Crack-a-lackin!

My brothers were about eleven and nine when they moved to Bombay. Any thing intrigues kids that age, but everything in this new city was of interest to these two. My eldest brother often ran down the street from my granny’s house to go pet the cow by the garbage bin. For him, there could not be anything cooler than a live cow on the street, nonchalantly mooing and munching in the middle of all the chaos, completely oblivious to the world.

Later in the year, we moved to our new house, and then came Diwali. The festival of lights! Since it was going to be their first experience of an Indian festival, mum and dad decided to get them loads of crackers—rasi bombs, anars, chakras, phuljharis, the works. 

Evidently, their excitement knew no bounds; they ran from pillar to post screaming with delight. The night the festivities began, they lugged their huge bag-full-of things-to-blow-up down to where all the other building’s kids were. Out came the crackers and the madness began. 

After a while, my eldest brother picked an exceptionally long string of red crackers and looked at it with new-found interest. Though everyone spread those on the ground and were lighting 'em at a good one arm’s distance, what a silly conventional way of doing things that was! Completely not his style.

He called out to the second one to discuss a better way of lighting that string of awesome.  And then, like an epiphany, it happened. There it was, the shiny, brand new, double door to the D wing/bungalow of our building.

So they simply marched over to the door, secured the long string of crackers to the door knocker, and lit the thing of fire. 

I’m going to leave what happened to that poor door to your imagination.

Well, as my mom says, something good did come out of that incident. After all the yelling, screaming and complaining had subsided, mum made her first building friend in the aunty who lives behind the door my brothers almost burned down. 

Aren’t they the cutest? *Heart*