A Narrative : THE LITTLE GIRL

 The  Little  Girl

(Illustration created with AI assistance.)

As I walk down the lanes of memory, I often encounter a little girl walking beside me. She is not quite the girl I remember myself to have been, and yet I know her well. Perhaps she is the inner me—the one who resisted orders, questioned pursuits, and quietly went her own way—while the outer me learned to say yes to almost everything that life placed before her.

I was a serious little girl, more thoughtful than playful, more observant than joyful. I wore my long pigtails and a frock whose hemline had been let down and stitched up so many times that it had acquired a patch or two. Ours was a small, uncomplicated world where things were bought because they were needed, not because they were desired.

   But little girls have their desires.

Whenever I saw girls of my age walking about in high heels, I longed for a pair. I imagined the sound their shoes would make as they walked—tak, tak, tak—and somehow that sound seemed to me the very sound of elegance. One day, the road in front of our house was being repaired. There were drums of tar lying about, and tiny chips of stone were scattered across the road. Looking at them, I suddenly had an idea. I picked up several pieces and carefully chose two that were almost identical in size. Then I took off my plastic slippers, smeared tar on the stones, and stuck one onto each slipper.

                               And then I walked.

                                 Tak! Tak! Tak!

There it was—the sound I had imagined high heels would make.I was wonderstruck. Delighted. Exhilarated. For those few precious moments, I was no longer a little girl in patched-up clothes and plastic slippers. I was wearing high heels!Perhaps this was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with shoes, slippers, and sandals. When I was well settled in life, I had a whole collection of them. But with age, my feet began to ache, and finally I decided that I would rather flaunt my comfortable Kolhapuri slippers.

Shyness was another companion who stayed with me for years. I was shy of crowds, shy of people, shy of unfamiliar places, and, at times, almost shy of the world itself. Yet there was another side to me. If someone made me feel comfortable, did not nag me, and created a warm and welcoming space, I could talk for hours. Perhaps that is why, wherever I went, I created a little world of my own—a cocoon in which I could observe, listen, think, and quietly be myself. I was always fascinated by the thoughts and ideas of others. I listened carefully, absorbed whatever I found worthwhile, and then tried to make it part of my own journey. I did not always follow the world, but I was always willing to learn from it.

   Then there was the night.

I have always been a nocturnal person. While others seemed to come alive with the morning, I found something strangely comforting in the stillness of the night. During the day, I preferred to keep my curtains drawn; at night, I would open them and let the darkness in. Winter, in particular, awakens something in me that I have never been able to explain.Every year, when the sun begins to set on one of those not-quite-cold winter evenings, when the skin first begins to feel dry and the air carries that faint, unmistakable touch of winter, I am overcome by a strange emotion. It is difficult to name. It is not quite nostalgia, not quite longing, and not quite sadness.

It reminds me of the mood of Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper—of a traveller somewhere in the mountains, suddenly hearing a song from a distant land and being moved by something he cannot fully understand. There is a peculiar sense of belonging in that feeling: the feeling of being drawn towards a place that is far away and yet somehow familiar. Perhaps I understood that feeling long before I could put it into words.

 There was nothing particularly glamorous about me.

I could admire women in stiletto heels, their elegant saris falling perfectly around them, their long hair gathered into graceful chignons, their faces enhanced by cosmetics, their beauty sparkling with diamonds. I could look at them with genuine admiration. I could appreciate all that glamour without ever wanting to become part of it.Because when it came to myself, I preferred my favourite faded purple salwar-kameez, a thick cotton dupatta thrown casually over my shoulders, and my trusted Kolhapuris on my perfectly feminine feet. My short hair was usually tied into a little bunch at the back—a hairstyle that probably had no recognised name in the vocabulary of hairdressers. A bag hung from my shoulder, more often unzipped than zipped. Inside were a few books related to my work, a pen or two, and several handkerchiefs that somehow found their way into the bag every day and remained there, day after day, without ever being taken out. I was myself.

Rumi, the great mystic poet, said, “What you seek is seeking you.” I have often thought that I am not much of a seeker. I have led a quiet life, never chasing after too many things or searching restlessly for what may lie beyond my reach.But perhaps I have been seeking all along—only in my own quiet way. I have sought comfort in the night, wonder in nature, companionship in books, beauty in simplicity, and meaning in memories. And perhaps, without my knowing it, these things were seeking me too.

Maybe that is why, even after all these years, I still find that little girl walking beside me. She reminds me that some of the most precious things we seek do not arrive from outside. They grow quietly within us, waiting for us to recognise them.Perhaps the little girl was never lost.

 Perhaps she was simply seeking the woman I would one day become.

- Pankaj Mala Bhattacharya