One summer morning, when we were all celebrating the freedom of school closure, my cousin from Madras breezed into our house loudly helloing at every one of us, his cousins. Much before him came his awesome reputation as a boy brilliant at studies and smart at dealing with peers. We were told that he could speak Tamil, Telugu and English. These were intimidating statistics released by his father who visited us earlier to tell us that his son was coming to spend a few days with us. His parents called him Ups and we felt it was modern and convenient too and decided to call him by that name. Ups was thirteen and none of us were older than nine. He was tall and hectored us at every step and behaved more like an uncle than a cousin. We began our vacation with him with the history his father had supplied us as a guide.

One day Ups suggested we should play cricket. ‘Cricket, what is it?’ we asked him hiding our shame that we did not know something he, perhaps the world at large, already knew. You stupid guys, he said using a Tamil word for that honorific. Three languages and cricket too, we wondered where he would stop. ‘We need eleven players for each side. That means twenty-two. Do you get it?’ he asked. ‘But we are only thirteen’ we told him. That does not matter. ‘We will play with one side only. Each batsman who is bowled will join the fielders. One of the fielders will bat in his place’ he said. Though we did not understand anything we pretended we did. ‘What do we do with the other two?’ we asked. Without a hesitation he replied, ‘that is no problem. They will be standbys.’ ‘Standbys?’ Again, we did not understand. ‘Idiots, all of you’ he shouted and explained to us what standbys were.

‘We will need six wickets’ Ups said. Wickets went over our heads. This time he did not shout. He was already convinced that we were beyond instruction. He asked us to get six sticks of wood. We brought six pieces of wood from the fuel stored in the kitchen. He stuck three of them at one end and took twenty-two steps straight ahead of him, stopped and stuck the other three sticks into the ground. ‘Where are bats?’ he asked. We knew what bats were but not cricket bats. Cricket we knew was an insect like a grasshopper and bat a kind of a mammal hanging from tree branches. Otherwise, a bat always meant a badminton bat for us. Somehow we managed to salvage two blades of wood from an unpacked bale of paper at the printing plant my grandfather owned. We also stole a tennis ball from an uncle's room.

Now the game began. Bowling was difficult because we could not rotate our arm in the manner of a bowler. ‘It is all right if you can throw the ball at the bat’ Ups said. The first batsman was out for the second ball because he swung the bat wildly and hit the piece of wood behind him. ‘You are out’ Ups said. ‘How and why’ the batsman cried. ‘You have hit your wicket’ Ups said. ‘So what?’ the batsman said and refused to budge. His defiance melted when Ups stared at him hard. The second batsman managed to hit the ball and ran to the other end and stayed put there. The fielder collected the ball and held it in his hand with a feeling of triumph. ‘Return the ball’ Ups told the fielder and shouted at the batsman to run till the ball was returned. Since there were no sides, there was also no team score, only individual scores.

It was now Ups turn to bat. It was not difficult for him to register the highest score of forty-nine. At that stage, one ball slipped from the hands of the bowler and hit Ups' wicket. But Ups would not go. ‘Why?’ the bowler demanded. ‘Because your ball has hit only one wicket, there are two more. Who will bowl them?’ Ups asked. This time all of us protested as a team and Ups had to bow to our collective wrath. This game brought us closer to Ups and we feared him less. Still, he was our leader because he was senior in age and because he came from Madras, a big city, as big as London we thought. London was familiar to us because one of our uncles who studied there always talked about it.

In the evening, our uncle who went to the club every evening to play tennis was looking for the ball. He searched for it everywhere as we slunk away silently from the scene. But a girl whom we did not include in the cricket team, blurted out the truth. ‘Rascals’ our uncle shouted at the walls. ‘I will break your hands next time you do such a thing’ he cursed. When he left for the club, we cornered the girl and asked her why she had told him. She was a hard nut and asked us to go and mind our business. We squirmed at the guts of a pig-tailed girl and vowed to avenge it soon. We never could do anything of that sort to her, a slur we did not forget for long.

One day when we thought we had played enough of cricket we asked Ups to suggest something new. ‘All right, it is no problem. But those of you who have a stout heart come forward’ he told us. Afraid that any one who did not come forward would be considered a coward, all of us said we were ready. ‘The plan is like this’ he revealed. ‘A magician had told me long ago an easy way to get anything we want. For this, we don't need anything but salt, common salt. We will go to the cremation ground, are you afraid?’ he asked. ‘No’, we shouted unanimously. ‘Yes, as I told you we will go to the cremation ground and when you see a whirlwind at ground level throw the salt in it. Immediately a genie will appear. You should not lose your nerve. Reach for his hair and pluck a tuft of it and close it in your pocket. The genie is now ready to obey any command you give’ he concluded.

Getting salt was no small job because nobody except the cook could enter the kitchen, which was presumed to be sacred. One of us drew the cook out of the kitchen asking him to serve water to drink. As the cook was busy satiating our feigned thirst one cousin sneaked into the kitchen and thrust as much salt as he could into his pocket, spilling some on the ground, which was dangerous evidence. When his job was done, the cook returned to the kitchen and saw salt on the ground proclaiming our guilt. ‘Fellows, I have to bathe again. You have fouled the kitchen’ he shouted at us. We did not mind him shouting at us. We got what we wanted.

We went to the cremation ground and began our expedition. From across the river came cool breeze rustling the branches of the casuarina trees. Each one of us threw some salt at what we thought was whirlwind. No genie appeared. This went on till the keeper of the cremation ground noticed us. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ he asked us angrily. We told him who we were. Since our family was well known, he came to our residence in the evening and told our parents about our adventures. That was the end of our expedition in search of genie and wealth.

We were yet to see Ups play the cheating games we thought Madras kids were good at. ‘Are you hungry?’ Ups asked us one day. We knew it was an invitation to a hotel. ‘Yes’ we said. ‘Okay, dig into your piggy banks and get one anna each. We will go out and have our breakfast.’ All of us trooped into Welcome Hotel and sat around a table in one of the several rooms of the hotel. Each room had a waiter serving the clients. ‘Now, order anything you want’ Ups told us. At the end, the waiter gave us a big bill. Ups took us from there to another room where he called for two half cups of coffee. After we had done, the waiter in this room gave a much smaller bill. Ups presented the smaller bill at the counter and pocketed the difference. Our eyes shone with admiration for his ingenuity.

A few days before he left for Madras he said he was shifting to a grand uncle's place from where he would leave for Madras. We were all sad. ‘Look guys, give me a silver rupee each from your piggy banks. I will turn them into gold coins. This will take some time. You can collect the coins from my grand uncle after a week’ Ups said and lifted our spirits. Each one of us parted gladly with a silver rupee. He took the rupee coins and said goodbye to all of us. After a week, we went to his grand uncle and demanded gold coins. ‘What gold coins?’ he asked in dismay. ‘You fools! That fellow left the day after he came’ the grand uncle said. Really, we are fools; we thought but conceded that the Madras cousin was a genius.

-Dasu Krishnamoorty

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