It's a stupid game! a child cried and threw a ball out of the window of a fast moving car. They were on a highway, the most boring highway ever... even MacDonalds was nowhere in sight. The child was bored. The school holidays began few days before and his parents decided to take him to visit his grandmother in a dull town few hundred kilometers away from home. Grandmother would make sambar for them, dessert of banana and juggery and force him to drink buttermilk every morning. He hated it. All his friends had time to loiter in front of tv and watch cartoons all day and it was only his unsophisticated parents who insisted on embarking on that tedious journey every summer. Everybody else was allowed to have fun with the latest version of TRANSFORMER.5 on the tablet while his parents wouldn't even get him a smartphone for his birthday. Life really sucked with them and he often dreamt that maybe he had been adopted and one day his real parents would ring the bell and take him away to some foreign country where the sickling smell of coconut oil would not reach his nostrils at every corner. But that was only a dream, the reality was that he was trapped inside the moving car and the only way to express his frustration was to throw out that idiotic ball outside the window. Such a boring toy!
Huligemma lifted three more stones and placed them in the basket. The supervisor insisted on keeping there three more, but she knew that she would not be able to lift it then. She was not a weakling, it's not that - she even knew how to climb a coconut tree, but there were no coconuts around, only dust, stones, asphalt and the building that was higher than any coconut tree in the village. It was summer so her parents decided to bring her with them to work at the construction site of a new apartment building on the outskirts of a big city. She was twelve. Or at least that's what she thought she was for nobody really remembered the exact year when she had been born. How did it matter anyways? What mattered was that she was a child of her parents and thus had to help them in earning money so that they could send her younger brother to school. She left school when he was born. Her parents wanted her to take care of him when they would be away.... and now she was away with them. She missed the village, the trees, the cow and the girls who would go together to the river to do their laundry. Here the sun was high above and she would often get scolding from the supervisor for being lazy. Her reminded her of a teacher she once had at school. He would make her stand up, stretch the hands and the hit the knuckles with a ruler. It hurt. Her knuckles didn't hurt now, but her back did after a day of work at this dready construction site. She kept her head on a pillow made out of her mother's sari and closed her eyes. When she slept she saw their village and the girls playing with a blue ball by the river.
Huligemma lifted three more stones and placed them in the basket. The supervisor insisted on keeping there three more, but she knew that she would not be able to lift it then. She was not a weakling, it's not that - she even knew how to climb a coconut tree, but there were no coconuts around, only dust, stones, asphalt and the building that was higher than any coconut tree in the village. It was summer so her parents decided to bring her with them to work at the construction site of a new apartment building on the outskirts of a big city. She was twelve. Or at least that's what she thought she was for nobody really remembered the exact year when she had been born. How did it matter anyways? What mattered was that she was a child of her parents and thus had to help them in earning money so that they could send her younger brother to school. She left school when he was born. Her parents wanted her to take care of him when they would be away.... and now she was away with them. She missed the village, the trees, the cow and the girls who would go together to the river to do their laundry. Here the sun was high above and she would often get scolding from the supervisor for being lazy. Her reminded her of a teacher she once had at school. He would make her stand up, stretch the hands and the hit the knuckles with a ruler. It hurt. Her knuckles didn't hurt now, but her back did after a day of work at this dready construction site. She kept her head on a pillow made out of her mother's sari and closed her eyes. When she slept she saw their village and the girls playing with a blue ball by the river.
