Weirdo....

A favorite pastime one summer vacations among all of us kids in the colony was cycling, most of us had our individual cycles and used to cycle in full speed in the colony lane. The younger lot who did not have cycles used to play the traffic police giving direction to us and so on. This pastime ensured that none of the uncles or aunties in the colony could walk down or come out with their vehicles when we were on the cycling spree. Not so frequently our parents fed up of the racket made by us would allow us to go out on the road (that is beyond the colony lanes kind of the busier road). Eventually so as to aviod being nuisance we moved into the church grounds to cycle. The church is a very old one almost a 100 years old which has lots of spare ground filled with trees making it shady even during the peak afternoons thus it being transformed into our new cycling path.

One evening when we were cycling in the church grounds there came a guy who was passing through the church compounds, it is a shortcut used by many. He seeing us kids play came by and asked one of the younger ones as to where do we stay. Seeing that he was speaking to the younger ones all of us who were cycling came to where he was speaking. Neets younger sister Geet who has never said truth in her life till then informed us that the man was a drunkard who was not from the neighborhood and was asking them where we lived. She said she was scared and asked us not to tell the truth saying that he might come in the night and may rob us and go (idiots that we are we believed it). We said to him that all of us kids (round to 10 of us)belonged to two families living in an area far away from where we were playing and that we had come to a relatives place on the other side of the church. He started asking us our names and we made up names and told him and we watched him till he left the place and even trailed him to make sure he left that area. To tell you the truth we were scared and the rest of the evening was spend in discussing about the guy and what would have happened if we had told the truth.

We have church family get together every first Sundays evenings in one of the families houses. In one such church family get together soon after guess to our surprise whom we ran into? The same guy whom Geet had told was the drunkard and was from some faraway place. He was a new person to the neighborhood an advocate a new member to the church. And during the entire get together he gave us odd looks because we were calling each other different names (obviously we had given him wrong names) and we who belonged to another part of the city were being introduced as sons and daughters belonging to different families in the neighborhood. I am sure he would have been thinking whether he was weird or were the kids weird. I am sure the reason for this is Geet the liar. Even today when we see this guy in church or on the road we giggle among ourselves remembering the day we all had turned weirdoes :)