Those Were the Days

Crocodile was the name of the game. Entrenching our toes from one corner to the other was the aim of the game. I cannot remember how the game (of Four Corners) got that name. But then, in those days our home was a veritable cornucopia of games with rules of their own.

Every morning during the holiday season, almost the entire neighbourhood of my age group assembled in our front porch. Thence, till evening, a noisy buzz prevailed as we launched ourselves into the vigorous pastimes. From football to cricket, we had it all.

I still remember one of the rules of our cricket. Dare to hit the ball high in the air (say five to six metres), and the batsman was declared out. Perhaps someone from our clique had heard a radio commentator say, "…the ball is up in the air and he’s out." No one, then, possessed a television set in our neighbourhood.

Once, we even organised an individual cricket championship among ourselves. A very tiny winner's cup was up at stake and I had won it by scoring some seventy odd runs. I must have had been legally out on, at least, seven occasions during that innings. Obviously, no one from our band knew much about cricket then.

We had an interesting penalty rule while playing football. If a team conceded three corner kicks successively, then a spot-kick was awarded against them. Many times, arguments lingered on whether it should be just one spot-kick or seven.

But the game which held the pride of place was Hide And Seek. We played it only on occasions when the gang was sufficiently big and the holiday mood was palpable. The game came to be referred as "Tantiani" which in the local parlance (Konkani) means "with eggs." I do not know how and why the game got its name.

The fun and frolic during this game was tremendous and, unfortunately, at the cost of the seeker. But then seeking everyone from their hiding places was quite an achievement. And this too without anyone getting near the seeker’s post without his knowledge.

My mind travels back to one specific incident. There was one particular rule to the effect that if the seeker identified a hidden person wrongly, then he had to start all over again. As such, a tested trick in our bag was to exchange our clothes while hiding and, thereby, confuse the seeker.

But the essence of the trick lay in the hidden person’s ability to conveniently show a part of himself in the exchanged dress and goof up the seeker. Once, I too went about this task. I intelligently chose someone of my size and interchanged t-shirts with him. To add to my luck, our t-shirts bore contrasting shades.

Then, all set to carry out the trick, both of us crept behind a low wall so that only a part of our hunched backs could be spotted by the seeker. Expectedly, the seeker called both our names that we were traced. Our tricky euphoria lay punctured when we realised that we should have been at two different places and not behind that same damned wall.