Winter is going through
its last lap; a few more days, and then it will be gone. The mango trees will
become inflorescent and buzzing flies will envelop them. Then millions of tiny
fruits will appear and engulf the branches. Most of them will fall littering
the ground, and eventually something resembling tender mangoes will appear.
There was a time when
children would start pelting the trees with stones right at that stage. Now that particular
period of childhood has disappeared along with the bittersour taste of tender
mangoes, freshly shot down.
There are very few who
can still remember how exciting it was to write something with a tender mango
seed on a neighbour’s freshly whitewashed wall. It was like writing with an
invisible ink; when you give the first stroke, it would be marked like water,
and then evaporate. Only afterwards would the angry neighbour notice the brown
letters emerge.
Slowly and
gradually the writing would become prominent and darker by the passing day. To
the utter disappointment of the owner of the wall, there would remain no option
for him other than a repaint, to be rid of this vandalism. Nor was he able to catch
the culprit, who would have long disappeared right after writing the slogan.
Perhaps the most hostile and the ugliest part of it was the kind of graffiti
that would resurface from underneath in a few days even after a repaint.
Well, it was not
like the boys would ever want to be caught red-handed. So in most of the cases
the slogans used were some iteration of “His-name + Her-name”. A few
excellent surfaces for such anonymous “Blog-Posts” were the buildings that
still under construction. There was less chance of getting caught and
building’s newly cemented walls were so much smoother than the old houses.
There was local youth, a
rail-company draftsman, who was asked by a renowned property developer of a
suburb to produce a grand plan for a new school building for the local girls’
school. He did it meticulously well, being his first professional assignment as
a building planner. In his Rail Company he was never given such a big
responsibility.
The old and abandoned
zamindarbari was already was in use as a temporary set up for the school and
was brought for a pittance by the promoter, but it was pulled down part by part,
piece by piece and the school’s routine also rearranged in a similar fashion.
It was a promoter’s first experience in both construction and as contractor and
it took a fairly long time. Small children enjoyed these long holidays more
than ever, but the middle school girls had to share the same classrooms for an
amalgamation of subjects.
Two sisters, one smart of
whitish complexion and the other, darker, shy were getting late returning home
one evening, being from a different locality as they were. The forced holidays
brought intercollege boys an unexpected opportunity to flirt with them. In a
dusky forthcoming evening, two youths stood at both sides of the only road,
stretching a skipping string to its ends, blocking the sisters’ way. The
girls in sarees, could neither jump the line nor was there left any room to
bypass the boys. The younger and smarter one ducked and passed, smiling
meaningfully to the boy on the right. But the shy, elder sister stood there
confused, clutching her books tightly to her chest and with tears in her eyes.
The boy on the left had to loosen his end and let her go without much to say.
In the course of the next
three years, their father gave his younger daughter’s hand in marriage to that
flirty bright young man who had become a graduate and joined a merchant firm by
then. But the shy elder sister had a fiancé who did not pass the exams and
remained unemployed. Her marriage was then arranged with a suitable man in a
different township, leaving him.
Eventually the school building
was raised up to two storeys, but the doors and window shutters were still
missing. One morning, the class-teacher of the junior section had found
“Her-name + His-name” written with tender mango seeds all over the school’s
bare walls; this was the fiancé’s last attempt to stall the marriage.
But it did not work, the
girl was gone. She had disappeared just as a shadow melts into the darkness
when the light evaporates at the day’s end and the writing on the wall was
whitewashed.
