Sardar Kushwant Singh had sent a letter to me praising this story. It is hand written on his own letter head. I treasure it. The story is one of my favourites and is inspired by a real life incident. I hope you like it

When I first saw her, Pooja was standing outside the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate of our city. A wave of TV cameras and mikes was threatening to engulf her, as they arched over her tiny form and converged before her taller parents.

The cameras drew my attention to her.

A thick crowd had formed an unwanted, jostling ring around the trio and their interrogators. I do not know whether it is the desire to see the news in the making, or a vicarious, voyeuristic, pleasure at knowing somebody else’s business, or simply the thrill of transmitting your bewitching visage across the nation, or what; but its is true, that the moment someone flashes a TV camera and a mike, they attract a horde of people, much like a skylight draws moths.

I was one of the moths. But I was looking at Pooja and not the cameras.

A mere wisp of a girl, it was easy to miss her, trying as she was, to disappear behind the folds of her mother’s sari. With some effort, I was able to catch her eye. For a moment, just for a moment, her defiant, smouldering, charcoal dark, pair looked into mine. Then she lowered hers.

That she was lost was obvious. Why she was so, was easy to understand, if you knew her story.

I knew it. Every body else present there did too. It had been all over the television. Let me tell you.

Ten years ago, she was born to parents, who had awaited a child for many years after their marriage. The long wait, ensured that there was only a mild disappointment at her gender, or her swarthy complexion, which contrasted sharply with her parents’ fair skins. Truly, only a parched throat knows the value of a sip of water.

Her parents were simple, reasonably well off folks. For the first nine out of ten years, life for Pooja had been fun, laughter, tantrums, toys, and school; till a fateful day, more than a year ago.

The day had dawned as usual, everyday like, in a flurry of early morning activities. Pooja never realized that it was a fateful day. No one did.

But then, fateful days are sly. Deliberately, they dawn like ordinary ones, so that they can catch us unaware. They go about their business quietly, hiding destiny in their wicked wombs.

That day, after putting Pooja on the school bus, her mother had picked the morning paper, handed it to her husband and had gone on to the kitchen to brew the morning cuppa,. It was daily routine.

She came back to him, with the steaming cups balanced neatly on a tray, and found him staring fixedly, at the paper. His face was drained of all colour.

Wordlessly, he handed the folded sheet to his wife. She too blanched visibly, as she recognized the shame faced woman, in the picture accompanying the news story.

The small item was printed on the inside pages of the city edition and on a more hurried day Pooja’s father could have easily missed it, but did not. On such tenuous, unexpected twists of cruel luck, are the lives of the mice and men dependent.

Later, that afternoon, Pooja did not find her mother home after school. She was not unduly concerned, being an only child she was used to taking care of herself. A neighbourhood aunt had let her in. But by the time it was late evening; the tiny tot had worked up a mighty tantrum to greet her parents.

A look, however, at their grim faces, warned her not to unleash her little storm. And from the way her mother pushed her away from herself, albeit gently, when she rushed to her, she sensed something was amiss, terribly.

Mother did not cook that night. Later, some relatives and friends dropped in. They all sat huddled together and spoke in hushed whispers, which would die altogether, whenever she came within earshot. That night, for the first time ever, the worried girl went to bed alone. She prayed, for her parents’ wellbeing. She thought that they were in some kind of trouble.

In his adjoining room, her father picked up the paper, again, and re read the headline for the umpteenth time, “Mid Wife Arrested For Exchanging Babies.”

The news item had alerted Pooja’s parents; their daughter’s colour was testimony enough. They too had gone to the police station, where the midwife was being held. The woman had nothing more to loose and admitted, readily enough, that their real son was living with another family in the same city.

She had sold him for a few thousand rupees. His adoptive parents had not wanted their child to know that he was not their very own. After all they were buying a real son with real money. The nurse had admitted during her interrogation, that it was her regular business. She was doing it to put her own children through costly public schools.

However in their case, the woman had not swapped the children. Pooja, she had got for free, from somewhere, and thus could not recall from where. Not that any one cared. The important thing was to get the boy back.

It was easier said then done. The boy’s incumbent ‘parents’ were not going to give up on their investment so easily.

It took a long court battle for the DNA test to be allowed.

The news was first published in a local paper. Later it had caught the imagination of the nationwide electronic media which is always desperate for new, slightly bizarre stories. It is a slave to a 24X7 devil, whom it has to feed constantly.

That day, after a year of judicial scrutiny, the CJM had pronounced the obvious verdict. Standing outside his court room, Pooja’s ‘mother’ was victoriously holding her son up in her arms.

Standing next to her, holding on desperately to her mother’s sari, the poor girl was facing the strongest, most potent, four letter word in English, ‘Mine!’ As in, me, my, ours …..MINE. It is the fulcrum on which our personal worlds revolve. Every emotion, be it, the much touted, ‘love,’ or its darker kin ‘hate’ (four letter ones again) is merely, its progeny. “Mine” comes before anything else.

A pretty young thing, from a national channel, asked her mother, “Madame, what will you now do with this girl?” Cheerfully, the lady in the limelight announced, “I will bring her up too. She is also like my daughter.” There were wide smiles of appreciation all around. Good people.

Distraught, Pooja looked up at her mother, who was too busy and happy to look down.

It had been an immense fall from the self-assured, peak of ‘my daughter,’ to an insecure, unsure, valley of ‘also like my daughter.’ On the way down, she had lost all that was hers. Everything, that she could once pick casually, without thinking, was now an obligation, a charity.

Later that day, her parents and her spanking new, fair skinned, brother visited almost every place of worship in the city, for obeisance before the munificent lord. “Bend, child, bend,” her mother would whisper fervently. Every time she would find her daughter staring accusingly at the Gods, and would urge, “Bend, for the almighty has blessed us!”