Pink, blue and purple

“Amma, you have not given me an eraser,” said Poornima.
Her mother came sighing from the kitchen.
“Poorni, is this the time for you to remind me of that? What were you doing last night?” asked Divya.
“You have told me not to ask you anything on a Sunday night,” Poorni said, an apologetic expression slowly creeping into her face.
Divya screamed. In her head, of course. She wondered how Poorni had chosen to completely torment her with these little things. Especially on a Monday morning. On the first day to a new school, that too.
“It’s okay, appa will come to school with you, I’ll ask him to tell your teacher you don’t have an eraser. Is that alright?”
Tears already filling her eyes, Poorni suddenly decided not to cry. If her dad was coming along, things would hopefully not be that bad. She was to be a new student, anyway, and besides, girls studying in UKG shouldn’t cry, she told herself.

With Poorni and her husband packed off out of the house for the day, Divya had her lunch and got out to explore the new city they had moved in four days ago. A new place, a new language, new everything. She couldn’t believe she felt so lost in just another city in India, and managed with the little Hindi she knew.
She found a stationery shop after hunting around for half an hour, and bought three erasers for Poorni. This should keep them set for at least the next two weeks, thought she, considering the rate at which her kid lost her erasers.
The day seemed to drag on till it was time for her to go get Poorni back from school. As she neared the school gate and saw her grinning, Divya drew a big sigh of relief. Her worst fear had passed: Poorni wasn’t crying on her first day in school.
As the two walked back, Divya trying hard to register some nearby landmarks, Poorni spoke.
“Ma, do you know how much trouble I faced today without an eraser?”
“Oh dear, so sorry…. Let’s go home and see the erasers I bought for you. They’re pink, blue and purple.”
Poorni grinned.
Poorni picked the pink one first, it being her favourite.

When she returned from school that afternoon, Divya checked her pencil case. She groaned.
“Poorni, where is the new pink eraser? You lost it on the very first day?!”
“No ma,” Poorni replied. “I left in the desk. I need a new one.”
“How can you be so irresponsible? Losing one once a week, maybe I can understand, but this rate…” Divya stopped, knowing that none of this talk would make any sense to her four-year-old daughter.
Blue was the second eraser.

Divya had to check herself from throwing a tantrum when she discovered that this was lost too, on the second day.
“At this rate, Shyam,” she told her husband, “we might go bankrupt buying erasers for the girl!”
With severe admonishing and warning not to lose the last one, she gave Poorni the Purple eraser.
Needless to say, it was lost, too.

Well, it wasn’t so much the erasers that bothered Divya now. She was worried if someone was threatening Poorni to probably hand in her eraser everyday. (She couldn’t help smiling as she imagined her poor kid surrendering to some kid in the new school.) She decided to go talk to the class teacher and make sure everything was fine.
She went during the lunch break and talked to the class teacher. The class teacher burst into peals of laughter, while Divya stood staring at her, wondering what made her laugh this much.
“Ma’am, please come with me to their classroom,” said the teacher.

They stood near the classroom window.
The class was a riot. Kids running and screaming all over the room whose walls were ridden with charts, paintings and more than anything, crayon work by the kids.
Divya was relieved to see Poorni sitting with a group of girls and boys, grinning.
“See what your daughter is doing,” said the teacher.
Divya peered into the classroom. By now some kids inside had known the presence of a stranger, somebody’s mother. They hushed down, but Poorni and her ‘gang’ didn’t really notice her, and continued with whatever they had been doing.
Divya gasped.
Poorni and her friends were rubbing their eraser in the back of their pencil boxes, and collecting all the dust in strips of notebook paper, and elegantly packing them.
When Poorni was asleep that night, Divya checked her bag and found ten packets of eraser dust – three were pink, three were blue and four were purple.