Ouch, that hurt!

Yesterday, my Uncle's son, the five year old cousin who lives downstairs was showing me his wounded knee and was giving me a detailed description about how he fell down and hurt his knee. It was really adorable to look at the kid describing the incident very seriously to me. His eight year old sister was beside us, who was watching all along, patiently listening to her brother giving me a detailed account about the incident. She was waiting to take her turn, to explain about all the times that she had fallen down and hurt herself. Once he was done, she took over and started telling me about how she had once hurt her elbow while playing. At this time, my aunt entered the room and sat beside us. She was telling the kids "Look how strong Gautam is. He is very much elder to you. Think about how many times he might have hurt himself throughout his childhood. You need to eat well to grow up and become strong like him". By that last sentence, I wasn't sure if she was really telling that I am strong, or commenting that I was fat. Anyways, to add to her advice, I told the kids that I had got hurt a lot of times while I was a kid. The kids started asking me to narrate about all those incidents. So this is what I told them:

Incident 1: This happened outside my school, St. George's School, New Delhi, when I was probably in my 2nd or 3rd grade. There were many kids used to go the same school from the neighborhood, so we used to go to the school in an auto rickshaw. The auto driver used to collect the fare on a monthly basis, so he became our 'official' auto-wala. He couldn't carry many kids in an auto rickshaw, also there was a high demand for transport. He upgraded to a Maruti Omni and we now started commuting by the Omni car, but we still called him auto-wala. This upgrade from auto to Omni to a pitch battle being fought the kids in a competition for the window seats. One such 'battle' was fought between me and a guy named Kushagar who was much bigger in size as compared to me. It was a fine evening while the driver had gone inside the school campus to bring some kids to the car, Kushagar and I had begun a quarrel for the window seat in the meantime. Things soon got dirty and we took it to the next level. It soon became a mini street brawl on the footpath and in due course, he pushed me and I fell on the ground, and there were many pieces of broken tube light. My elbow took the maximum impact, perhaps the only impact, but it was very severe. The glass pieces pierced at several places in and around my right hand elbow and I had to pluck them out one by one. I became really furious and the guy became scared, just beginning to realize what he had actually done to me. All of a sudden, as if there was some superpower that got into me, I walked up to the guy and punched him on the stomach. He succumbed to the blow and bent down and I kicked him in the back. Just as he was about to fall, I caught his neck and dragged his forehead through the broken pieces of tube light. Right after this, the auto-wala came running and took out some cotton from the first-aid box and gave it to each of us. In all, it looked like a typical Tamil masala movie, where the police come just after the hero kills the villain. The auto-wala asked us to get inside the car and I was the first to get in. I had made a mistake by volunteering to get in first, as Kushagar got to sit beside the window. I was still angry at him. Neither of our parents went to each other's house to complain or fight, nor filed a complaint with the school, as they knew that there was fault on both the sides. The wound took nearly four months to heal. While my wound was hidden under my shirt, Kushagar looked like he was wearing a bandana for a month!

Incident 2: A friend is supposed to pull you up during hard times, but this is incident is an example of how that could go horribly wrong. This happened at New Delhi again, in my apartments. Those were the times of severe water scarcity in Delhi and my area was one of the most affected. Water was supplied only during specific timings and everyone needed to make sure that their individual overhead tanks were filled and used the water judiciously. There was this man who lived on the ground floor who used to steal water from everyone's tanks using a pipe and fill it onto his own. I know it sounds kinda crazy, but when there's scarcity of such essential commodities, shit happens. So one fine afternoon, my friend Rahul and I were sent to the terrace by our parents to check out if there was sufficient water in our respective tanks. The tank was supported on a cement slab, and as the cement had worn out over the years, the iron rods inside it projected outside the slab. Back then, I wasn't tall enough to climb the slab. I carefully placed my left knee up and I realized that the other knee was just touching one of the projecting iron rods. I tried to grab one end of the tank to climb, when Rahul had already climbed up. He thought that I stretched out my hand to ask for his help and he caught my hand and pulled me upwards, towards himself. The iron rod that was touching my right knee pierced the skin and as he had pulled me upwards, it horizontally tore about 3 inches of my skin. The impact was so severe that my knee was bleeding uncontrollably till we reached the hospital. My parents tried several tricks to arrest the bleeding, but it was to no avail. I cried in pain, but the doctor didn't seem to care and started stitching my skin together. I was told that the stitch and the scar would heal in a few months, but it's been well over thirteen years and the scar still stays.

Incident 3: I learnt a lesson very early in my life, that one should never trust girls, whatsoever. A girl of about my own age (whom I don't even remember now) and I were playing on the terrace of my apartments. I was about eight years of age then. She stood in front of me and we held each others' hands in a crisscross way. I held her left hand with my right and vice versa. Both of us started spinning round and round, initially slowly and then very fast. I really don't remember what happened or why she did it, she simply left my hand. At such a fast pace I almost flew for a meter or two and fell down with my forehead directly hitting the ground and I felt as though someone ripped apart my forehead. The pain was unbearable and I was bleeding. This time, I got my forehead stitched. Scar stays, you can still see it on my forehead. I sometimes wish the scar could have been more like that of Harry Potter's.

Incident 4: A brother in need is a brother indeed. My cousin Ganesh and I were playing in his house at Delhi. His apartments had this really long fight of stairs that it had about 50 steps at a stretch. Ganesh was standing at the bottom and I was probably on the 25th stair.  We were playing with a crazy ball (I hope you know what a crazy ball is). He threw the ball at me and it landed two steps below the one I was standing on. I bent down, trying hard to catch the ball, but instead lost my balance and fell down. I rolled down about twenty steps and Ganesh caught me at the last step. As the stairs directly opened to the road, had Ganesh not caught me, some vehicle would have definitely run me over. My right temple (on the forehead) was bleeding and a timely first aid made sure that I was alright within a week. 

Incident 5: This incident happened when I was probably in my 2nd grade in New Delhi. As both my parents went for work, I was sent to a creche where I stayed till late evening, under the care of a lady whom everyone used to address as 'Aunty'. This aunty used to pick me up from the bus stop and take me to the creche. On one fine day, I was returning from the school in my school bus and got up and started walking toward the exit door of the bus when a motorist in a two-wheeler overtook the bus in an unexpected manner. He driver thought that he might knock down the motorist and suddenly applied the brakes. I spun around and fell down and the back of my head hit the floor of the bus. What I did not notice was that there was a nail that was protruding out from the floor of the bus. When I fell, it pierced my head, about 1cm exactly at the bald spot I gathered myself and got up, while the bus conductor helped me get off the bus. The creche aunty was already present there as usual and we walked along to the creche. I was wearing my school bag on my shoulders and she took it from me to carry it. She then gently placed her hand on my back to walk me along but she immediately withdrew her as she felt something wet on my back. To her horror, she saw that her had was full of blood. She then spun me around and saw that the back side of my shirt was fully drenched in blood and it was almost till my hip. You can predict what happened afterwards - I was rushed to the hospital and got stitches on my head. One strange thing here was that I never felt that I had been hurt in my head. The piercing of the nail made my head (or at least the wounded region) go numb. My mom was called up and she came rushing to the hospital. The nurse complained to my mom - "What is it with your son? He was whistling tunes of some Bollywood film songs while we were stitching his head up".

You really should have seen the look on the face of my uncle's kids after I finished narrating the story. They seemed completely baffled and speechless. They were so immersed into it while I was narrating, that I wasn't interrupted even once!