He was standing in front of the claw machine in an arcade in Mussoorie. Something was amiss. He was seeing so many soft toys, and he had inserted the coin too, and yet he did not feel like winning. Life was great until then; before that, he had never felt like not winning. In fact, he had won quite a few times. That day was different. He thought he had lost something, something valuable, and that his loved ones didn’t really understand him. This is a realisation a lot of people come across in their lives, but for him it was that day.
He moved the joystick and tried to pick up a soft toy. The claw grabbed it, and then the bear slipped from the claw, and just like that the hundred rupees his father had paid went down the drain. He looked at his shoes, brand new Campus. They were not the shoes with lights like his neighbour had, but they were good enough—grey and black Campus.
There was a time when he wanted to buy a remote-controlled car, and while his mother was against it, his father got it for him. When he got second rank in his second standard, he got a bicycle with thick tyres, and that bicycle was a tough one that got him through to the years when he would have a full-size bicycle. Arcades were his thing; when he visited hill stations, he would play on the claw machine and eat the overpriced egg sandwiches in which they would sell three thin egg slices with two slices of bread for a hundred rupees.
Everything was a hundred rupees in the days when a daily wage labourer would get less than a hundred rupees as his daily wage. It never bothered him what kind of shoes he wore, but he preferred Action shoes, and he preferred to wear Action Synergy to school after thoroughly polishing them. Polishing your shoes was important in that household, until the time came when even brushing the teeth wasn’t necessary.
That day in Mussoorie, in front of the claw machine, something went amiss—a piece of the puzzle that he was—and he would then spend a lifetime finding that piece to complete that puzzle.
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