Kisna

He appeared as if from nowhere.He was tired, haggard and barefoot . He probably stank too(as was confirmed later). He sat in the shade of our porch, on the cool, cemented floor, dangling his foot on the edge(as if he owned the place; other servants would remark later). He wore a pair of shorts, frayed at the edges, and his pale yellow /dirty white shirt had several buttons missing.

When my granny walked to the porch,and demanded to know, who he was and what was he doing there(as was her wont); he turned to look at her and gave her a gap toothed smile. That melted her formidably strong heart and she took him in, under her wings.

He was watered, fed,and questioned (strictly in that order).All he could say was his name(kisna).All other queries elicited the same famous gap toothed smile. We concluded (probably rightly)that he was slightly mentally deficient and had run away from his home.
.All of thirteen years, he was given my brothers' clothings and a makeshift bed in  the spare room on the terrace.

He took to us merrily, like fish to water. His chores were simple,to fetch water from the well, and occasionally, accompany us kids to the bus stop. In the evenings, he would clean the glass chimney and trim the wick for the lanterns.When we sat with our school home work, he sat next to us, peering at the illustrations, making faces at the pictures and keeping us in splits till he was shooed away by our stern grandmother.

 Occasionally he would be given a bit of pencil and paper to do his own writing, which would be reverentially folded away and added to his growing stash of colourful photos culled from discarded newspapers.

That he came from extremely impoverished state was apparent. Kisna wouldn't let water from boiled rice be thrown. He drank the whole lot, seasoned with salt, for two entire weeks, before he grew tired of it.The fact that rice in our home was cooked for nearly ten people and that rice was the staple at almost every meal must give one an inkling to the vast amount of frothy, salty and starchy soup kisna drank.

Besides prodigious appetite, he had a large heart. He would follow my granny around the house like a devoted dog. Others would laugh at his weird tastes(salt in black tea instead of sugar, mustard oil for hair , to name a few),but not my granny. In him she saw her own long lost brother(a deaf- mute who wandered off the family estate during the second world war" the days of big aeroplanes"  and was never heard of again).

That he was swarthy and a tribal to boot did not deter her. On long hot summer afternoons, she would allow him to curl up on a piece of matting in our own fan cooled bed rooms, a privilege not accorded to other servants.
Around autumn that year, we noticed a change in kisna. Normally courageous, kisna started avoiding the dark. He would stumble around pots and pans at night and would simply refuse to draw water from the well at night.At a village wedding, Kisna became the talk of the town, for having clambered over sleeping forms of the grooms' party; while going to and fro the bathroom,thereby bruising many a chest, eyeball and ego, in that order.That it was done in a moment of unintentional haste paired with lack of night vision missed every one's notice.My astute grandpa diagnosed it as night blindness, brought about by extreme and prolonged malnutrition. A month of goat liver for dinner and foul tasting oily concoctions for medicines, Kisna was back to his normal self, drawing water from well with gay abandon, in pitch dark,while belting out tuneless hindi songs.

That he was a foundling, was never to be mentioned to him, even in a fit of anger. He was one of us, he played hopscotch and peekaboo with us, got drenched in holi colours and was given new clothes during the poojas.

Never once did he mention his village or his family. Neither did he ever express a desire to go back home (wherever that was ). Once in an unguarded moment, he did let slip that his father "beat him a lot".

So it came as a complete shock, on our returning back from school one day,  to find two dusty adult adivasis sitting on our porch bench , drinking tea .

 Upon entering, Kisna was found sobbing near the coal heap, behind the kitchen, and my grandmother was sitting sullenly on her bed, counting some money.

How kisna's father discovered his runaway son's refuge is an amazing saga of witchcraft/blackmagic come true. A rational mind could dismiss it as a series of serendipitious coincidences.Having exhausted the conventional methods of looking for his lost son, the father approached the village shaman.In a state of trance(possibly hallucinogen aided), the shaman "saw" a vision of a" yellow house"(our humble abode).The 'voices' in the shaman's head also gave him clear instructions as to how to reach the said house, following which the two afore mentioned men landed up at our door step .

Predictably, Kisna did not  want to leave, my granny was distraught; she didn't want him to leave either.

None of us did. We had grown so fond of him and his eccentric , childlike ways.And as my teacher sister pointed out, "he was just picking up hindi alphabets".

But his father wouldn't budge." And after all, he should live with his parents" came a practical rejoinder from my clear-eyed , and normally silent grandpa.

So, Kisna went, wiping  tears on his sleeves,clutching his' bundle of stash', his half finished hindi alphabet primer held in hand,pockets bulging with a few currency notes that my granny had given him hurriedly; other hand held firmly by his father, repeatedly turning back to glance at all of us, gathered on the porch, to bid farewell.

We never heard from him or his family ever again.
We will never know why kisna was sent to us , to enter our lives briefly(a year and a half to be precise).We know for certain, that he ended up transforming all of us with his simplicity, trust and ability to love total strangers.