The Window

'There's something about the window', Chotu always thought. It was so difficult to be one. I mean, who has the patience to wait all night long for the sun to rise, so that all the dew droplets collected on it could get evaporated? Or who has so much stoicism so as to look at the roaring storm outside with so much silence, when all there was inside was cosyness and warmth? Who has the perspective to hear simultaneously the cacophony of children playing cricket outside, and the TV churning out news after boring news inside?  
As he opened his eyes, Chotu saw a sparrow sitting on the window pane. Sun had risen hours ago, and was staring at him, as if making fun of him. Very reluctantly, he got out of the bed. He wished he was a window instead. 'It would have been so much more fun', he always thought. Afterall, Life for an EIGHT year old is no fun, right??!
He reached school ten minutes late. The Morning Assembly had begun. He was so scared. It was for the first time that he was so late. Generally, he managed to be inside school premises just as the morning prayer started. He looked at Lallu Bhai, the school Peon, as if trying to bribe him into letting him in through his innocent looks. But Lallu Bhai, having been working in the school for the past eleven years, knew each and every student like the back of his hand. Chotu didn't get any concession, and was made to stand outside the school till the assembly dispersed. Then, after being done with getting scolded by the teacher-in-charge of the assembly, he made his way to the classroom.

The teacher had not yet arrived. There was the usual hullabaloo that is there in a typical third graders' classroom. As he entered the class, the usual sight of two sardar boys beating up a timid looking chap greeted him. He shouted,'Sandeep Mandeep, leave him alone.' But the command, or pleading rather, got drowned in the noise. Before he could muster the courage to try to save Nirmal, the teacher entered the class, and everyone sat in their places. As he sat next to Vinaya, he felt annoyed at the teacher yet again, for making him sit next to a girl. I mean, how can you sit next to a girl!! They were so organised with their homework, were teacher's pets, and always made him look like an idiot in front of the teachers. Just as he sat, Vinaya smiled and said,' Can you write my name on this sticker?'. He was always asked to write people's names on their stickers, coz he had a fairly good handwriting. Suddenly, the annoyance vanished, and he wrote her name with a special flair, adding a wiggly tail to the V. 'Girls are not so bad, afterall!', he realised.

The Maths class got over uneventfully. Next was music. Chotu always wanted to sing. Everytime a new music teacher came to their school, he made sure to approach him to get inducted into his list of students-who-can-sing. But everytime he appeared for an 'audition' for the same, he was just asked to do one thing. 'Beta, Sa lagao' . And that did him in. He never understood the difference between the Sa the teacher sang, and the Sa that he sang. 

So, in every music class, all that he did was go out and play cricket with all the other boys of the class who were left to play outside with the justification by the music teacher that 'these boys don't have it in them to understand music'. Who cared though? Getting to play cricket during school hours. What more could you ask for!!

After having spent most part of the class fighting over whether the ball went directly out of the fence, which was an out, or did it touch the fence, which would have made it a six instead, and having soiled his sleeves by wiping his face on it, the shorts-clad boys returned to the class. The teacher had just left the class, and yet the girls were still flocked around the table. Chotu wondered what was going on. As he reached the table, he was surprised to see a sparrow on the table. It was frantically trying to move its wings, but he was shocked to see that there was blood on one of the wings.

'This bird was outside my window in the morning! What happened to it?' he exclaimed. 'Don't be silly. All sparrows look the same. How do you know this is the same one? And it hit the fan and came crashing to the floor just as Upasani Sir left' said Vinaya. Chotu realised his silliness immediately and covered it with a 'Can't we help it?'. 'Help?', said everyone. 'It'll die. Once a bird came in my home. It died and my Mom buried it in our backyard', said someone. 'Why? So that many such birds would grow from the one buried?' said somebody else. 'Arre baba, it's a bird,not a plant'. 'But what do we do about this one?It's still alive.' 'Eww,I am not going to touch it, it's so hairy'. 

Suddenly, Chotu thought of something and rushed to the Biology Lab upstairs. The lab attendant, Rana Sir, was busy with some mounting work, when he barged into the Lab. 'Arre, what are you doing here?', he asked. 'Sir, I saw that you store snakes and frogs in bottles. There's a bird in our room. Can you store that too? Otherwise it'll die', said Chotu. Rana Sir heard the full account of what had happened, and accompanied him back to their classroom with some first aid stuff he had with him in the Lab. 

After cleaning the wounds of the bird and applying some antiseptic, the bird started to chirp a little, which amused the children so much that few of them decided that they would keep birds as pets at home. 'But birds are not to be kept in cages. They are beautiful only when they are free', said Rana Sir. Hearing this, Chotu took the bird in his hand and went near the window. The bird was chirruping very excitedly, as if dying to go outside. Chotu looked back once, at the other students who had gone back to their seats and were waiting for the teacher to come, and threw the bird in the air. Like a paper aeroplane, the bird took a trajectory, but unlike one, it  actually took a flight and vanished in the sky within seconds. And there was Chotu,standing,feeling contented, as if someone had gifted him a Five Star, smiling to himself for no apparent reason, and gazing at the sky through the window, the window that he always wanted to become...