Kids

As summer holidays begin, there are children everywhere. In the trains, at the bus stops, malls, ticket queues, restaurants and everywhere else. It is like they have spilled out randomly into the streets and into our everyday life. As a student studying in Mumbai, who just recently started work, I only always came across the working class, full of energy in the morning train, dead tired at night. They were my faithful companions in the train journeys I undertook day and night. My routine was set. Although I didn't know any one person, I was surrounded by strangers, whose behavioral patterns I had studied, and perfected to my own advantage. Now suddenly, there was a shift in this universe. Chaos struck. 

It began gradually, with the train seating formula going wrong. In a second class compartment train to Churchgate, four ladies will sit comfortably together. Now with a lady bringing one kid and his/her younger sibling, the maths has gone out of the window. Does the fourth or even third lady ask the mother to shift? Then where does the child sit? Does the baby count as the fourth person? 

The other problem was that I used the morning time to read. In the train, there was a lot of noise, ladies being chatty early morning. But having made my peace with it, I could translate Dickens into a language that I enjoyed. Now, the kids disturbed this peaceful harmony. It's not that they screamed and shouted. But ladies get excited when there is a baby around. Or a young child. So there is a lot of, "Kya naam hain" (what is she/her called) or "chuttiya hain eskool ko?" (summer holidays, eh?) going on. On one memorable occasion, a fellow passenger asked the mother of a child, to please pass the baby to her. The mother held her out to me, intending for me to be the intermediate carrier. Wide eyed, I continued to stare at her, not believing it. She soon got up herself and passed the baby around. 

At another time, a young boy, fascinated with my phone, my book, my bag, was seated right next to me. Almost immediately he felt an intimate level of comfort as to perch himself on my lap. As I tweeted, 'An unknown kid is sitting on my lap. When does school begin?' he looked into my phone, quite pleased with himself. 

Then there is the story of when two kids meet in the train. One lady got her young girl into the train and immediately bought her some wafers to munch in the train. Presumably to keep her engaged. All the kids in the compartment started eyeing this privileged child who had been handed special wafers. Quite soon, all the mothers hailed the waferwallah and bought all sorts of junk-wafers, chocolates,biscuits. Soon, the kids were all crunching into their wafers, feeling free to drop them around in the compartment or onto my lap.

Feeling tourist-y I took my mother to eat at the Juhu Chowpatty, on a Saturday night. At around nine in the night four kids, were playing around happily in the water. Unsupervised. They were as young as five, five, seven and eight. If they were lost, they were quite comfortable playing in the water, till their parents came to find them. 

Me and my mother took a brave trip to Elephanta Caves on a Sunday. In Summer, during summer vacations. It was quite an experience. But the darnest thing were the kids. Amazingly so, there were hundreds of children everywhere. On the roads, the Ferry, the Gateway, everywhere. Then again, I couldn't help but notice, a strapping young man, all of five take a photo of his parents near the Gateway. He was telling them to come closer in the frame, so that he could click a good picture. Smart kid.