We have sticky fingers. Probably green too. Like the ones that grab anything it tends to remotely like and sometimes even things that it just must have. It is a fancy, a fascination and an obsession to want anything and everything that can be wanted and probably possessed.
I was very small then...tiny in fact. Probably 4 or 5 or at the most 6 years old. Surely not older otherwise my ego would have retaliated back rather terribly at this incident. I had lots of toys. LOTS. Just as all pampered girls do especially if they are the oldest of the siblings. Even more so for the poor parents feel that since they have decided to go ahead and make the error of wanting MORE crying, bawling, defecating, noisy kids to add to the general chaos, the first of the blessed lot must be feeling unloved when the later truck load arrives. The poor child is made to feel miserable by relatives of all shapes and sizes and most hideous proportions that the parents would now love the new creatures and not them. So these disillusioned older children wander around plotting murder and managing to pull the cheeks of the new arrivals and subsequently getting shooed away by the ever watchful, irritating, pan chewing ayah. These juvenile delinquents are made shades worse when those awful relatives heap gifts over gifts on the new creatures and the criminal minds wonder- what exactly will a 6 month old baby do with a tricycle? Or a toy train? Or a Barbie? It baffles them. These were supposed to be THEIRS. And why not?
The parents do not care anymore about their glorious lives and no one gives them anything. Trust me. That is how the relatives and the servants ensure that they think. And if you are a shade darker than your new sibling then God help you and your likes. You will be ostracized to the depths of a dark continent and back. Twice over.
What do the parents do? In turn they together with some well meaning people donate some goods of decent entertainment value to the older child hoping to negotiate peace details. It works mostly. You know...the bright, colourful, shiny, new toys are such a temptation.
Someone had sent a packet full of toys to our house. I do not know who they belonged to and I never will. Being the eldest I managed to sift through them first before my brother and sister could reach it and I hunted out a plastic cat with a blue bow painted on its plastic body. Someone had nibbled on the tail and the right ear. Teething Animals!!! The rest of the things were broken and uninteresting. So I grabbed the cat, with its nibbled ear and tail as it stimulated this vague memory in me. It was probably an old toy of mine for I had the habit of chewing anything and everything. I still do. It also occurred to me that if this was mine then for sure some unholy soul must have taken it away from me when I was sleeping and had put it in the bag with all discretion so as to pass it on to my siblings. THIEVES.
So I grabbed the cat and exclaimed-
“Eta to Amar!!!”
Translated- “This is mine!!!”
The next thing that happened has engraved itself in my memory in such a bitter and raw way that it bleeds even today.
My grandfather snatched it out of my hand and said-
“Shob kichu tomar noye...”
Translated- “Everything does not belong to you...”
Nothing had ever been snatched away from me unless they were shiny sharp objects. Baffled I looked up at his face. There was a look of a strange disgust- a disgust of my childish greed and God knows what else. But disgust.
He took the plastic cat away from me and gave it to my sister.
The plastic cat with the blue painted bow now sits on the top of the refrigerator. And I don’t care who it belongs to.
