Fireflies at my window - I

I was never the bullying type- well, being the shortest girl- not counting Aruna Rani, I guess helped! I was generally very tolerant of all the girls and a lot of them came to me with all their problems and strives in life- from poor marks to boyfriend trouble.

But Anoop and I rubbed the wrong sides almost immediately. It wasn’t a novelty to him; he rubbed wrong sides with everyone. I met Anoop when my uncle and aunt moved in to a new colony. He gave me one look top to bottom and smiled a very sarcastic smile. I immediately was ruffled. I tried to work up a sarcastic smile but he was long gone by the time I figured out what I wanted to do.

Playing cards was the thing to do in the afternoons. Early afternoons to late evenings, we would sit on the verandah and play the same game again and again. And the nearest I’ve come to any kind of physical activity was play shuttle with the kids in the colony. Anoop was a terrible player. I was the next terriblest!



But he soon picked up the knack of the game with the thing that boys have for aim and precision. And I had to push myself to actually play with him. Thanks to him, I became better at the game and the netted wire drawn across my racket actually touched the feathery shuttle cork a few times.

He studied all the time. Did anyone study in the summer holidays? Let me rephrase that- did anyone in their senses study during the summer holidays? He was curt and couldn’t answer a decent question when asked. In the world of children where cruelty existed with a meaner streak than anywhere else, he was the scapegoat.

I was sitting and solving the Hindu crossword- please read on- the one in the ‘Young World section’ and racking my brains at the several unfilled grids, when I felt a shadow over my paper.

“Crimea”, he said.

I knew it was an answer. But there were several unfilled grids and it could fit anywhere!! He pointed at the exact place and said again, “Crimea”

I took the paper and went inside. I stopped solving crosswords that day.

He was used to being rebuffed, ignored and scorned. Pradeep and I were sworn enemies. But we had one thing in common, our dislike for Anoop. Pradeep would pull him into innumerable verbal duels and endless tripping. If I felt bad about the whole thing, I kept quiet. The last thing I wanted to happen was to get romantically linked to Anoop!

We shared a common compound wall. His room and mine- when I stayed there in the summer were almost at arms length- or so I felt! I’d opened that window once and had seen him standing by his window and looking out. I closed the window and never opened it after that.



“Can you lend me ‘Lila: An Inquiry into Morals’?”, I jumped out of bed hearing his voice.

I hadn’t even heard him come in! Knocking on doors, asking an ‘excuse me’ didn’t exist then in my life. I would have laughed at anyone who’d done that; but I was mad at Anoop coz he didn’t!

“I don’t have the book”, I lied.

His eyes fell on the almost fluorescent green colored book on the table. I blushed a darker shade of the almost black brown that I was.

“This one is for you”, he said and walked out of the room leaving behind on the table a book.

I picked up what he’d left on the table. “William the fourth”. I didn’t know he knew I read books like this! I realized slowly why I always found among the total disarray of books at the local library, just the Williams arranged neatly on the rack that was almost undiscovered save by me and another person, for I would find if not Williams at least decent reads on that rack all the time. And I would in return for the act of kindness leave behind books that I liked and wanted to share. Of course I was curious to know who the person in question was, but I enjoyed the anonymity and the faint trace of romance that comes along with such things.



I realized that the ‘other person’, who ensured that I had something nice to read all summer long, was Anoop. Who better than Anoop would know the dusty steel grey rack existed- he who lived there almost half the day? I wanted to run behind him with Lila in hand, but I didn’t. I sat there feeling sick and empty.

I didn’t know how to react after that on seeing him. I didn’t know why I disliked him, or if at all I actually did. Such complex thoughts were new to my life then. With growing trepidation I realized that I actually didn’t have any reason to dislike him. And once this fear crept in, it brought in a host of other emotions as well.

But the image of the boy the whole colony loved to hate was to be maintained. I would still make rude remarks about him and scorn him with a look I was soon practicing to perfection. It was to save my own skin. If Pradeep found anything amiss with my taunts, he never said anything. So I guess I must have done a convincing job. I never went to that rack or even that side of the library. I never got decent books many a times, but I never went to ‘our rack’ ever…