Every morning, the children would wake up to the sound of something drumming on the corrugated iron-sheet that covered the kuccha-floor veranda just outside their rooms. In their half-sleep they would mutter their prayers and would stay that way for some time, allowing the gods enough time to act on them. Finally, one of them would open his eyes and peer through the grills at the rose bush lining the ground outside. More often, it was the oldest among them who did that. If the gods had listened to their prayers, the sound would turn out to be that of the raindrops falling on the roof. The rains would mean they wouldn’t have to go to school. And that meant puddles everywhere for their paper-boats and for them to jump in. On such days, the children would jump out of their beds without their parents having to drag them out.
But if the day was clear, they would get out slowly, aided by their mothers’ hands and their fathers’ voices, and with a sullen mood that in contrast to the weather outside, start getting ready for school. The sound, they would now know without looking, was that of the birds pecking at the boiled rice mixed with sugar that their grandfather would throw on the roof as the first rays of the sun worked its heat on the moisture that had settled in the night’s cold. That’s how the children would know that on that day, it was the birds’ prayer that the gods had listened to. And on the days it rained, it wast the children’s. But every morning, it was either the birds that lost out, or the children did. Every morning, the gods had to decide between their prayers and the birds’. Either the birds would get their breakfast, or they would get a day off from school. And for reasons they didn’t understand, the birds won their favour more often than they did, for it was mostly the prayers of their winged rivals that got answered.
“Is it because the birds can fly and get closer to the gods that they are heard more often?” the youngest child would often ask the others as they all dragged themselves out of their warm beds and went in a line to get their glasses of warm milk from the kitchen. And the children would look up to see the shadows of the birds on the opposite wall as they continued to peck, and it would seem like they were nodding, and that only spoiled the mornings for them even more.
As the children shuffled about with rolled rotis in their hands and their school-bags on their shoulders, they would walk past the old chair where the old man sat sipping his tea under the morning sun. He was a strict man who always had a word or two to say to each of the children. It could be about that ink-stain on the elder boy’s shirt front, or about the missing hanky on the youngest cousin. But for each child he also had a coin. The children saw it as inadequate compensation that they were given for the sound on the roof not being that of the rain. Though they took the coins, they weren’t ready to forgive him for giving the birds something to pray for. They walked out nursing a common thought that somehow, by feeding the birds, their grandfather was responsible for it not having rained that day. Their doubts were confirmed on days when it did rain. For on such days, as they ran out with their paper-boats to their spots under the tin roof where the water drained down and collected to form puddles, they would dodge past their grandfather, on whose face the creases seemed to have become even deeper as he stood scowling at the dark skies above. Though the poor man was missing the sun and feeling its absence in his old joints, the children nudged each other and nodded, knowing that he was secretly communicating with the birds, asking them to pray even harder the next day.
On days they had to walk to school, they took the road that rolled between hills, but seldom bothered to stick to it. Between each switchbacks and loops there were goat tracks and clearings that they knew far better than their lessons. Judged on distance alone, these could have been called short-cuts. But if their purpose was to cut short the travel time, then they failed miserably. These paths were strewn with so many distractions that despite taking them almost every other day, the children still managed to lose their sense of time and purpose and would often get late for school. But the one thing that the act of overturning snails slithering by, and squishing the purple flowers that left a pattern on their palms, did was to make them shake off their sullen mood that they had carried this far. So by the time they reached their school, they were smiling and even looked eager for a class or two. That they had to line up in front of the entire assembly for having reached late never bothered them. One, because at times there were far more latecomers facing the assembly than there were children in the rows ahead. And another because the delay meant they had something that the others standing in front of them didn’t. It could be a chestnut one day that they would play with in the recess, or a dragonfly in an emptied water bottle. Or a wood rose that was a treasure trove of their favourite after-school activities — the helicopters. These were the thin wooden petals that you had to carefully pluck out of wood roses. The petals came off as thin, translucent wings joined to a hardened spine, that when dropped over a cliff spun like a helicopter and they would stand and watch as it spun out of sight, all the time making sounds of a chugging engine. Children who came late to school were looked upon by others with envy. A view the teachers never seemed to share with their wards.
Returning home from school wasn’t any different. They would take longer than needed, and take the same route to see if the dead wasp they had left by the anthill had been devoured, or the leaves they had pinned down by a brick in the middle of the stream had been dislodged. And if it ever rained at this time, the children would feel the betrayal of their gods far more than they did in the morning. They would be forced to take the only bus that went past their school and covered the entire route in just fifteen minutes, taking away the joy from their return journey, and adding minutes to the time they would have to spend at home. The same rain that they had prayed for in the morning would now feel bitter on their tongues. And the same splashes that they looked forward to earlier, would now look like dirt patches they wanted to avoid.
Between all this, there were the coins from the morning too. By the time the kids got back home, their money would be spent on small candies or saved for something bigger. Each child would be careful to hide his money or whatever he or she had bought with it. That was one thing that would be theirs, otherwise they shared everything else as cousins living under a common roof. Just like they woke up with a common hope, they would go back to sleep huddled around their grandmother listening to her stories till the lights went off and their mothers half-dragged, half-carried them off to their part of the house.
Again, morning would come with the familiar sound of the drum-drum-drum on the roof and their prayers against the birds’.
The night the kids were to watch their favourite movie the house was in a state of unrest. The fathers walked about and consulted with each other, the mothers sat quietly in a room with some close neighbours, the grandmother hung around the grandfather’s door as he wheezed and coughed from inside. The kids were sent to bed early and told strictly to not venture out. The only thing they liked about the arrangement was that their mothers or fathers were not in the adjoining rooms from where they could shout at them if they were heard speaking late in the night. So they could kick and play around and make a mess as long as they wished.
The next morning the children were surprised to wake up to the sunlight streaming into their window, signalling that the day was well past the point they had to leave for school. Their parents seldom woke them up as they had been rising to that drumming sound for years. But today all was quiet. The birds hadn’t dropped in, nor had the rains. Something was clearly wrong. The older children sat up and sat gloomy, knowing something had changed forever. The younger ones looked at them and felt lost till one of their aunts came in. Seeing that the children were up, she turned back and fetched their mothers. The youngsters saw they all had tears in their eyes, and as they were rushed to go the neighbour’s house for some milk and bread, they turned to see that the veranda was full of people, dressed mostly in white. Their grandmother sat in a corner surrounded by women, and in the centre, between their weeping fathers, was man wrapped under a white sheet. While on the roof sat the birds, not making a single sound.