The "mean" Game

I like to narrate about incidents when I was growing up to Sandhya and Divya. They in fact like to hear those stories than the stories from books as I do spice it up when I'm narrating to them. I recently was telling them how I used to go to my grandfather's village during summer holidays when I was small when the talk about summer activities came up. I was mentioning how it used to be fun then running around backyards with uncountable coconut and mango trees, bating in the ponds where at one end of the pond buffaloes will be sun bathing too. They listened to me with beady eyes interrupting with questions like how far did you climb the tree to pluck the mangoes or did it itch when you played on the haystack like it does when we play on the lawn or how cousins you had or did you really catch fish with hands etc . As a year end project they did a model to represent a farm and all the activities in their class were based on learning about farm It started when Divya showed me her craft where she made a rooster out of a plastic cup with a string hanging and a small sponge tied at the end, she showed me that when you wet the sponge and use it to pull the string it sounds like a chicken clucking. Then she told me "this is how a chicken sounds do you know it". I smiled and said I know how it sounds , I have seen it ..paused a bit and asked them have you ever seen a rooster, they sadly nodded no, then my evil laughter sprung up, I midst laughing started playing it.."Oh not even once you have seen it...in your whole life , you have not seen a hen?" at first it was amusing to them with me laughing they enthusiastically nodded and said No for all my questions..it was fun..but soon Sandhya's face turned red and she stopped smiling. She went and sat at the corner of the Sofa and said "amma its all your fault, you should've shown us the roosters when we were in India last time, and now you are making fun of us"..

Sure enough we did not see a rooster or hen for the meager amount of time we visited M's grandfather's village during our last visit. With every body migrating to towns and cities villages are not anymore lively. Its like some zombie place. Its been decades since I visited my grandfather's village but the memories of my summer vacation are still sweet. We managed to see a goat and its 2 days old kid during that trip. It was an experience for the girls. they were really excited. Of all the things that attracted them there was one thing that Sandhya was really in to examining. It was Goats poop. There were of course lots around and she asked us what it was that's looking like black beans. She was not ready to believe that it was the goat's poop. We had to try hard to not make her touch it. She was keeping on coming back to it asking us was it really the poop :).