Empty Summer Afternoons

I guess that summer we were eight or nine at best. Four girls, we played through afternoons while schools remained closed.

Sarojini had very strict parents. She used to be utterly scared of them. If she fell down and bruised her knees, she would cry worrying about how her mother would spank her rather than cry for the hurt of the bruise. In fact, all of us were scared of Sarojini's mother.

Early that summer, one of the girls had been on a visit to her village and had had her ears pierced. The rest of us envied her. Sarojini had been toying with the idea for a long time but was too scared to ever ask her mother to take her to the doctor to get her ears pierced. That afternoon, while playing inside an empty garage, she gave herself up to us in complete faith and asked us if we could do it for her. We looked at each other's faces in bewilderment and then turned our faces in the direction of Sarojini's house. I could hear her mother's screams when she would discover the object of our surgery. Sarojini read our minds and dismissed it off saying 'Oh, she would never find out'.

We believed in Sarojini and sufficiently convinced that ears were not like knees and could always be hidden better, we started to look for surgical instruments. Sarojini helped our efforts quite a bit by picking old nails, shiny pointy metal pieces, wooden twigs etc from the front yard. Although the nails looked quite right for the operation we thought they were too broad. So we discarded them and picked a couple of pointed 'khadika jhadu' (Indian broom stick) pieces for the job.

Sarojini sat down very patiently under a tree in the front yard. And one by one we took turns in pushing the pointed end of the slim broom stick pieces (much like the action of a screw driver) into her ear lobes. In the beginning of the project Sarojini did not flinch but when we started to break the sticks trying to drive them in and her epidermis broke into a fine streak of blood, she started to make some noise.

When the left side would begin to hurt more than what could be tolerated, we would turn to the right and continued to go back and forth like that. This went on for quite an hour or so and we made little progress because the sticks kept breaking and Sarojini kept whimpering more and more. The hole that we twisted out of her earlobe wasnt more than a few micrometers in depth and we kept encouraging her with images of hoops and danglers.

Sarojini was quite a brave girl I must say. She would have gone on with the surgery that afternoon if her mother had not called her name from their front yard. The houses were close by and our mothers used to call us loudly by our names when it was time for a meal or it was getting late or a there was a guest in the house. Hearing the shout, Sarojini quickly stood up and covered her ears with her thick braids (confirming that ears could be hidden better than knees) and we threw the surgical instruments away while scampering home. When I knocked on our door, my mother looked in askance at me. She had never seen me return home before time. 'Everything OK?', she asked. I nodded a furtive 'yes' and quickly made it to my books.

Sarojini did not come to play the following afternoon. But she did come the day after that. Afterall, on sweltering empty summer afternoons who wanted whining kids at home? Not even strict mothers like Sarojini's who discovered her daughter's ears half pierced with broomstick ends.