The Child Got Lost at the Crowd - Essay Example

The Day I Got Lost I was about six years old the day I got lost. We were visiting India on holiday and my mother and I had gone out to shop. I had never seen so many people together at once. There were shopkeepers calling out to us from every corner, and nearly five times as many customers. People kept pushing each other trying to make their way through the crowd. I noticed a little girl about my age standing inside a shop and staring at me through the window. She looked like she wanted to talk. I smiled at her and she stuck her tongue out at me. Angry, I made a face back at her. She did the same. We had been pulling terrible expressions at each other for a while when I finally got tired of it and began to laugh. The girl laughed too. ‘What a strange girl,’ I said to my mother. Hearing no reply I turned around. My mother had disappeared. My parents and older relatives had always asked me to be a sensible girl and stay calm when something bad happened. So I did not scream. At least, not right away. All of a sudden the crowd seemed to grow bigger, busier. The entire time that I was looking at the girl I had stopped taking notice of it, but now it swarmed around me like a horde of wildebeest. I seemed to drown in trouser legs, saris, skirts, belts, shawls - everywhere around there were stomachs, knees, feet, hands - not a single face could I see. Getting whirled around in that oppression of rustling cloth and foreign smells, I finally screamed as loudly as I could manage: ‘Mommy!’ The crowd around me seemed to slow down. People did not stop right away but I got the impression of more air, people seemed to be moving away. One or two of them stopped at a distance and stared down at me curiously. I did not fit the scene somehow, even though there were other children around, most of who looked not too different from me. My clothes, my skin, my hair, everything seemed to be on display as they looked so intently at me. I was about to start crying when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Normally, I would perhaps have jumped at such an unknown feeling. But this hand was gentle and kind. It belonged to an old man with deep lines around his eyes and mouth which folded this way and that as he smiled at me. He slowly pulled me towards him by my shoulder and kept saying things softly under his breath which I could not understand. Once he had pulled me to a shop where the crowd was less, he looked at me and said, ‘Mother?’ I nodded, ‘I’m lost. She’s going to be very angry with me.’ The old man smiled. I don’t know if he understood what I said but he held up a finger and pointed at his forehead, which he tapped once or twice. ‘Knowing’, he said finally, ‘I knowing.’ Hearing that, I could not help but smile and hugged the strange old man around his knees. He chuckled to himself and patted my head. ‘Come’, he said and gently pulling me off him, he began to walk. I followed him, clutching some of his loose clothes. I did not want to be lost a second time in one day! We kept making our way through the same busy crowd again and suddenly, panic struck me. I did not even know this man, why was I following him like this. What if he were taking me somewhere bad? I had heard awful stories about kidnappings in India. I had heard that they stole children and broke their arms and legs to make them into beggars. The more I thought about it, the more horrible images began to come into my head. Whatever I had heard grew even worse in my imagination. I could see this old man suddenly pull out a hammer from his loose loincloth and start hitting me with it. Perhaps the man felt me shrinking away because right then he looked back at me. His eyes looked so full of concern that I felt my fears disappear. ‘Baby, okay?’ he asked in a worried voice. I nodded and smiled to let him know it was alright. We kept walking. In about five minutes, we had approached a large clearing. It looked like the center of the market because there were no shops in the middle but a large open space with a fountain. All the shops were around this open rectangular space and they had tiny lanes beside them. We had just come out of one of these lanes. Beside the fountain, there were many pigeons pecking at some seeds that people had thrown. The sun was just setting above the low shops and it looked so beautiful. Some old grandparents had brought their children beside the fountain and were sitting by it as the kids tried to catch the hungry pigeons. Looking at this lovely sight filled me with deep sadness. ‘I wish my mother could see this,’ I said to myself. We had stopped walking so I knew we must have been close to where this man had seen my mother but nothing could prepare for me what I heard next: ‘She can.’ I turned around to see her standing there. I ran into her arms and stayed there, crying and blubbering for a long time. I noticed she had been crying too. She looked very tired indeed. Poor mother, I thought, she must have been just as worried. ‘How did you find me?’ she asked. I turned around to point the old man to her but he was nowhere to be seen. ‘This is such a strange place. I’m sure there was an old man here just now.’ My mother too began to look for someone like I described but neither of us could see him. ‘Perhaps he was sent by God,’ I finally said. ‘Yes,’ my mother smiled, ‘to return my child to me.’ We had not really got any shopping done but it was already evening and both of us had had enough. We sat beside the fountain for a while, looking at the birds and the slowly emptying shops. My mother held my hand the entire time. I was expecting her to scold me but she did not say anything at all. I told her about the girl and how I found the old man, or rather how he found me. I told her about how frightened I was. My mother listened but did not say a word. Once it was dark, we began to walk back to our hotel. Read More