Games at Twilight by Anita Desai

 As a child, do you remember what you did when you really, really wanted to play? Did you try just about everything to convince your mother to let you go? Didn’t it seem like our job, a compulsion, to go out and play? Once I remember on a bright, sunny afternoon, my Ma refused to let me go outside. She insisted I take a nap and rest. So I just waited till she dozed off. Then, risking the huge row that happened later, I put a pillow underneath her hand and leaped out. Don’t ask the rest. It got ugly!

When I read Anita Desai’s ‘Games at Twilight,’ I was already a teenager. But while reading it, a forgotten era seemed to come back into my mind’s eye. Things that had happened years ago, when giving the ‘den,’ was the worst thing that could happen in a day. Or when a rain shower could ruin a much anticipated evening to the extent that tears would relentlessly pour. Or when catching a friend cheating at a game would unravel passions and tempers, baulked at the injustice. Or when a sudden power cut in the summers would bring a smile, because it meant extra playing time outside. It seemed a lifetime ago that I cared for all those things. Where did that child go? She got lost in career building and board exams. But Anita Desai and her bunch of kids woke up that child in me. 

The story begins on a hot summer afternoon, when a bunch of children, happy to be finally released outside their house, decide to play hide-and-seek. As Raghu is “it,” (the den), all the other children scramble to find a suitable hiding place. Ravi, the central character, after much deliberation hides himself in a spooky shed, believing he will never be found and would thus win the game “in a circle of older, bigger, luckier children.” But after he emerges, hours later, he realizes that nobody has remembered him and he collapses with “a terrible sense of his insignificance” while the other children chant, 

            “The grass is green,
            The rose is red;
            Remember me
    When I am dead, dead, dead, dead . . .” 

This story is one of the best descriptions of childhood, another one being Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird.” But this story being Indian, definitely hits the right nerve. The group dynamics Desai portrays is a good psychological study, where there is a “motherly Mira,” who actually bosses the younger children and the footballer, Raghu, who scares and bullies the rest. Most of all, when I read Desai’s mean description of Indian summer, her choice of scrumptious words brought back to mind the many summer afternoons that I had braved with my gang of friends. And then later, her description of twilight is once more so realistic; the relief when the sun bids farewell for the day and a time when the children’s “games would become legitimate.”

This reminds me of this one time, when after a thousand pleadings, my mother let me out on a particularly hot day. I found a bright, turquoise blue egg in the grass. Thinking it was a plastic toy I tried to bounce it on a rock. It smashed, splashing yellow, slimy yolk all over my arm. I immediately knew I was in trouble. I ran home in bawling. Of course, it was a snake’s egg. My mother refused to touch me and made the driver bathe me in Dettol. It was quite some time after I could ask to be let out again.

The child that I was can never come back. Too much worldliness has filled my head. I have forgotten why I had such a yearning for playing outside. That period of innocence is gone, but “Games at Twilight,” will never let me forget that “business of the children’s day which is—play." If you haven't read this fantastic story spend a few minutes and read it here.