That Sunday afternoon was a typical one, the two-day-holiday cushion diluted by the impending Monday blues. I squatted on my haunches in our compound, all my attention focused on the green, shiny skinned grasshopper, sitting motionless on our home’s whitewashed wall. Only the two antennae on its head moved. That too, ever so slightly. The rest was still.
“It is not moving. You sure we can catch it?” six year old Winnie asked, watching excitedly by my side.
“Shhh…” I hissed, pressing my index finger against my lips. “If you make any noise, it will fly away.”
Silenced, she squatted by my side, pouting, as I stealthily moved my fingers around the grasshopper. She let out a squeal of delight, when it was between my fingers, trapped, struggling, legs flailing and wings fluttering wildly.
“Hold it tight, Yippee!!”
Paying scant attention to her, I methodically removed the two antennae on its head. Black blood trickled out, and stained my fingernails.
“Oh poor thing! Why do you do that?”
“To make it obedient”, I said. “They will jump away unless you take their horns off.”
We had kept aside a translucent lid of a cough-syrup bottle, with the letters ‘Cipla’ on its top and ounce measurements on its sides, to enclose our prey in. The lid lay on the portico, its Cipla side upwards. As Winnie gingerly lifted the lid, I put the insect inside, and replaced the lid in a flash.
The trapped grasshopper stood inside, as if ruminating over its Cipla cage and the lost antennae.
“It looks lonely.” Winnie said.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we catch one more? So that he’ll have company?”
Then we set off, to find another one, squatting down again, waiting, like hungry lizards do on walls and rooftops for their prey. Several would-have-been prisoners came and went, and all were either very smart or very lucky, until one finally fell in our trap. He was brown, the color of dead wood, and had an ugly mottled design over his back.
“It is so ugly”, she screamed. “We can catch another”.
“It’s tough to get another, Winnie”, I said, carefully plucking off the antennae from the new grasshopper’s head.
We got him too under the Cipla cup.
“They won’t be friends”, Winnie was still complaining, “They don’t match at all.”
“They will fight”, I said. Winnie’s eyes widened. Fights always thrill children. We weren’t any different.
“They will? Really?”
“Yes. They will. You just wait and watch.” I said gravely.
“Who will win?” She continued to chatter.
I had not thought of that, but then, the conventional filmi wisdom must have come to the fore. The good looking one should be the hero and the ugly one, the villain.
“The green one.” I replied.
A handsome hero. A loathsome villain. The stage was so nicely set. Both of us knelt down, elbows resting on the floor, faces cupped in our palms. Two pairs of eager eyes glued fast to a Cipla lid.
The grasshoppers transmuted into sparring gladiators in our imaginations. One armored in brown and the other in green. Raring to go at each other. The Cipla lid became a Roman amphitheatre.
But the insects, trapped, together in their misery, had other ideas. They faced away from each other, desolate, showing no intention to fight. They didn’t even move an inch, and stood there, bottoms pressed against each other’s and the antennae-less noses rubbing against the lid’s inner walls. Having watched for sometime, Winnie lost patience, got up and walked away.
I still waited, hoping for something to happen. For quite some time, nothing did. Exasperated, I took a round pebble, lifted the lid, and smashed the pebble down twice onto the brown grasshopper. Our supposed villain.
Snap snap. Broken wings. Cracked head. Black blood. Gnashed flesh. It briefly slashed out with its frail legs, before dying a quick death.
I chose to subvert reality: ‘The green one killed the brown after a fight’. Then I yelled to Winnie, to come and see for herself, how the fight and the result had panned out in exactly the same way as I had said. But contrary to my high expectations, Winnie found the scene too gory, and stomped off. Unimpressed and queasy.
Not having got the adulation that I expected, I disposed the dead brown one, forgot about the green one sitting alone in the lid, and kept myself occupied with other similar, silly games. It was an hour later that I set my eyes on the Cipla lid again.
I had not replaced the lid properly: A part of the green grasshopper’s legs stood outside the lid; so did a part of the feathers on its rear-side, and the weight of the lid pressing down on its body had enervated the insect rather badly. Almost fatally.
I took the lid off. The insect could not move. Feet crushed under the weight of the lid, it was crawling on the floor. The wings had been broken too. I tried to set it free, but each time it started to fly or to jump, it landed back on the floor with a dull, sickening thud. I felt sick. After a few moments of deliberation, sure that it could not survive anymore, I put an end to its suffering – in the same way which I had done with the other grasshopper. With a pebble.
For the entire afternoon and the night, the dead grasshoppers flitted about in my consciousness, stirring up guilt and remorse. I just could not shake it off. By the next morning, I had almost forgotten about the incident, preoccupied with thoughts of school, when I saw something – a fleet of ants, as if in a funeral procession, carrying the rotten carcass of the green grasshopper across our compound. The insect ghosts started to wake up once again within me.
I had come to know recently from Mom, that God forgave sins till kids were seven. Beyond that age, the sins would be recorded in ChitraGupta’s register, and depending on the intensity of the crime, we would roast in hell, in stygian furnaces of varying temperatures. Greater heat for greater crimes. And I was nine years old. Two more than seven.
Starting to feel sick and guilty again, I skipped breakfast, slung the schoolbag over my shoulder and walked off, ashen-faced, to school. I walked, absent-mindedly, the hellish fires in my mind and in my eyes, tripped over a rope and fell down. My knees landed on a rocky ledge, and got badly bruised. Blood ran down my legs, soaking my white socks and canvas shoes in red. My parents came running over, lifted me up and carried me home. I stayed at home that day, wounds bandaged and dressed.
For the entire day, I was confined to my bed. But, even as the searing pain crept up my thighs, even as the vitriolic antiseptic burnt its way through the wound, even as its strong pungent smell crept up my nostrils; what I felt was not pain. There must have been pain, but more than that, what still stays etched in mind was the queer sense of relief that I felt then. Of justice being done.
Perhaps, this could be how I had to atone for my little sin. Moreover, ChitraGupta might pardon me and score my name off his dreaded register – I had already served my punishment. Thankfully, the flitting, restless grasshopper ghosts never reappeared again to ruin my dreams.
I remember, it was then, as a kid all of nine years, that I got my first idea of penance. And as a matter of fact, I haven't played an insect torturing game ever since.
