Little Boy Blue

Today evening tea time had its new story. Chai, rusk, brad-aumlate and Maggi at Dhyani’s in the evenings have become the only time when in am not burdened with mtext, osnap and tedious-entangled thought processes.

The small sparse cove became a stadium gallery today, with some boys from god-knows-where were playing a cricket cum catch match. The half basket ball court size is hardly enough space for four teenage boys to play cricket. Nevertheless the enthusiasm was not marred by lack of space. They were enjoying the two pace length run ups and oddly placed sweeps with their bruised bat and ball. The amateur spin deliveries sometimes resulted in some nearly window pane shattering trajectories.

So essentially Striped T-shirt, Lemon T-shirt, Green Shirt and Faded Patchwork Jeans were having a good time. Along came Little Boy Blue cycling like mad, jumped off after resting the cycle against the parapet of the sunken court ….his eagerness to join the quartet obvious. I was expecting an Anita Desai kind of storyline to unfold…the kid would hang around wait eagerly, the teens would ignore him and the kid would become sad and leave.

Well I was in for surprise…Little Boy Blue was not interested in batting or bowling, he was just eager to catch attention. For a special reason though. He took two steps down to the sunken court and absentmindedly fidgeted with something on his neck. A faint glimmer of a gold chain. He jumped down the rest of the steps and landed on the court, sprinted to the disused basketball hoop stand and slid to the other side. Stripes noticed but played on. Faded Jeans faltered at the next ball and the ball rolled in Little Boy Blue’s direction. He grabbed it …actually seized it and the opportunity to catch attention as well. As he threw the ball back to Stripes he flashed a smile and discretely pulled out a chain with a small flat gold locket. Very very discretely. Stripes gave him an ‘ohh’ look and raised his brows as if to say ‘very nice, very nice…’He then shot the ball at Green Shirt and they all resumed playing.

Clutching onto his blue collar as if, would he let it open the chain would fall, Little Boy Blue ran to the steps. He sat for a while grinning and then ran up to his cycle and pedaled away furiously……to show his new gift to someone else.