Courage & Humility
दो दीवारों वाली उस शाम, एक जंग छिड़ी। शुरुआत, जैसे ऐसी जंगें होती हैं, ओरिगामी काग़ज़ से हुई। खुशी ने अनीश के अच्छे सुनहरे काग़ज़ की तीन शीट बिना पूछे ले ली थीं (“मुझे सुनहरा चाहिए था, चाँद के लिए है”), और बदले में अनीश ने बिना पूछे उसकी पूरी शेल्फ़ फिर से करीने से…
The evening after the two walls, there was a war. It began, as these wars do, over origami paper. Khushi had taken three sheets of Anish’s good gold paper without asking (“I NEEDED gold, it’s for the moon”), and Anish, in return, had reorganised her entire shelf without asking, so that Khushi could no longer…
कुछ ही समय पहले की बात है — अनीश और खुशी हर सुबह कंधे से कंधा मिलाकर स्कूल जाते थे। हालाँकि कहना चाहिए, कंधे से कोहनी मिलाकर, क्योंकि अनीश दस साल का और थोड़ा लंबा था, और खुशी आठ साल की और थोड़ी नन्ही, और उन दोनों के कंधे कभी एक ऊँचाई पर राज़ी नहीं…
Once, not so long ago, Anish and Khushi walked to school shoulder to shoulder. Well — shoulder to elbow, really, because Anish was ten and tall-ish and Khushi was eight and small-ish, and their shoulders had never once agreed on a height. The morning always began the same way, in the flat on the second…
Every big fear has a ladder leaning against it. You do not leap to the top — nobody does. You climb, one rung at a time. The trouble is, somebody has jumbled the rungs of our ladder, and one rung in particular is the one most climbers quietly skip. Your job has two parts: put…
Khushi could run. Everybody in the colony knew it, and — if we are being completely honest — so did Khushi. So when Sports Day came, and the whole courtyard lined the chalk track under a sky full of paper buntings, there was really only one question about the sixty-metre dash: not who would win,…
THE CARD Somewhere in today, someone in your home probably did a small brave thing. Maybe you owned up to a mistake. Maybe you tried the hard thing instead of the easy one. Maybe you spoke up when it would have been simpler to stay quiet, or stayed quiet when it would have been easier…
It is the evening before Independence Day, and the Gang is up on the terrace watching paper kites cross a pink sky. “Everyone talks about the big, famous brave people,” says Tara, chin on her knees. “But where were the ordinary ones?” Aarav’s grandmother, visiting for the season, smiles. “Everywhere,” she says. “Courage in those…
Anish has set up a board. Not the ordinary hangman board, mind you — the kind where guessing wildly gets you nowhere. On Anish’s board, every hidden word is locked, and the only key is an if–then clue. Think first, then write. The Genie has agreed to umpire, which mostly means eating jalebis spiral-first and…
The stage lights were still switched off, but Aarav’s knees had already begun their own little performance. Tap-tap. He touched his pencil twice against his palm, the way he always did before anything big. It did not help. In four minutes he would walk out in front of the whole school and recite a poem…