Summer was in a good form that year and mother could not stop washing the floors as she felt that the heat was making floors sticky. We were walking like kangaroos, jumping over the wetness . Of course we could have avoided doing so by not roaming around but there was not much else to do. I was standing at the window wearing only a cricket umpire hat and my red denim shorts. I was proud of my hat, where I kept all the short stuff (loose coins, stamps in case of emergency letters and two pieces of an orange candy) but recently I was given a very close-cropped haircut by my grandfather and it had become a pain to store things under it. Everything was rolling onto my ears these days and I had to walk very stiffly. My younger sister was lying flat on her stomach on the sofa, she was pretending to be dead as it helped her cool off. I was looking out into the street where there were just two dogs taking turns falling down the drain in the middle of the road. It was not hurting them I suppose since they kept this routine going for a while. I started to feel my pulse as in the movies to see if everything was alright with me when my four year old brother came breezing in.
He was recently labelled the superstar by his class teacher, who went by the name of Ms. Anjali. She had promised my parents that great things are in store finally for our family as my brother had topped his L.K.G. section but for the reasons that went unexplained we found that he was still in the same class repeating his L.K.G. year. This cadence of academic failure would have hurt a lesser being but not him. He has stylish windswept hairs and he knows it too I suppose, since he always walks with his head tilted at a slight angle as if about to draw a startling conclusion. To be honest, he was smarter than me. He had this neat trick of hiding coins in his fist. He has very small hands so he does not have to make an extra effort while squeezing down on the fist which has the coin hidden in it. You could never tell. Anyways, I was eager to hear what he had to say this afternoon.
“I am not in love anymore”, he said casually tossing out the words into the air. I was ten year old and it was my younger brother who was the first one to fall out of love. I scratched my bare stomach in circles and moved towards the couch. My dead sister rose wiping off the mourning air from her face and inquired about this ex-paramour.He began to tell the story of how he fell for this girl when he first saw her subtracting ten from nine, without blinking an eyelid. After that whenever they played kho-kho he made a point of chasing after her for a long time and only gave up when he was tired since she was stronger than him and could run a long time. He said that at such times he had to act cool and show that he was giving other people a chance but frankly she really was a bit too quick. He looked solemnly at his red suede shoes which had a yokozuna tattoo on one shoe and sachin on the other. I tried to point out that maybe this was the cause but he was not paying any attention. Anyhow, my sister was holding the reins for now and she pressed on for proper details. “She shaved her hair and wasn’t even wearing a cap to hide it”. I thought the insult was co-pointed at my direction, so I clarified that hats and caps aren’t just meant for hiding the lost hair but also could stand for beliefs in personal freedom. But he would not have anything of it. We stayed silent for while and the silence was hurting.
I looked at the wall-clock, it had moved good four minutes when mother came in with the water bucket and asked if anything was the matter. He could not hold it in anymore and started crying, mother didn’t seem too much worried and simply asked if he wanted to change his aim in life again. It was clear that she was privy to his aspirations all this while because she went out and came back with this startlingly beautiful yellow card which had a list of crossed out words written down in an order. He took it and brought out a green sketch pen from his pocket and crossed out the word “LOVE” from the bottom of the list and wrote “MAGIC” below it. We had just finished reading that word when he made the sketch-pen disappear.