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12 | Dear Diary (11/05/2007)

11 May 2007

Friday,

4:15 p.m.

Dear Diary,

As I sit here, under my hideout, away from the visibility range of her eyes, and put in writing my thoughts for you to wade through, I watch her ensconce herself under the enormous deciduous tree, skimming through her schoolwork with a Nataraj pencil sharpened from both sides at a rate of knots.

It's summer again.

And like they do every summer tide, the flowers in that canopy of bright emerald foliage that she at all times sits under have blossomed again-it's flowers scarlet like the blazing flames of fire, yet so soft and sublimely mellow, just like the cerise dungaree she is clothed in today.

The little girl with pigtails has grown taller and chubbier over the course of the last four years, yet she still looks so tiny to me. Her fluffy black pigtails remain the same, though, still tied in bright and vibrant polka-dot scrunchies.

I gaze at her as she violently scratches the crown of her head, like monkeys do, evidently confused due to some gibberish scribbled in her notebook. One thing that I have noticed multiple times is that every time she writes, her hands move across her notebook like an arrow out of a bow. I can already deduce that she has a very bad handwriting despite never having witnessed her penmanship.

Nowadays, most sheets of my exercise books are filled with her doodles. Tuesday evening, while I was again squiggling a barely decipherable picture of her in one of my registers, perched up at my study table in my room, Nirjhara slipped into my territory with her Complan mug loosely held in her hand. As she tried to sneakily look into my notebook, Miss Lilliput somehow tripped on the football kept next to the leg of my chair and had a graceful touch down on my laundry bag head first-not that I care about it. That brat could go bathe in a bucket full of cow dung and stink all day, for all I care. But the issue was something different: the Complan mug in her hand, just like its owner, had an elegant landing on my poor head as well. Thankfully, it didn't break my skull-----I hate missing school.

It didn't exactly bother me that my hair smelt like a dairy farm the entire following day, but the fact that some of her doodles in my notebook that I had so painstakingly drawn, no matter how incorrigible they were, were horribly damaged, displeased me to the bone. Instead of her cute doodles, some pages of my register were now adorned with blackish-brown malty blotches.

If that was not enough, instead of uttering a word of apology, that clumsy little twelve-year-old rodent sibling of mine took off from my room with my notebook in her frog-like hands as if her derriere was set on fire. She went so far as to tell dad that apparently I was drawing some nonsense called Power-Puff Girls in my notebooks. And the next thing I see is dad scrutinizing me as if I were a raving lunatic who had hightailed from a mental hospital.

I sometimes feel like packing and dispatching both my siblings to a distant grassland somewhere in Africa through FedEx. And no, I am not apologetic about my thoughts because that's where wild animals belong, don't they?

Coming back to the little girl with pigtails, I peer at her as she keeps her notebook back in her Ben-ten bag, and in place of it, she takes out what I guess is a packet of biscuits. It seems like a four-rupee pack of Parle-G. At home, fresh groceries are stocked in the pantry every morning by the head of the housekeeping staff, so how do I know the rate?

Well, I sneakily bought myself a packet of those biscuits from a local store, which is roughly a hundred meters away from the park. None of the security men came to know about my secret expedition to the grocery store, though, courtesy of Karim.

Little Miss 'pigtails' then tries to open the biscuit packet, first with the help of her squishy pink fingers. It doesn't help her much, though. And then she uses the ultimate weapon-her teeth. Clenching the edge of the packet between her teeny-weeny incisors, she tears open the pack. Alas! The poor little Parle-G packet rips apart into two as all the rectangular-shaped cookies inside it tumble down on the ground next to her knees. The ground beneath her is covered with the fiery red blooms of the elephantine Gulmohar tree, which she always takes refuge under in the evenings.

I observe her as she advances her right hand to pick up the biscuits from the ground, but then retracts it back. She proceeds to perform the same action twice but then eventually gives up, leaving the glucose crackers to the will of the ants residing on the Gulmohar tree-a contemplative expression marring her round face. And once again, I discover a new fact: Little Miss Pigtails is a cleanliness freak.

Good for her, unlike my siblings, whose rooms look like garbage dwellings from Ghazipur landfill.

And then, in a flash, as if sensing someone's unwavering gaze on her, she averts her eyes to peek in my direction, and as if hit with an intense strike of lightning, I almost try to shove myself completely into the hollow of the old red maple tree I was sitting under.

A few hidden glances and peeps later, I find that little Miss Pigtails has diverted her attention back to her elementary school textbooks. With this, I recoil back to my initial position and then carry on with the purpose I am here for, which is intently gazing at her weird self.

It's weird that I notice so many things about her almost every alternate day, yet two things that have been constant throughout these four years are:

1. I am still not aware of her name.

2. She is still not aware of my existence.

Wonderful, isn't it?

Over time, she has grown quieter. She no longer has as many friends as she had two years ago. She no longer plays at the park in the evening. Instead, she comes here and sits under that same old tree every afternoon until sunset, scribbles down her homework at the speed of light, feeds on whatever little snacks she brings along, and occasionally sips water from her gigantic Cool Captain water bottle, which dangles around her neck and is almost half the size of her body. Almost half of the time, the water spills on her face instead of spilling into her mouth.

I redirect my eyes to the sky and find that it's about time for sunset. The lush verdure above me rustles as a strong gust of wind sweeps in. Reddish-yellow and brown-hued maple leaves start falling on Earth just as I glance back in the other direction to find that little Miss Pigtails is trying to catch the Gulmohar flowers cascading down on her due to the wind. Soft giggles escape her lips as she jumps on her feet to catch a blossom. A bright rubicund maple leaf descends down on my left palm precisely when I see her grabbing one of the numerous flamboyant blooms falling from above her.

I have a leaf on my left palm, and she has a flower on her right palm-both red, as if two pieces of the same puzzle. I smile, looking at her, while she smiles, looking at the Gulmohar blossom on her palm.

Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to tell you, dear diary, but there is this thing that I discovered long back.

Little Miss Pigtails likes Gulmohar trees.

Signing off,

Dev. D

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