Stone.

It’s true that as my age has increased, so has my desire and ability to travel. More recently, I seem to have developed a veneer of (unnecessary) extreme unfriendliness and what I believe to be a cold attitude towards most people I come across in life. And this I see especially when I travel.

And this is what I feel most shitty about too, when I think of the two chutku boys in Hampi.

I was in the temple town mid-last month over a long weekend. Having visited the place five years earlier, I was shocked at how crowded it had become, and how many more foreigners were on the loose there. (Only later did I figure out that it was because of Sankranti and the Hampi Festival.) And of course, with foreigners comes more commercialisation and absolute fascination for the fair-skinned ones. So most locals assume that anybody with the colouring or an unfamiliar (read untypically Indian) nature is categorised as ‘foreigner’. So it was that the four of us who reached on Friday afternoon ended up being mistaken for foreigners. That my camera appeared to be big-ass, and I appeared to be a big-ass photographer didn’t help any.

And that’s why, when we climbed the hillock next to Virupaksha Temple, people walked up to us and asked us take pictures of them with my camera, or just stared into the picture viewer from behind me as I kept clicking. Most of them were shady, so my hackles went up immediately and my armour of prickles fell into place. I gave everybody cold looks, turned around and questioned a few Peeping-over-shoulder Toms with “Is there a problem?” or “Excuse me?” in a venom-drenched voice. In the middle of all this, two little boys, egged on by a bunch of teenage hooligans, approached me and asked me to take a picture. I made disgusted faces and followed it up with an unfriendly, I-don’t-have-time-for-this “Okay, stand.” I figured they were going to be cocky young gits.

And that’s when things changed. Because this is how those two boys stood for the picture.

I haven’t seen anybody pose like this in years. The last time was decades ago, when I saw a picture of myself as a chubby, innocent 1st standard student standing at the gate of my grandparents’ place with arms falling on either side of my hip as if punished. When I saw that innocence repeated in the two little boys, I just melted.

After posing for the picture, they came up to see it. And they smiled big smiles that penetrated my armour, tore through my ribs and squeezed my heart to create pain-pleasure. And then they just walked away. Maybe I would have done something more than just let them go, maybe I would have smiled back at them, maybe I would’ve taken a better picture – I’ll never know. Because by then, the scoundrel teenagers who had egged them on came along for a peep at the picture over my shoulder, and my armour quickly fell back in place to defend me.

Now, every time I see this picture, I want to cry because I was so unfriendly to the two chutkus for no fault of theirs, or for that matter, for no reason. I feel like my heart’s being injected with a more-than-healthy dose of pain because I didn’t give the Maybes that ran through my mind any closure.

More than anything, every time I see this picture, I hate myself for turning into this cold person.