Back when I was a kid – in first grade. One fine evening, I was walking back to home in that strange infantile gait that I would prefer – with the gleaming joy hovering in my thoughts and a poem buzzing in the lips that our very nice ma’am Saffia taught that day. I would hum stuff then all the way from school to home habitually. It was a usual evening, kids were discontinuing their half-played-matches and leaving the park by our house, the Azaan-e-Maghrib was echoing all over the town, I reached home and dropped down my bag and waterbottle and handed my dad my report card, grinned widely like an almost stupid kid and stood before him with both hands in the pocket and a constant cute stare at him, a stare with some expectations, for I had a feeling of all that being a good omen. I didn’t know what it was all about; Dad the great and mom the great smiled back at me though their smiles were not like the usual ones, they were rather tensed and I could see that. They were really excited about that card like thing for some unknown reason I didn’t know back then. They were smiling and smiling one can say like “perpetually”. All at once, their smiles disappeared and my mom the great uttered something like, “uh-oh” and dad the great like, “this is not great!” And then they said 10^th! Yes, I stood 10^th in the very first examination of school I’d ever taken.

From that day on, I have a posture of that moment stilled back in a very special corner of my brain which I always recall when I study, for exams of course. After that very first examination, I’d always worked hard, and improved to the point that other kids’ parents would scold them and would tell them to be like me.

Yes. That boy was the same one that today, I saw in the mirror in the morning.

Except

I was a kid then.

Life was smooth then.

I was intelligent then.

I was confident then.

Blah.

Today, I recall it differently, because when I fell, Dad the great did not say “this is not great.” nor did my mom the great utter anything like, “uh-oh”. They were sad. That gesture. Period. Gesture is framed. So… blog, you know the rest of the story, right? … What? Aren’t you too smart to guess that?

I’m leaving you with this for an indefinite time period. Take care and be good to people. =) Allah Hafiz.