I was found near the community trash bin. My grandma, who was a maid in an upper middle class household in the town, was there to take her morning walk and also to throw the trash.

She took me and due to a lack of accommodation and her old age she convinced a young widow, a mother of five, to keep me just as long as I was an infant and needed a lot of motherly care. This young widow cared for me as her own baby and in turn got a part of my grandma’s monthly income from the household.

When I was one I could speak and walk, I began to give grandma a company to her work and she would dress me up in nice clean clothes and flaunt me everywhere she went. When I was three she tried to get me into a local school but due to lack of money she could not. I saw her sad face which was rarely the case. She otherwise had a great sense of humor.

She began to teach me counting and alphabets and then she talked to the principal of a school and, considering my advanced level of knowledge for a 4 years old kid, I was given admission to the school.

I would sit in some corner of the classroom and wonder all the time. I would look at how other kids laughed and talked about their parents. If someone had their birthday the teacher would have everyone stand up and sing happy birthday for them. I think my eyes became larger in those days because I wondered wide-eyed so often.

When I was in grade two I became a bright student in the class but I could never believe I could be the best. I lived in a world that was just enough to live by. I never wanted anything more so I never had the desire to work toward a goal. I read the books because they intrigued me and also because they smelled so good. It was so wonderful to just rub my hands on the pages and then bury my nose between the pages and take a deep-breath.

Grandma had begun to look more weary and concerned when I hit puberty. She would take extra precaution in letting me take part in everyday life. She would not let me mix up with the kids in the street, not that I was very social myself; I could see she had something going on in her mind, something that bothered her.

I was shifted to the household. Grandma would come visit me once in a while and tell me to be good to the people in the house. I was bored all the time and I would just look outside from the window and do nothing, at night I would bury my face in the blanket and cry and sometime pray to God to find me a better place. This went on for two years.

I could see grandma was growing weak and was hardly able to perform her duties at house. I could hear the landlady grumble and threaten grandma that she would find someone younger to work for her. She would not let me take over for Grandma's, she thought I would not work well and that being in school would have made me too arrogant and proud to work for someone else. Grandma would try to cover everything up and protect me. When I would ask her if she was sick she would say it was age and nothing else. When I would ask about why the landlady was shouting the other day at her she would make up some other story and then conclude with, they are our masters they would never be satisfied with our work, it’s like that only, you don’t pay too much attention to that.

During this time I made friends with another girl in the neighborhood who was a year older than me but in the same grade. We sat and studied together. Her father was a loving father. One of the reasons I went there was that he treated me like a daughter. We both were studying for college entrance.

One day I woke up and found the newspaper after the kids in the family had read it. The news in the local section said, this girl was murdered a couple of days ago in her hometown. I ran here and there in the house frantically trying to catch a breath before I could say to the landlady that my friend was dead. The family expressed their sadness to my friend’s family.

The next week after this, the landlady called for me in her bedroom and had me sit beside her. She said to me, look we’ll have to make some other arrangement for you in the near future, as your grandma will not be working here much longer. I looked in surprise while she went on to say that grandma was ill and might never recover from her illness.

I came back to my room angry with grandma. She was away from town to meet with her family some thousand miles away. She had told me she had to see the family once in a while. Now I realized she had gone to make arrangements for me after she was gone forever.

I was very angry.

Next day I went to school and when I came back I had a packet of mice-killer powder in my school bag, just in case.

In couple of days I heard from grandma, she wrote she would have to stay back in her hometown because someone was sick. I knew she was still trying for some arrangement, which was difficult, and so she needed more time.

It was a summer afternoon. I opened the door of my room cautiously and sneaked out of the house. My feet were treading their own path in the bushes and I was thinking in a blur. Before I realized it, I was sitting on a log in front of the village pond where the buffaloes bathed and the villagers relieved themselves in the morning. It was almost always abandoned and useless beyond that. I sat on a log behind a thick bush and stared at a point just above the pond, somewhere in the middle.

The powder packet in my hand was getting slippery as I was sweating and my breaths were heavy. I thought about my dead friend and soon to die grandma. I thought how unfair it was of me to be a constant burden to my grandma who was still trying to secure me a future when she had none left for herself. I thought if there really was God and if He really was perfect, I certainly was God’s mistake: or, if He was perfect and could never make a mistake, then he didn’t care for me. I thought every such thing and was convinced my life was meaningless.

My conclusion made me deeply sad. My gaze shifted from a far point above the pond to down on the ground close to my feet. My eyes were dry and I had no thought left in my head. I don’t know how long I kept staring at the ground and then muttered God, this is it. Give me one reason why I should live? I stopped somewhere in the middle of the sentence and then silently stared into the bleakness that filled the space between me and where my feet rested on the ground.

My blankness was disturbed by a strange noise that originated somewhere at the end of the pond. For a moment I thought some kid threw a stone in it. But sooner than I could finish thinking that I heard another similar noise. I stood up and peeped from behind the bush and tried to locate where the noise was coming from. Suddenly I was running toward the pond. I had seen human head. A kid was drowning.

The next thing I knew was that I was in the pond. When I knew that, I also realized I didn’t know how to swim. I used to think it must be a cakewalk but it was not especially in a dirty muddy and swampy pond.

I had jumped in the pond as an instinctive reaction but now I was trying to save myself from drowning rather than trying to save the kid. I tried to navigate toward the kid and when I found it hard I shouted to him, I am here, I am coming to you, don’t worry, I am here. Like that could really help.

But eventually I could reach him and could hold him by his waist. Now we were in the deep and I had to jump up every few seconds to be able to breathe. At the same time I was trying to swim or walk back toward the bank so I could stand and then shout for help. The pond was not too deep but the mud in the bottom made it difficult to stand tall.

The kid clung to my head and shoulder as I had put him above me so that at least he could breathe while I was trying to disengage my legs from the underwater plants in the pond and walk. I could feel something biting at me all over my body. It was like sharp syringes being injected here and there everywhere in my body. I had no time to pay attention to that. My feet were struggling to find a firm place to stand so I could breathe.

This went on till eternity until I moved to a place where I could jump a few inches from the ground and then shout for help and then sink back. Every time I would do that I would dig deeper in the water and then I would move forward to find a higher place.

As I said before, it was a summer afternoon. It meant that the whole village was sleeping in the houses and there was no one to be seen except for the buffaloes that sat under trees away from the pond.

I shouted and the kid shouted. We took turns in shouting and then he began to cry. I said to him, if you have to cry, cry harder so someone could hear and come rescue us. He tried and then began to shout with me again.

I would always be thankful to diarrhea, which was why a young villager came by to visit the pond in the hot summer afternoon. We shouted again in hope and then he saw us and dropped his mug of water and ran to us. Thankfully he was a swimmer.

I woke up in the local hospital forty-eight hours after this incident. The doctor was peering at me, when I opened my eyes and looked in awe. He said, yes you are alive, we had to put you to sleep because the leaches in the pond had a good feast on you and it would have been very painful for you. I looked at him and inside my head I thought, I thought I was dead already.

The family of the kid came to visit me. The mother had food for me and gave blessings as she cried and thanked me for saving her only baby. The father cried too and said nothing. I looked on and could say nothing as I had tears in my throat. I was all bandaged, tight and numb in body.

A few days after that, when I could sit in the bed, the doctor asked me if I wanted something from home. I said yes, my journal. The household sent me my journal.

That night I wrote in my journal, dear god, Thank you for replying to me. But next time when you decide to answer back, would you please keep it simple? May be just whisper in my ear or send an anonymous letter? But thank you again.

Grandma arrived and rushed to the hospital to see me. The villagers had their versions of the saga and the saver of life. She came to me and sat with me. Her face was parched with the heat and her hands were dry and pale. She put her hand on my forehead and said, I should have taken you with me to my hometown, what in the world were you doing near the pond that afternoon? It’s good that you saved the kid’s life but what of your own life, huh? Do you have any idea what would have happened to me if something bad had happened to you? She said all that in one go.

I looked at her and said, I was out there to take a walk and contemplate. She promptly replied, oh, now you stay with me when you have to contemplate, life is too precious to put to danger like that.

It’s been seven years since then. Grandma passed away two years ago. I could not be with her when she was dying. The village people remember me as a savior of that kid. I still don’t know who saved whom.

However I lost the mice-killer packet, somewhere near the pond and never heard from anyone who found it either.