What
games do you usually play in the evenings? Have you had memorable
experiences during such games? Can you
narrate any of them? Try to predict the plot of
the story you are going to read. Now, read on and find out if your predictions
are proved right.
1. It was still too hot to
play outdoors. They had their tea,
after the long day of confinement in
the house that was
not cool but at least a protection
from the sun. Their faces
were red, but their mother would not
open the door.
‘Please, ma, please,’ they begged.
‘We'll play in the
veranda and porch - we won't go a
step out of the porch.’
‘You will, I know you will, and
then...’
‘No - we won't, we won't,’ they
wailed so horrendously
that she actually let down the bolt
of the front door so
that they burst out like seeds from
a crackling, overripe
pod into the veranda, with such
wild, maniacal yells.
2. They faced the afternoon.
It was too hot. Too bright.
‘Let's play hide and seek.’
‘Who'll be the catcher?’
‘You be it.’
‘Why should I? You be-’
‘You're the eldest-’
‘That doesn't mean-’
3. The shoves became harder.
Some kicked out. The
motherly Mira intervened. She pulled
the boys roughly
apart.
‘Make a circle, make a circle!’ she
shouted, firmly pulling
and pushing till a kind of vague
circle was formed. ‘Now
clap!’ she roared
and clapping, they all chanted in
melancholy unison: ‘Dip, dip, dip -
my blue ship -’ and
dropped out of the circle with a
yell and a jump of relief
and jubilation.
4. Raghu was the catcher. He
started to protest, to cry.
‘You cheated-Mira cheated-Anu
cheated-’ but it was too
late, the others had all already
streaked away. There was
no one to hear when he called out,
‘Only in the veranda-
the porch-Ma said-Ma said to stay in
the porch!’ No one
had stopped to listen, all he saw
were their brown legs
flashing through the dusty shrubs,
scrambling up brick
walls, leaping over compost heaps
and hedges and then
the porch stood
empty in the purple shade of the
bougainvilla.
5. He started whistling
spiritedly so that the hiders should
hear and tremble. Ravi heard the
whistling and felt himself
too exposed, sitting on an upturned
flowerpot behind the
garage. Where could he burrow? He
could run around
the garage if he heard Raghu come -
around and around
and around. Ravi looked about him
desperately.
6. Next to the garage was
another shed with a big green
door. Ravi slipped into the shed
which had the smell of
rats, anthills, dust and spider
webs. Ravi had never cared
to enter such a dark and depressing
mortuary of defunct
household goods. But, as Raghu’s
whistling came closer
he suddenly slipped off the
flowerpot and slipped inside
the shed through the crack and was
gone.
7. Ravi stood frozen inside
the shed. Then he shivered all
over. Something had tickled the back
of his neck. It took
him a while to pick up the courage
to lift his hand and
explore. It was an insect - perhaps
a spider - exploring
him. He squashed it and wondered how
many more
creatures were watching him, waiting
to reach out and
touch him, the stranger.
8. He contemplated slipping
out of the shed and into the
fray. He wondered if it would not be
better to be captured
by Raghu and be returned to the
milling crowd as long as
he could, be in the sun, the light,
the free spaces of the
garden and the familiarity of his
brothers, sisters and
cousins.
9. Ravi sat back on the harsh
edge of the tub, deciding to
hold out a bit longer. What fun if
they were all found and
caught - he alone left unconquered!
He had never known
that sensation.
Nothing more wonderful had ever
happened to him than being taken out
by an uncle and
bought a whole slab of chocolate all
to himself. There he
sat smiling, knocking his heels
against the bathtub, now
and then getting up and going to the
door to put his ear
to the broad crack and listening for
sounds of the game,
the pursuer and the pursued and then
returning to his
seat with the dogged determination
of the true winner, a
breaker of records, a champion.
10. It grew darker in the
shed. Through the crack Ravi
saw the long purple shadows of the
shed. Could he hear
the children's voices? It seemed to
him that he could. It
seemed to him that he could hear
them chanting, singing,
laughing. But what about the game?
What had happened?
Could it be over? How could it when
he was still not
found?
11. It then occurred to him
that he could have slipped out
long ago, dashed across the yard to
the veranda and
touched the ‘den.’ It was necessary
to do that to win. He
had forgotten. He had only
remembered the part of hiding
and trying to
elude the seeker. He had done that
successfully. With a whimper he
rushed out of the shed
and flung himself at the white
pillar and bawled, ‘Den!
Den! Den!’
12. Out on the lawn, the
children stopped chanting. They
all turned to stare at him in
amazement. They stared,
wondering at his
reappearance, his passion, his wild
animal howling. Their mother rose
from her basket chair
and came toward him, worried,
annoyed, saying, ‘Stop it,
stop it, Ravi. Don't be a baby. Have
you hurt yourself?’
But Ravi would not let them. He tore
himself out of his
mother's grasp and pounded across
the lawn into their
midst, charging at them with his
head lowered so that
they scattered in surprise. ‘I won,
I won, I won,’ he bawled,
shaking his head so that the big
tears flew. ‘Raghu didn't
find me. I won, I won...’
13. It took them a minute to
grasp what he was saying,
even who he was. They had quite
forgotten him. Raghu
had found all the others long ago.
There had been a fight
about who was to be the catcher
next. The parents had
come out, taken up their positions
on the cane chairs. They
had begun to play again, sing and
chant. All this time no
one had remembered Ravi. Having
disappeared from the
scene, he had disappeared from their
minds. Clean.
‘Don't be a fool,’ Raghu said
roughly, pushing him aside,
and even Mira said, ‘Stop howling,
Ravi. If you want to
play, you can stand at the end of
the line,’ and she put
him there very firmly.
14. The game proceeded. Two
pairs of arms reached up
and met in an arc. The children
trooped under it again
and again in a lugubrious circle,
ducking their heads and
intoning,
‘The grass
is green,
The rose is red;
Remember me
When I am dead, dead, dead, dead...’
And the arc of thin arms trembled in
the twilight and the
heads were bowed so sadly, and their
feet tramped to that
melancholy refrain so mournfully, so
helplessly, that Ravi
could not bear it. He would not
follow them, he would not
be included in this funereal game.
He had wanted victory
and triumph - not a funeral. But he
had been forgotten,
left out, and he would not join them
now. The ignominy of
being forgotten - how could he face
it? He felt his heart go
heavy and ache inside him
unbearably. He lay down full
length on the damp grass, crushing
his face into it, no longer
crying, silenced by a terrible sense
of his insignificance.
(Adapted)
Anita Desai (b.1937), is an Indian novelist and short story
writer. She is known for the sensitive portrayal of the inner feelings of her
female characters. Many of Anita Desai's novels explore the conflicts in
families and the alienation of middle-class women. Her major works include the
novels Fire on the Mountain,The Zig Zag Way and The Village by the Sea, a book
for children. She is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
Cambridge.