This was when I was in the fifth standard. Sushila was my classmate - a little girl in pigtails .

Inflicting cruelty to another human being is not an exclusive trait of adults. Even as nine year olds having the mighty wisdom of the ages, those kids in our class could ostracize this girl just because she was dark skinned, belonged to a poor family and could not speak good English. Nobody in the class wanted to be her friend.

I had a soft corner for this hard working girl, Sushila. Sometimes, we would walk back home together after school as our homes were close by, she with her younger siblings. We would sometimes linger on the roadside to pluck berries (called ‘ber’ in Hindi) from the ber tree across the fence of Leena’s house. In the afternoons, Leena’s household would be sleeping giving us the perfect chance to pluck them.

One fateful afternoon, as we were walking back home, we again stopped by to pluck the ber. We must have picked a few and hardly must have eaten that lo and behold - from behind the bushes came our crouching tiger, none other than Leena’s grandfather. The memory of the lecture he gave us that day on the criminal offence called stealing, virtues of not plucking berries from people’s ber trees without permission and of course, the threat he gave to inform our parents and principal of our esteemed school that forced me to write this pearl today. None of it happened though, but the old man must have laughed to himself how he gave us kids a giant scare.

Today, those kids are well placed and busy in the school of life teaching their kids all the good things they have learnt along the pathway of life.