The SOBA (Scindia Old Boys Association) page on my FB feed throws up this picture. I’m startled. ‘ग़ौर से देखिए इस आदमी को,’ I want to shriek, but since there’s no one around to heed my cry, I desist from airing the warning.
Friends, this here is the grinch who stole my sweet dish for an entire term. Okay, not exactly stole; he actually won it in a bet. The bet was whether or not a certain batsman would score a half-century in a certain match. Rohit won because the batsman we were betting on was him; and he indeed scored a half century. Call me a bad loser but I say this was match fixing. So, there we are, Rohit and I, chatting after a gap of 30 odd years. It’s all smiles and laughter. Rohit says that it was great character on my part to stick to my word for the whole term. I tell him he’d ‘earned’ the prize , not won it by a stroke of luck. He offers to treat me to the best cake in town, next time I’m in Delhi. A sort of just desserts. And so it goes. Then eventually, he lets it out. He asks me if the whole episode doesn’t actually bring back some bitterness in the mouth. The pun is unintended I presume. I pause to think and realise that if this buried memory has yielded anything, it’s sweetness. And this is where Rohit’s younger brother,Mukul, makes his entry. Now Mukul was neither in my house nor in my batch. Yet, whenever I was handing over my jalebi or fruit cream to his elder sibling, he usually made it a point to put up a resistance on my behalf. He sometimes even shared half his sweet-dish with me. I guess it is this thread of kindness, and not the strand of deprivation, that stands out in the whole weave of the episode. The emotions that move us most are passions such as love, anger, or jealousy. However, their hold on us only slackens with time. What endures is the poor and humble cousin. Plain simple kindness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorSachin Jha. Archives
September 2020
Categories |