Krishna

“Nooo…”

Krishna’s parents, sleeping in the adjacent room, were startled by the shriek and at once rushed to their son’s room. Krishna was sitting on his bed in darkness, weeping. “What happened, my child,” his mother drew him close to her bosom, sitting beside him on the bed.

Krishna’s father switched on the light. “Was it a nightmare, Krishna?” he asked.

Krishna nodded his head in reply. Their soothing words and the bright light from the tube made him comfortable and calm. He stopped weeping.

“Come on! Nightmares are just bad dreams. No need to worry,” his mother said. “Shall I sleep with you here, Krishna?”

“No mummy, I will sleep alone. I am a brave boy,” he said.

His father laughed and stroked his head. “That’s my Krishna!”

His mother pulled bedsheet over him. After a while, they both kissed him on the cheek and departed, leaving the light switch on and instructing him to call them back if he needed anything.

When they left, Krishna shut his eyes tight, trying to sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come to him so easily. He wondered why he was dreaming that same horrible dream everyday. At least if it was a different one, he could have told his friends in school about it as an adventurous story. It was too much today; he woke up from his sleep crying, which he had never done before. He frightened his parents with his shameful act.

‘Damn with that terrible-looking monster coming into my dreams!’ Krishna muttered inwardly. ‘I will not let him spoil my sleep and mummy and papa’s sleep.’ With that strong determination, Krishna shut his eyes more tightly and he did not know when sleep took him over.

The most enjoyable event in eight-year-old Krishna’s everyday life was his return walk from his school to his house in the late afternoon. He would cover the distance in around twenty minutes, reflecting on the day’s events at school and anticipating a happy playtime ahead with all his neighbourhood kids in the evening. And the most exciting part during the walk was his butterscotch cone ice cream, his favourite one. He daily bought it from the ice cream vendor in front of their school and ate it while walking down to their apartment. He always took it as a challenge to devour the ice cream through the twenty-minute walk to his home without letting the cone melt down. He would finish it only before knocking on their door.

Lately, Krishna began to dislike the last leg of his afternoon walk. When he entered his street, almost everyday he would find a boy his age staring at him, his eyes fixed on his ice cream. The boy looked at him in such a way, Krishna began to fear that one day he was going to beat him and snatch away his ice cream.

Krishna guessed from the dirty torn clothes the boy always wore that he was from the slum area just beside their building. Would he ever take a bath? Krishna wondered many a time looking at the boy’s unclean face and soiled hands.

‘Why did he look at me like that?’ Krishna tried to get an answer to this question. He got many answers in his head. The boy was poor, did not have money to buy an ice cream, so he was planning to snatch it away from him.

Later Krishna made his second theory. ‘If father’s words are true, this boy must be a thief,’ thought Krishna. Stealing was in the blood of all the slum-dwellers and the poor, his father always said and warned him to be careful with those people. ‘I must be cautious with the boy. He is planning to steal my ice cream by making me afraid with his fierce and nasty looks.’

Like that, Krishna would make a new theory every time. That day, to his surprise, he made a theory from a different point of view from his usual one. When Krishna spotted the boy from distance, he saw a face filled with sorrow and gloom instead of his usual roughness and carelessness. When he came a little closer, he saw a streak of tears running down the left cheek of the boy.

‘What happened to him,’ Krishna wondered. ‘Maybe his mother should have scolded him for some mischief.’

Even while crying the boy did not stop looking at Krishna and the more than half-eaten ice cream in his hand.

‘What does he want from me?’ Krishna boldly looked into the boy’s eyes, as the boy seemed vulnerable today. On other days, he even hardly looked at him. ‘This boy may not be bad as I assumed,’ thought Krishna. ‘He too might be fond of Butterscotch ice cream like me.’

Suddenly Krishna changed the direction of his path, walked up to the boy and thrust forward his right hand holding up the remaining ice cream to his face. ‘Take this.’

The boy was surprised and embarrassed by this sudden offer. But it was only for a second. His face lit up, taking the ice cream. And he eagerly began licking it.

Wondering how the boy’s eyes shone while eating his half-eaten ice cream, Krishna walked towards his building. The monster that always captured all his possessions in the nightmares did not come in his dream that night.

Nandu

‘How delicious the ice cream is!’ thought Nandu, taking an eager lick at the remaining ice cream. ‘This ice cream boy is not as bad as I thought.’ He watched the boy disappear into that posh apartment building.

Nandu’s father always told him that the rich living in those big and comfortable apartments never care about the poor. But his words turned out to be wrong today. ‘This boy cared about me; he gave me an ice cream’, Nandu muttered inwardly. After finishing the ice cream, he wiped his hands clean with the hem of his shirt and ran toward the slum.

As all children his age, Nandu too liked ice cream. But he rarely got a chance to eat it. A week or two would take for him to save five rupees from the money his mother or father gave him occasionally to buy chocolates. Sometimes he would not buy anything and save it until he had five rupees enough to buy an ice cream.

When Nandu first saw the boy from the opposite building walking happily down the street one afternoon, with colourful and delicious-looking ice cream in his hand, he had felt pangs of jealousy. ‘His ice cream must be tastier than the one I eat usually,’ Nandu’s mouth watered. He just imagined how deliciously and smoothly it would melt on his tongue.

From that time onwards, it had become Nandu’s routine to observe that ice cream boy. It was his best time. He would forget the world, looking at the ice cream in the boy’s hand and imagining as if he himself was eating it. If, for some reason, he did not see the boy any day he would feel upset as if he had not taken lunch.

The thought that he had finally eaten that delicious ice cream today made Nandu walk on cloud nine. When he entered their shabby hut and saw his little sister weeping, he came back into the real world.

***

The following afternoon, Nandu was waiting for the boy to appear as usual. When he spotted  the boy, he was surprised to see one spare ice cream in his other hand.

Krishna walked straight up to Nandu and offered him the spare ice cream. Nandu hesitated. “It’s okay. Take it. I had some extra money today, so I bought it for you,” Krishna said.

Nandu grabbed the ice cream at once as if the boy might change his mind any time, and began to run without saying a word.

Krishna was puzzled. “Why are you running?” he called out.

Nandu stopped for a moment, turned his head over his shoulder and said, “I will give this to my little sister. She has never tasted an ice cream in her life.” Then he disappeared into an alley of the slum.