Recently I have found myself enjoy conversations much more outside my peer group, particularly with kids and oldies. They are less cribbing about life, they talk about things other than web-series, career and love, they mean what they talk and talk what they mean. This one is about my new 8 year old friend, Hea, as she would want me to call her.
"Obhilasha", she said, in her Bengali accent, as she offered to walk me to a play ground near by. She was a quick and confident conversationist, as if to make me comfortable in her company she started with my favorites, from fruits to vegetables she would want to know everything that doesn't concern me even a bit, but surprisingly and honestly immersing me remembering forgotten facts about self. Her favorite fruit was strawberry, she said, which she had eaten only once, one that her friend her gotten her, she quickly described it's taste, translating to whatever Hindi she could. There's a thing about us since childhood, fancy things are almost always our favorite. We walked through the hardly four feet wide lane that could give way to nothing except a bicycle, yet, she commanded that I kept to the left of the lane, and she would take my right. I wanted to recheck where all this confidence was coming from, some kids in my previous encounters had taken me to be a student. Very unlikely, she was a perfect judge to my age, 24, she said, and yet continued to hold my hand in the most protective manner when a bicycle would take us by surprise from the back.
My mother had mentioned how Abhilasha had recently lost her father in a heart attack, and all this while I couldn't be more amazed by her spirit. But, what she did next, was least expected. Just when we reached the playground, she started narrating me memories of her father, of how they would spend time playing on the ground. I think I just couldn't concentrate on what she was speaking anymore, her expressions did not have a taint of loss, there was this smile, I imagined, she would have had with her father in those moments she was narrating. She mentioned her father a couple of times more with that same oblivion, leaving me perplexed as to how kids receive loss. Had she accepted so well of her father's loss or was she still unaware of what had happened? Was that courage on her face or was that innocence?
Coming back to the responsible kid she was, she reminded me how it was almost sunset and we should be heading back. She asked where I came from, "Mumbai", and there came that big smile this place brings to a million faces. I asked what brought that smile on her face, it lit her up even more with that innocent answer of how she had never been to Mumbai, but she would want to. The biggest town she had been to, was Malda, but she had dreams of living in Delhi. That did take me back a few years down, and wonder what precisely I should be a little thankful in life about. Village or a city life, flowers or trees, discussing about things lesser important, or how they appear to be, we parted ways for the evening.
She quickly agreed to get clicked, when I asked her to (I knew I wanted to remember her for long), and, did not for once bother to look at how she looked in the picture.
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