Great Stories for Children Read online

  If you, dear reader, have any ambitions to be a writer, you must first rid yourself of any notion that perfect peace and quiet is the first requirement. There is no such thing as perfect peace and quiet except perhaps in a monastery or a cave in the mountains. And what would you write about, living in a cave? One should be able to write in a train, a bus, a bullock-cart, in good weather or bad, on a park bench or in the middle of a noisy classroom.

  Of course, the best place is the sun-drenched desk right next to my bed. It isn’t always sunny here, but on a good day like this, it’s ideal. The children are getting ready for school, dogs are barking in the street, and down near the water tap there’s an altercation between two women with empty buckets, the tap having dried up. But these are all background noises and will subside in due course. They are not directed at me.

  Hello! Here’s Atish, Mukesh’s little ten-month old infant, crawling over the rug, curious to know why I’m sitting on the edge of my bed scribbling away, when I should be playing with him. So I shall play with him for five minutes and then come back to this page. Giving him my time is important. After all, I won’t be around when he grows up.

  Half-an-hour later. Atish soon tired of playing with me, but meanwhile Gautam had absconded with my pen. When I asked him to return it, he asked, ‘Why don’t you get a computer? Then we can play games on it.’

  ‘My pen is faster than any computer,’ I tell him. ‘I wrote three pages this morning without getting out of bed. And yesterday I wrote two pages sitting under the chestnut tree.’

  ‘Until a chestnut fell on your head,’ says Gautam, ‘did it hurt?’

  ‘Only a little,’ I said, putting on a brave front.

  He had saved the chestnut and now he showed it to me. The smooth brown horse-chestnut shone in the sunlight.

  ‘Let’s stick it in the ground,’ I said. ‘Then in the spring a chestnut tree will come up.’

  So we went outside and planted the chestnut on a plot of wasteland. Hopefully a small tree will burst through the earth at about the time this book is published.

  Thirty years ago, Rakesh and I had planted a cherry seed on the hillside. It grew into a tree, which is still bursting with blossoms every year. Now it’s Gautam’s turn. And so we move on.