I won but that didn’t seem to upset her in the least. She said she’d rather lose to me than win against someone else. To my 7 year old mind, that was the best compliment one could receive.

Most days she would go back home. She would trail behind her mother, idly holding the end of her mother’s sari. Some days she would fall asleep in front of the TV watching cartoons. If her mother came to get her, my father would say- Let her be. You can take her back tomorrow. The next morning- Mira’s eyes would sparkle as she stuffed her small mouth with egg. She once told me her mother had warned her to never eat egg. It was her small rebellion. I promised never to tell anyone. That was the extent of our secrets. Eating eggs.

Then one day she told me a real secret. To this day, I remember the look in her eyes. I also remember, clear as day, how it had made me a feel. Perhaps, it was commonplace somewhere in the world. In my world, it wasn’t. Mira showed me a semi-circular burn mark on her back. It stood out arrogantly against her soft brown skin. Then she zipped her dress and told me that her uncle did that to her if she didn’t fill the buckets. Or if the food was cold. She said that her uncle told her he’d do bad things to her is she didn’t work hard. 7 year olds don’t really know too many bad things. Not even imaginative 7 year olds like me. I figured if there was something worse than being burnt with a hot pan, I didn’t want to know of it. That night, Mira fell asleep with her hand resting on my arm. I remember putting an extra sheet on her, as the night grew darker and colder. I don’t think she noticed it. But if she had, I am sure she would have appreciated it.

I am not sure when exactly, but Mira stopped coming to Bombay. By this time, we had grown up and apart. I then left Bombay myself, for a few years and studied abroad. Even her mother had left Bombay for good. Then a couple of weeks ago, when I came home on a vacation- I saw Mira’s picture in my desk. It was under a pile of old cards and letters. It was a picture taken when we were 8 or 9. Her arm was around my waist. She was smiling her small smile. I wondered where she was, if she was okay. Was she married? Did she have children of her own? Had her uncle kept his promise and done bad things to her? I don’t think there was any way to find out. And standing there, in my room, now knowing full well the extent of said bad things, for the first time in a long time I wished I could go back to being 7 again.

Little toy soldier on the window pane. He watches the cars go by. In the mornings, he watches the men buy milk in their night clothes and skim through newspapers through their gummy eyes. His room is quiet. The bed is made with pale blue sheets. The pillows are new.
The couple in the house poke their heads through the door and look around. They don’t necessarily notice him. Sometimes, the woman comes in and looks through the window. She picks him up and looks him in the eye but she says nothing. She leaves him there again by the window.
There is a basket right under where he sits. Basket full of toys; dolls with woollen hair and big bright cars that make sounds. Boxes and boxes of board games; Scrabble in a hope that the kid will be fascinated by words and Monopoly in case he is all about the money. Paint boxes and colouring books. Playing cards with pictures of fruits on the back.
An invisible child plays with cards on the marble floor, painting some invisible pictures by the side.
The height chart on the wall has pictures of animals on it. Giraffes and rabbits, a strange way to assure both short and tall kids. It remains unmarked.
The man of the house comes in once in a while and sits on the freshly made bed. Sometimes, he smokes a cigarette but almost always puts it out midway. Then he sighs and leaves, the smoke and the fizzling guilt settle in the corner of the room.
The tin soldier observes all this in silence. The little gun on his back doesn’t work and perhaps never did. Then again, nobody ever tried.
In the room next to this one, the man and the woman fall asleep every night at around the same time. The child they never could have curls and sleeps between them.

Paper cut

Under the blue-and-white umbrella outside the store, is the gift wrapping station. The man who wraps gifts is called Hakim. He comes in every morning, puts away a plastic bag that holds his things and rolls up his sleeves. Then for 8 hours straight, until the stores shuts, he wraps all kinds of things in a variety of papers.
His area is a festival of pretty paper; some shiny, some chic. The children are fussy; apparently Bobby’s present has to be wrapped in a paper that says happy birthday. Hakim hardly speaks, his hands move through the air with the air of a magician. Scissors and ribbons come in on cue. Ribbons that curl; ribbons that look like flowers. On dull summer afternoons, sometimes the ribbons look like swans.
The pay isn’t great but they give him tea and lunch. A boy in dowdy clothes comes and pours piping sweet tea into a steel tumbler. Hakim doesn’t speak to the boy, just nods in acknowledgment.
The store is packed with women in the afternoons. They buy hairdryers and make up kits. They buy bright coloured school bags for their kids. They always stop by the gift wrapping station. Hakim is convinced that a lot of people get things wrapped only because it’s free. What is the point in getting things wrapped when you’re buying them for yourself? He wonders about this more often than not, while he swiftly covers up a curling iron in silver paper. Who is silly enough to be taken by surprise by things that they bought a few hours before, he thinks. Then he looks up at the women whining incessantly about the food at their parties and their delayed pedicures and he has his answer.
In the evenings, he picks up his plastic bag and rolls down his sleeves. He puts away the gifting paraphernalia and sweeps the area around the gifting station. Scraps of silver paper speckled with blue fly around like birds in fairy tales.
He walks home, smoking a cigarette. That is the only luxury he allows himself. Outside of the one where he takes in, hungrily, the smell of fresh wrapping paper every morning. That speck of happiness keeps him going; despite knowing well that the paper will end up in the dustbin of a rich kid by the end of the day.

Last year, there was a bunch of street children who played outside Mahalaxmi station.

They would chase each other and have make believe weddings. They had a variety of toys that they had made themselves. Cardboard boxes, strings, plastic bags, torn kites all found their way into the games that used to take up their days. They'd disregard traffic and the weather. They'd snigger at irate police officers and screaming adults.

Then one day, I saw them all huddled together. They were all cackling about something. It was a mobile phone. I smiled to myself about how thrilled they were. I wondered how they got it. For the few days that followed, they would peer into the phone and laugh.

Then one day, I saw a policeman yelling at them. A crowd had gathered around one of the kids and there was a commotion. Turns out, the boys were taking pictures of passing women. Although the pictures were by themselves harmless, the act was unacceptable.

I didn't see the kids after that.

A few days ago I saw one of the boys at the station. I remembered him as one of the older kids from the group. He was being slapped repeatedly by a woman for feeling her up. He said, "bhai bola karneko"

It will be rather unfortunate if there is such little hope from the future generations. I threw him a dirty look and walked past. Turns out that's all I can do.

The big tree

The big tree is being cut down. A lot of children cry. They hug the trunk and their shrill voices cut through the heavy afternoon air. I look down from my first floor window and see one particularly enthusiastic child swinging on one of the branches. The people that the BMC has hired to bring down the tree are standing at a distance and chalking out their modus operandi. I can imagine the children’s distress, the tree is nothing but magnificent.

Moreover, the plan to bring down the tree isn’t well thought out, evidently. They can’t possibly have thought of cutting down such a huge tree on a Sunday afternoon with no protest from the residents. Sunday afternoons are a time when mothers stop bothering their children about food and homework and such; and the children rush out in the sun to play. I consider going down myself, if nothing else to reason with the officials, but from what it appears, a lot of like-minded people are doing that already.

Some concerned residents approach the BMC men and ask them something. From a distance, it looks like a very grave conversation. One of the officials makes hand gestures which indicate that the road has to be widened. The residents are unimpressed. One of them points to the tree and says something to the official. From his gestures, it looks like he is pointing out the tree’s grandeur to the BMC official. It is the official’s turn to look unimpressed. He has heard too much of this intellectual rubbish.

As the people flock around the man talking animatedly to him, I see that the enthusiastic child has fallen off the branch. It must have been a couple of feet of the ground, but that’s all it takes. The child starts howling. The child’s mother tries to pacify him. The other kids are confused and join in the crying. The adults try to calm the kids down – but the floodgates have opened. They bawl and shriek and the BMC officials have had enough. “ Chalo, hato!” one of them shouts and raps his stick on the pavement for effect. The children don’t budge; they surround the injured kid and keep making a racket.

“Chalo!!” The official shouts again and grabs one kid by the collar. He has tolerated more than he bargained for. The child screams as if pinched. The adults try to intervene but the official screams at them as well.

After 20 minutes of stern words and raps with the baton, the crowd begins to disperse. Just as the BMC official rounds up his men and gives them instructions, there is another intervention. In the middle of an unassuming October afternoon, it begins to rain. The official slaps his forehead in disbelief. It will be hard to work; the others chime in, as the rain gathers force. They walk towards their vehicle in frustration, cussing the children. Just before they drive off, they see the children have returned. They run around their beloved tree - the blues and yellows of their raincoats are in sharp contrast with the wet brown trunk. They laugh and play and give the BMC officials condescending looks.

The tree stands there, not sure what it has done to deserve such love from these 6 year olds