Saturday Pages no.1

[I am trying something like this for the first time. Thanks to Jenny and Ali...]

I should have run then. My heart was pounding in my chest. But the devil was in me, and instead of running I looked at the three big boys at the bottom of the path, and I simply said, 'Or are you scared?' The devil till then had been only reserved for school, and mostly for those group sessions in English and Sanskrit where I whipped out my precocity like a warrior prince his patent sword on the big dull ones who had never laid a finger on me. Out on the street, there is no room for abstraction so I thought I might as well turn the big D on.

They did not move, joking among themselves, apparently not aware of my presence. Usually in such circumstances, they are pretty liberal and give me a head start. I guess it gives them a sort of kick to watch me scamper like a scared hare and then catch me. Giving the crowds their money's worth and so forth. I started to walk toward them. The kite flung itself to my right flank as a sudden gust turned up from nowhere. I pulled the kite out and held it between my thumb and forefinger, pressing the point of intersection of the mast and the arched yard enough not to shear the paper so hard that it tore. My first kite!

The path was ruddy and broken, usually reserved for bicycles and motorbikes. During the day, cattle and goats were usually shepherded to the farm nearby. I sidestepped a batch of cow dung recently run over by a motorbike. The boys were still joking, their laughter intermingled with the usual popular swear words. I told myself not to look in their direction till I passed them. Then maybe I will nod or raise my free hand with the right amount of coolness and then march on. One of the guys, with a positively teratoid face and matchstick legs went over to the wall and hoisted himself on it. The one wearing a sleeveless shirt threw a rubber ball at him, standing in the middle of the path. The third one ran past me. I didn't look where but I knew what they were up to.

The first ball thundered above my head at 100 kmph. I looked at the monster as I came up near him.
“Nice arm” I said. He didn't know what to say. He just stared at me and I continued to walk.
“You can't go in there” he said finally.
“But I can” I replied.
“Give me the kite”
I smiled I think what you may call a wry smile. The sleeveless dude was in front of me now, spinning the ball between his hands and moving backwards.
“You don't dis boys older than you, you mosquito. Look at him Muscles, a mosquito flying a kite. What a scene!”
He seemed to enjoy the scene, so to speak. I realized this was the moment. With a speed that has astonished me till date, I ran straight at him, biting him on his shoulder, and he hit the wall. I released him and he fell.
“Mosquitoes bite. Didn't they teach you at school?”
My right side glass had broken but the kite was intact. I felt my wrist twisted behind my back and I wailed like a scrupulous alarm clock. Muscles!
“It is the monitor grip” and he spat on me. I swung my leg to the back but to no avail. He switched hands. And it shot up again, more than the first time. In the mid-distance a song started playing. Some old movie song with the violin that made you cry. Not the type of song you want when your arm was being force-fed through a sugarcane juicer. Suddenly I thought I was dying. Seriously, I felt like my whole internal affairs department from the esophagus to the rectum wanted out desperately. But two strikes and out? Heard you see your life in front of you. But what about what you hear? Where was my kite, anyway? No he wouldn't got for it now. But what a kite!

My glasses clung haplessly on my nose and I could make out the third boy a few feet away from my face. He looked the oldest of the three.
“Stop!” he shouted disapprovingly and Muscles finally let go with an ugly grunt.
“Where's your house, boy?” he asked calmly.
“Why should I tell you?”
“I want to hear from your own lips that you have come too far from home. You live in Railway Quarters, don't you?”
I didn't know how on this Milky Way he knew that.
“So?” I answered, rather saucily.
“Well, you do know the rules?”
Seeing that I was feigning ignorance, he went on.
“A loose kite falls under the rule of capture”
“Yes. I did find it first.”
In my haste, I had not even put on slippers.
“That's not what it means. It means it belongs to whoever lives in the area. I guess you're a newbie..You doing alright, buddy?” He asked the guy who called me a mosquito. Buddy Boy gimped away and nodded.
“Ask him to apologize” he said. He had picked my kite up and was lusting at it.
The leader looked at him as if looking at a silly child. He finally sighed and motioned to me. Buddy Boy stood in front, with an odious grin that looked creepy. Apparently his lip was cut in our little tete-a-tete.
“Sor..”
Before I could complete, he rammed his bony fist into my stomach and out came the afternoon tiffin–a gooey cocktail of potatoes, lentils, and semolina painting his sleeveless shirt and–this is the painful part– my kite which he held in one of his hands. What a kite! It was a beaut (Rs. 5.00 at Thangam Stores). It was a dodecagon with red, blue and green colors alternating for the sides. The symmetry was rather fetching. The lower sides had hanging from them golden tufts, which looked very much like the tassels that hanged from my mom's silk saris. I had to inveigle Cobra with foreign coins to let him teach me to fly. Everything was going according to plan until...