Childs Psyche

by Kumar Rajendran
(Bangalore, Karnataka)

Joshua my Nephew was 5 years old and in the first year of his school, every day he was supposed to stand at a particular spot in the school waiting for his Dad (my brother in law "Amar") to pick him, it was a routine that they were familiar with and even if dad was a few min's late Joshua would wait and he knew his daddy would come and this carried on for several months.

A few months later my sister and her family were moving to another house in another suburb, So this particular day all their stuff had been packed and they were waiting for the movers to come, at some stage there was some argument between my sister (she is an annoyingly argumentative woman) and Amar, after that though in a grumpy mood, as usual Amar took Joshua with him to drop him off at school.

In the evening Amar had got delayed a little longer than usual because of the shifting, how ever, when he arrived at the school he could not find Joshua any where, after frantically searching everywhere for more than an hour and calling up every body he knew there was no sign of Joshua and with a sinking feeling he was on the way to the police station which was to be on the way to my fathers house, to lodge a complaint for missing children.

On the way to the police station he suddenly noticed a small little lonely figure walking on the sidewalk, with bag on his back and a water bottle hanging from the side, being over come with emotions it took Amar a few seconds to sink in, that the little child was Joshua. Amar ran to him and carried him in his arms and hugged and kissed him with relief, He asked him why he was so far off from school? and why did he not wait in the place he was supposed to? and this is what Joshua said "I waited a long time for you daddy but you did not come and because you had a fight with mummy and you had packed everything in box’s, I thought you and mummy were angry and so you left me and went away to another place...so I thought I would go to grandpa's house and ask him if he will keep me".

Amar was in tears and so were all of us when we heard the story...Anyway Joshua is now a handsome young man studying Architecture and vaguely remembers it.