For a long time Kaju thought that grandfather walked so slow because he wanted to look at everything long enough to find the story that he said was attached to each. He never thought that his old age could be the reason. As for the reason the old man picked up every leaf that Kaju had questions about, or went close to every bug that Kaju wanted to know about, it was — thought Kaju — because he wanted to take a closer look at them before giving his expert opinion. That his eyes were failing him never occured to Kaju.
Kaju would return from school by lunch, and till the time he accompanied grandfather on his daily walk to the temple for the sugary treats the pundit gave him, his mother would chase him to change his clothes, eat a fruit, put his school-bag in its place, look at his homework, leave the cat alone, drop her knitting and the pack of rubber-bands and other things that she had been looking for days but couldn’t find. And all this while she drew strength from the knowledge that starting next year he would be going to a big school where they kept children locked up for two extra hours.
One day a very unreasonable rain extended her ordeal and delayed the boy and grandfather’s trip to the temple on the other side of the park that was just across the road from their home. By the time they started, the skies had cleared up as suddenly as it had rained, but left the ground soggy with water. The two picked their way carefully over the little path that wound its way through the trees and the grass, placing their feet carefully between wet patches that could take a tight grip on their slippers. Kaju walked a few steps ahead, skipping easily from one unyielding patch to another, while grandfather prodded the earth with a stick he was carrying for this purpose before deciding where to plant his foot.
When they were halfway there, Kaju suddenly spotted something moving, and kneeled down to discover an earthworm struggling to make its way across the narrow path that to this little creature must have seemed like a vast stretch fraught with danger. The string-like figure stopped as it felt something like a threat, and then quivered slightly, unsure if changing the direction would help. Kaju looked back and saw that grandfather was still some paces behind. Looking about him, he found a mud-smeared ice-cream stick just next to where his left foot was. He picked it up and gave serious thought to deploying it as a knife to slice the insect in two, and see if it could function as two independent earthworms. But the thought of the temple that they were going to, and the unforgiving gods inside, made him pause. And before he could get past his scruples, his grandfather stepped up behind him and seeing Kaju squatting and peering at something, used that as an excuse to do the same to find some rest. Kaju heard the creaking knees and quickly hid the little ice-cream stick under his foot.
“Hmmm. So where is our friend headed?”
Grandfather always referred to all creatures as ‘our friend’. Having been his companion on this and many other walks, Kaju had started thinking of them as his friends too. But that didn’t stop him from pinching an odd ant or trapping glowworms in a bottle when it made for more fun than just having them as friends he could little else with.
Grandfather leaned forward, sitting on his hunches, and put his long fingers on the ground for support as he took a close look at the wriggling form. At least one reason, if not the only, he called all such things friends was because till he got this close to them he didn’t really know what else to call them.
“This earthworm looks lost. Poor thing.”
Kaju didn’t think these things ever got lost. They were at home, wherever they were, unless they were in somebody else’s home.
“Do they have homes, grandfather?”
Grandfather looked around, peering at the ground around him and asked him to pick up a small stick or a stiff leaf. Kaju took out the ice-cream stick and asked the old man if this would do.
“The very thing I needed!”
For a moment Kaju was filled with hope that grandfather was going to use it for the very purpose that he had in mind. But the old man was simply putting it in front of the insect, trying to get it on it. The earthworm must have sensed some movement. For it froze in its track, in the position that it was in — part of its body lifted up in preparedness for the thrust ahead. After a while it moved its little head to the left, and then to the right, trying to find an alternative to the route, one that wouldn’t have him go over this unknown stretch. But each time it shuffled, grandfather was quick to move the stick in a way that whichever direction it tried to take, the same yellow passage presented itself. It was as though it had suddenly been surrounded from all sides. Left with no choice, it finally took a tentative step over it, though strictly speaking, it had no steps to walk on, observed Kaju as he bent low to analyse it from a fresh angle.
Grandfather waited till most of its body was over the stick, and then he carefully lifted it, even as the rear of its body hung loose over the edge. Kaju watched it keenly, his eyes following its every move, and even his grandfather’s, as the thing moved in front of him and was taken beyond the line where the orderly path met with grass and shrubs that grew wild. Grandfather set the stick down gently, and waited, more for the knees to respond to his will than for the earthworm to get moving.
“This is where its home is. Don’t you think his family will be pleasantly surprised to see him home so early today?”
Kaju looked at his grandfather, and then at the earthworm that was still clinging to the stick. He half expected a few earthworms to emerge from the grass and quiver in surprise at seeing him back so soon, not expecting him to, and definitely not being flown in on a muddy, yellow aeroplane made of an ice-cream stick. And as he waited he wondered if they would really be happy to see him home early. His own experience was totally different.
Grandfather had by now stood up, slowly, putting his hands on the ground and supporting his weight to prop himself up.
“Come Kaju. Leave him to it. He knows the way home now.”
Kaju sat there looking at the earthworm who by now had walked across the ice-cream stick and was walking faster than before, happy to be on familiar grounds. Kaju was in no rush. Grandfather would walk on slowly knowing he would eventually catch up. They had their own pace, their own distractions, their own detours. But throughout their walk, if anything was worth sharing with the other, they were never so far that they couldn’t call out or come to where the other was.
Seeing the earthworm crawl with purpose in a direction that it seemed to have a clear understanding of, Kaju remembered the day his father had come home early.
At around four, when his grandfather was at the nearby shop where he went to read the newspaper and catch the local gossip or important things happening around the world and closer home, and when his grandmother would retreat to her room upstairs to sleep off the left-over daylight, and his mother was at the doorway talking to other women from the neighbourhood about the day and about the plans for the kitchen, and his father at work, Kaju had an hour or so when he was free to do whatever he liked. And what he liked seldom varied.
Kaju’s father had always wondered why he could never find a single blank, white sheet of paper when he needed one. He would always pick up a few extra leaves from the office stationery drawer if he needed one for some official work, and slipped the rest in his office bag. And he would always come and put these, along with a few pencils, some paperclips, erasers and blotting paper, in the box on the table. But when he needed one to write down the list of groceries Kaju’s mother had already started dictating, there wasn’t a single paper left. When he needed one to draft a letter to the telephone department complaining about the crackling noise in the instrument that made any conversation difficult, there was none to be found. One evening when he had to write an application requesting Kaju’s teacher to allow him to miss school for a day to attend a wedding in the family, he managed to find one, but only one. And that too was brought to him by Kaju.
Saying Kaju found the paper that day was one way of putting it. Though a better description would be to say that Kaju had spared that paper, knowing it was needed for something that was important to him. The rest of the papers, the ones that his father brought home with some difficulty, were put within the jaws of a manual paper-punch, and punched through. The small, round pieces of paper that got punched out were carefully picked up and put in the blue plastic jar with a yellow cap that he had borrowed from his mother when it was no longer suitable to hold the rice it had held for so long because she had one day accidently touched it with a knife that had just been dipped in hot oil, and had ended up making a thin, long slash in it. Every day Kaju would return to his pile of papers that he kept hidden better than his father did, and got to work. He would turn the papers expertly, making use of every edge, every length and every breadth in a way that very little of it remained that had to be further hidden from his father. The clay-oven outside that house that was lit up every evening to heat up water for his father to wash his hands and feet with when he returned from work was where he dropped what remained of the paper. The rest of it was put in the jar, the cap sealed and the lot kept away safely among his other toys.
That day, when Kaju sat down with the paper-punch and the blue jar, he dipped his hand in and ruffled the round bits of paper around. He used to love doing that, the weightless little things giving way to his fingers as he twirled and dug around the heap. And each day he would measure the depth of the contents by gently putting his hand in till his fingers touched the top layer, and seeing how much of it remained outside. That day, he gave himself another week or so before the jar would be full and he would walk up to the roof and flip it over, and look down as snow would fall all over their courtyard from a blue sky. His mother had often told him of the place he was in born in, that place where it would snow for four months and they would all go for walks covered in layers and layers of woollens and how his cheeks would go a deep red from the biting cold and how he would look up straight at the falling snow as he lay in her arms. This time he would watch it snow from above, like gods did, and see if they had a better view than the people below did.
But that day his father came home early, and saw him and the paper-punch and the jar almost full and the papers almost gone and though he said a lot to him, and snatched and threw away a lot of things, the only thing that stayed with Kaju from that day was the sight of his snowflakes being thrown into the fire and the fire leaping up suddenly as if catching its breath and then recovering to devour the contents of the jar in a matter of seconds. And Kaju could still remember thinking that snow wasn’t supposed to burn like this, and the reason why gods made it that way was probably because it didn’t look nice at all. It looked nice falling lazily over an earth made cold by the winds to receive it and preserve it that way for sometime at least. Whether it looked nice from above as it spun down towards the earth, he would never know now.
Kaju looked at the earthworm, who had by now made its way to a small little hole in the field, and it was about to go in. Kaju quickly picked up the little ice-cream stick that was still lying around where grandfather had left it, and with it he picked the little crawling thing up, the way he had just seen grandfather. The earthworm climbed up easily this time, having known the surface to be harmless, and having been led to its destination faster that it could have hoped for, possibly thinking of it as something of a wonder.
Balancing the worm on the little stick, Kaju walked back a bit, and set it down carefully on the path, a little behind from where grandfather had picked it.
“Kaju!”
The boy looked up and saw grandfather leaning on a tree and looking at something keenly. Something had caught the old man’s eye, and Kaju couldn’t wait to hear about it. He ran, feeling the thrill of having done something good. The earthworm’s family wouldn’t have to bear the consequence of it returning early.
He looked up briefly, and saw the last of the clouds drifting away to some other destination and wondered if they would make it snow there.