Adventures of Little Babu

As I have already told you little Babu was incredibly naïve and gullible. About seven eight years old, he had this masochistic streak to seek adventure and then curse himself for getting into trouble. When alone bizarre thoughts passed through his mind. One thing was certain, he rarely proactively sought explanation for things which he couldn’t understand or make sense of, rather confabulated or drew conclusions of his own about them. 

Once in the afternoon when most others were having siesta, he wandered off in the walled campus where his family lived in Kanpur. At the back of house there were stray trees some bushes and a winding footpath which led to the boundary wall of the cantonment behind which a road ran parallel to the boundary and beyond that a small flying club sprawled out as far as he could see. Mostly a few little planes lay in the far away open hanger or outside it, a contraption of clothe like a large pipe strung to a pole fluttered to indicate direction of the wind. The wall was too high for him to climb but a fallen tree made a nice bridge for him to climb up on the wall and sit there contemplating vastness of life and universe. Although he had walked out here alone but he was not comfortable, there was lurking fear at the back of his mind. He had heard of “lakadbagha” (hyena) snatching away children in Bithoor, a distant locality in Kanpur dehat. As explained earlier little Babu did not seek out, what a “lakadbagha” was rather drew a mental inference. He decided that “lakadbagha” was a man who has a piece of scented wood that would make little children faint and thus he would put them in a sack and take them away. So, when he saw a haggard bearded man carrying a sack on his shoulder walking towards him on the road, he froze in debilitating terror. Like an immobile rabbit on the road staring at the headlight of approaching car, he sat there as the man walked inch by inch past him. When the man was gone, he came to life. Without wasting a single moment sped off to home.