I, Pebble

I am a pebble.

I'm mostly orange-brown but there's a gorgeous blue streak across one side which I think lends me a rather dashing appearance. Which also caused me to be separated from my family, I suspect.

I used to be a happy little stone basking in the sun beside the gurgling river along with plentiful of my family members, occasionally doused by the cold water rushing by and then drying out either in the sun or by the cold wind and sometimes by both. At times, we would get tossed further down the river too... we mostly passed time admiring the sights and gassing about really old times. Then one day, a small girl came along with her family near the river bank and my life changed forever.

It was a cold, sunny afternoon when a car stopped by the river and a family stepped out, stretching and twisting, easing their limbs of the tiring drive downhill. A youngish couple and two kids, a small girl, and a smaller boy. I watched with interest as I find humans peculiar. Since the road was only a short height above the riverbank, the family stepped gingerly onto the rocks at the edge and came closer to the river, a few steps from where I lay. The couple found a dry spot and sat there, stretching out their legs. The woman kept her young son in her lap but let the daughter amuse herself close by. I watched her father keep an eye on her.

The girl skipped around for a bit, chucking pebbles in the river and chuckling loudly at the plops they made. This went on for some time when their driver hailed them, gesturing for them to return to the car and presumably carry on with their journey. The girl had just chucked another stone, and picked me up, giggling to herself, vastly amused. Just as I was bracing myself to be dunked into the cold rushing water, her mother called her.

"Polly! We've to go, baby! Come!"

And Polly ran after her parents, still clutching me in her hand. My journey to the wide unknown had begun.

The Khannas lived in a nice apartment from what I could make out. I learnt later that the city was Delhi. Initially, Polly's mother, Dilpreet, wasn't too keen to keep me at home. She tried talking Polly out of it but she, jolly girl, stuck by me, and seeing her determined to keep me, her father, Harpal, pitched in for her. So Dilpreet bought a large glass bowl, poured loads of pebbles into it, who I then joined.

"Look at the orange stone, momma... it's so beautiful! I'll keep it in the middle!"

And I got the pride of place in that bowl.

Life was steady there. Days blurred into nights, scorching summers into pleasant winters and Polly was soon a teenager while her brother, Dingo, was a naughty ten-year-old. I had grown to quite like my spot in the jar, surrounded by my cousins from some sea I believe, who, though, spoke little. Every morning a beam of sun angled into our corner and it refreshed me. I missed my river buddies but well, I consoled myself, what could I do about that?

One evening, when the parents were out and Polly was on a school trip, Dingo returned from his evening out playing cricket. He fancied himself a batsman and practised swinging his bat inside the apartment. That evening he was practising in the broad corridor that perpendicularly bordered the living room, gently hitting a tennis ball that he had coaxed the live-in maid to bowl at him. Well, you can keep a ten-year-old quiet only for so long. Suddenly, he unleashed a shot and the ball screamed in and smashed my home to smithereens.

I crashed to the ground along with my cousins, scattering all over the floor. As I lay stunned-and free-I watched Dingo gaping wide-eyed at the disaster he had wrought while the maid was almost in tears for it had happened under her watch. Soon she swept all of us pebbles together and kept aside in a pile, and the glass pieces in a paper bag.