All you could see of him were his bald, round head and shiny, bulbous eyes. A film of water stretched like a membrane over eyeballs that looked up into the face of every tall person that stopped near its toes. Who knew whether it was a boy? At three and a half feet and six years of age, they all look the same. 

The hem of the crisply starched kurta brushed his toes, soaking up the puddle that had built at its feet. Its presumably pudgy, childish arms lay lost within the sleeves-he looked like he smelled of surf excel and whatever his mother used to make the kurta crack like paper dosa when yet another tall person brushed by the bald delinquent.

I saw him from the distance, and I wanted to stand on his toes too. I wasn’t wearing a starched white kurta. He was standing absolutely still, bald head tilted, bulbous eyes staring, starched white reflecting. I wanted to reflect too, reflect, deflect, look up at the sky with a clean shaven brown head, brushed with vegetable oil so it would photograph well.

The it thing, he, she, turned its stare from the lamppost to my face, full of scribbles, of lines written and lost, retrieved and lost, the pen having left scratches, etches of broken skin. It stared and I stared, and stared and stared, as the slipstream of trucks and buses buffeted us-not his starched white kurta- until-he grew and I shrank, my hair became his, its eyes mine and I was finally wearing the starched white kurta that made me impervious and I became it.