The Crush-ing

Write about your first crush.

Since you’ve been around I smile a lot more than I used to.

When I was in grade 5 we moved into a new house. It was a new locality and I had more kids my age on the street to play with. But I also had to take care of my younger sibling, who was still too little to be able to keep up with me. We lived on the first floor and another family was living on the ground floor of this duplex independent house. The best part of this setup was that there were two kids downstairs who were similar in age to my younger sibling and me. But they had cousins and relatives also cohabiting with them, so it was often a full house. Just between them and us, we were about 9 kids in all, cousins and siblings included. The only issue was that the older kids were teenagers not interested in playing with us adolescents. So we used to ignore the older kids and just the four of us would play with the other kids on the street.

We used to love to play hide and seek. The houses on my street were typically built very close to the compound wall with approximately a 1-foot gap between the compound wall and the chajja or overhang. We used these compound walls and the chajja as a way to climb to the terrace of the houses while we ran across and jumped from roof to roof to escape detection while hiding from the ‘den’ in our game of hide and seek. Climbing walls, jumping across roofs, sitting on the chajja, or using them as a means to get across, it was often hard to pin us down when we were playing the game. Since I was living in a duplex, we often accessed the parapet wall to the neighbor’s terrace from the brick railings built for our house stairs. I used to throw my younger sibling and instruct her to hang on, then quickly scramble up after her and lift her over. We did this every time we played hide and seek. They would often come running out of their house to chase us off their terrace, but we were too fast to be caught. So, when they decided to add a couple of more floors to their ground floor home, we lost out on our access to the terrace that had opened all the terraces to the homes next to ours on the street.

Renovations started with the pile of sand dumped outside the house. And then there were the sacks of cement they had stacked around their front yard. Initially, the sand was dumped right outside their house, but as the days flew by, they started dumping the sand outside our house, giving us access to one of the best sandpits. Slowly, the structure started to take shape, unlike building from the ground floor where the foundations had to be laid and then cured, constructing the first floor and second floor was relatively straightforward. The first few months, we used to continue to climb onto their terrace through the chajja, but eventually, the height of the wall increased and we were no longer able to access their terrace. Around this time, they moved up into this semi-completed house, that had windows with grills and no window panes and doorways with no doors. They put up bedsheets and covers as curtains, and I had no idea if they managed to complete the flooring, but they were happily ensconced in this space. They managed to shift completely out of the ground floor house and move to the first floor in a couple of months at which point, they rented out the space on the ground floor to a group of engineering students. This was a group of North-Indian boys – loud, brash, and fair-skinned. Not to be racist, but back in the day, my hometown which is located in the south, was filled with boys with shades of dusky complexions, so a group of 10 white-skinned boys who could not speak the local language stood out of the crowd.

These were not the first engineering students we saw; many of them were on our street, barring one who was a bully, and his aggressively loud friend the rest of them easily slipped under the radar. I don’t know if we existed for them, but they sure as hell did not exist for us. Now, the bully used to often hang out with his loud friend on the street. If they were not in college, then we would see them on the street. If they were just standing on the street or talking amongst themselves, we had no issues, but often the bully used to target one of us from the group. We were raised to respect our elders and for all purposes, these boys were older than us and we had to respect them. It took him a couple of instances to realize that we would not disobey and he would just make us stand and waste our time rather than let us play. Earlier, the older boys in the street used to be indoors, it was only after the new group of boys came into the street that the local boys started hanging outside as well. Usually, the only signs of life on our street were our group of kids running and playing Lagori or Hide and Seek, now all of a sudden even the older engineering kids were out on the street. And to make matters worse, there used to be students from other streets coming in to visit their friends on our street. Now our street not only had a lot of young men but also had a lot of traffic.

We used to get back from school at 3 and we had until 5 which is when the older students returned from college. So we moved our play time from 4 pm to 3 pm. We rushed with our milk and snacks and came out to play earlier, so we would be done by the time the older students returned. Initially, it used to be two groups of students, one was the local group and the other was the group of tenants. The group of tenants was trying to get to know the neighbors and would often try to start a conversation with us, but we knew better than to get friendly with either group, so we ignored them and continued to play the games we could when we were confident they were not around. Almost six months after these boys moved into our street, a new individual started frequenting our street. He was not a local, but he was not part of the other group either. And the best part was this guy always saved us every time the bully caught us. If I remember correctly, his name started with the letter P and hewas interested in an older kid living in the house below mine. I have no way to confirm, but I think it was mutual and he would often use random excuses to be on our street. When we discovered that he had a soft spot for us and would bail us out when we were being bullied, we started playing a lot more like we did earlier.

P used to ride a bike and I got used to looking out for the sound of that bike. I would often run out of the house, to the balcony to check if any of my friends were also on the street around this time so we could play. Initially, he used to come between 5 pm and 6 pm giving us an extra hour of playtime. But as his relationship blossomed, he started coming in later and we had to go back to our earlier curfew of winding down early to avoid being caught by the bully. Getting caught by the bully signaled the end of our games, the other kids would usually just slink back home to finish their studies and homework, happy to have not been caught, and my younger sibling and I would have nothing to do. The only way we could continue to play would be if someone distracted the bully while we played. P was the perfect person for the job. He was the go-between both the groups and they would often start playing a game of cricket team locals vs team tenants. I loved this idea. This was the best way to keep the bully engrossed and busy enough for him to not want to start a conversation with us. I remember complaining to my parents and Dad even had a conversation with the bully, but he continued to harass us, and would often continue to smile and issue threats under his breath so no one could hear him, so if Dad ever looked in our direction it would seem like a friendly conversation. I don’t know if the siblings were aware of the drama we faced every evening, and to be honest I have no idea if they would have been able to protect us. But P did. Like a savior sent only for us. He saved us on numerous occasions from the bully. For my tiny group of friends, the choice was often between the bully and everyone else. And everyone else often won that choice. Even today, if I had to choose to have a conversation between the bully and P I would probably choose P to thank him for the times he saved my younger sibling and me from being bullied. The one person in that mixed group of young adults who often bailed us out of a nasty situation ensuring we smiled.