Hide-and-Seek

"Where's Rohit? Is he under the bed? No. Is he hiding behind the nightstand? No. Is he hiding behind the dresser? No."

"He's in the closet," said Jen. She didn't even turn around to look at me as she stood on a plastic stool by the bathroom sink, washing a stainless steel glass with soap and water.

I took my niece's hint and approached the closet. The door was shut. I knocked on it twice. "Rohit, where are you?" I called, trying to sound exasperated, as if I about to call it a day. "Are you in the closet?"

My nephew opened the door, a big grin lighting up his face.

"Oh, there you are!" I cried. "I looked for you everywhere but couldn't find you!"

He laughed heartily, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. He had no doubt who the victor was. He took my hand and led me to his own room. "Next time, look here also," he advised me. He led me back to the master bedroom. "And look here and here and here," he said, pointing to the bed, the nightstands and the dresser.

"Okay, I will," I promised.

Off he dashed back into the closet and slammed the door shut.

"Where's Rohit?" I cried. "Is he under the bed?" And so it went, on and on until he had hidden in the same closet half a dozen times and I had searched for him in the same locations.

And all the while, his sister continued washing the glass, squeezing generous dollops of liquid soap out of a bottle.

"You know he's in the closet!" she pointed out gleefully after Rohit and I had played the game twice in a row.

"Yes, but he thinks I don't know. You too were like him two years ago!"

I don't think Jen believed me. A month shy of turning six, she had become far more skeptical of adults' explanations than before. She continued washing the glass. The kids' father had gone to play tennis, while their mother was away in the Midwest, where she had moved when she found a job, leaving the kids in her husband's care. She wasn't visiting that weekend, which is why I had chosen to visit her family at their home in Albany—to help my brother-in-law with the chores and babysit the kids.


To be honest, part of what I told my niece that Sunday morning at summer's end wasn't true. She wasn't anything like her younger brother when she was his age, at least when it came to playing hide-and-seek.

"Hide somewhere else!" she had chided me on a previous visit. "Don't hide in the same place again!"

I had lost no time in obeying her orders.

When my brother-in-law entered the kitchen a minute later, he was visibly surprised to see me crouching on the floor near the sink, in full view of anyone who entered the room.

"Shhh," I told him, placing my finger on my lips. "I'm hiding!"

He gave me a quizzical look, but left me alone. He took a dish out of the fridge and placed it in the microwave.

My niece burst into the kitchen soon thereafter, followed close on her heels by her brother. The two dashed into the adjacent laundry room. Neither of them saw me, for I wasn't in their path. Upon discovering that I had indeed taken her advice, Jen came out and scampered to another part of the house.

But her brother lingered. Just for a fleeting moment, just long enough to turn his head and catch sight of me. He let out a whoop of joy. "Ninny, Ninny!" he cried. "I found Ninny!"

My brother-in-law laughed. Crouching on the kitchen floor in full view of everyone wasn't too bad a hiding place after all.

*

It wasn't me who dreamed of hiding in plain sight, though. That honor belonged to Jen.

Back when she was four and a half or so, she would tell the adults to close their eyes while she hid. When she said she was ready, we would start looking for her, only to find her just round the corner, standing by a wall. Or she would be sitting on the couch in the same room, her eyes tightly shut. We would shake our heads and laugh.

But her brother was another story. Even at the age of two, he was astute enough to know that hiding meant going somewhere out of sight, ducking underneath a table or a chair where no one could easily spot you even when they entered the room.

When I first hid in the laundry room, brother and sister looked for me all over the house in vain. I could have nodded off while waiting for them, had I not struck up a conversation with my brother-in-law who chanced into the kitchen midway through the game. When I heard the kids approaching, I cut short the chat  and slithered right back into my hiding spot.

"Daddy! Where's Ninny?" my niece asked morosely. "We can't find him. We looked everywhere!"

"Did you look in the laundry room? Go look in the laundry room."

Jen and her brother marched dutifully into the room. And there, standing in plain sight, was I.

"Ninny! Ninny!" they cried triumphantly. "We found you!"

When it was my turn to hide once more, history repeated itself. Except this time it was a farce. Brother and sister searched all over the home but didn't find me. Jen complained to her dad, who had been chatting with me seconds before. "Did you look in the laundry room?" he asked. "Go look in the laundry room!"

Jen peeped into the laundry room, but I was nowhere to be seen. Her search had indeed drawn a blank. "He's not there!" she protested.

"Look again!" her father urged. Again she looked, and again I was nowhere in sight. "Daddy, can you please give me a hint?" she asked meekly. My brother-in-law chuckled. "Did you look behind the door?"

Jen and her brother marched into the laundry room and peeped behind the door. And sure enough, there I was. "Ninny, Ninny!" they cried, their faces covered with big smiles. "We found you!"

*

I was reminded of my own childhood when I played hide-and-seek with my friends and my cousins and my sister—the same sister who had now moved to the American Midwest.

Needless to say, I enjoyed every single one of those games. We would hide in various nooks and crannies inside our flats, or behind bushes or hedges or trees or the pump house if we played on the grounds of the building in Pune.

But the game of hide-and-seek that I remember most vividly isn't one that I played with my peers. It's one that I unwittingly forced my parents and grandparents into playing.

"Where's Pingo?" my mother wondered aloud as she searched for me in the bedroom of her parents' flat in Mumbai one summer evening. "Is he behind the dresser? No. Is he under either of the cots? No. He must be in the kitchen. But I've looked for him there already. Let me look again."

Her footsteps soon grew fainter. It was getting dark and musty where I was hiding. I was already covered with dust and cobwebs and was afraid I'd get bitten by spiders and other insects.

My father joined in the search, and so did my grandparents. "He couldn't possibly have left the flat," I heard one of them saying. "We would have heard the front door click."

After what seemed like an eternity, my dad marched into my grandparents' bedroom. With one deft move, he pulled the heavy iron trunk sitting under my grandfather's cot and peered into the darkness behind it. And there was I, curled up in a fetal position, avoiding his gaze.

"Here he is!" he cried. "The thief!"

I hadn't stolen anything apart from my parents' time, but I dreaded what was in store. It was obvious that my dad would seek to give me a good hiding for playing truant. But mercifully enough, the spanking never came to pass. I can't imagine why he had a change of heart.

"Let's read the next lesson about India's freedom fighters," he said, opening my third-grade history book after getting me to sit by his side on the living room settee. "The chapter is about Lo Ba Gun Tea."

My mother covered her mouth with her hand in embarrassment. "Don't call him Lo Ba Gun Tea!" she admonished him. "It sounds disrespectful. Call him Lokamanya Tilak!"

"I know who he is!" my father snapped. "After all, he was my father's friend. Besides, those are his initials in Marathi!"

I felt relieved. The lightheartedness of the exchange was proof positive that my fears about being spanked were misplaced.

"I can't imagine why he avoids studies at all costs," I heard my parents tell my grandparents later that evening. "Even though he does quite well in school!"

*

But that was over three dozen years ago. Time flies. Before you know it, childhood gives way to middle age. Where did youth disappear? You can always dress like a kid, act like one and pretend that you look young enough to be mistaken for one. But there's no gainsaying the fact that it amounts to living in denial. Seeking to hide from the truth can take you only so far.

In another two years, my niece will be as old as I was when I dragged my elders into playing hide-and-seek. Will she still play the game? Will she play it in pursuit of a malicious objective—or any objective for that matter? Or will she have outgrown it? Only time will tell.


"Where's Mommy?" Rohit once asked me when we were playing hide-and-seek in his house. It was surely a bolt from the blue. Perhaps his uncle's presence had reminded him of his own mother's absence. He was younger at the time; not yet old enough to get a thrill out of hiding in the same place over and over again.

"Mommy's in Missouri," Jen replied promptly, placing a protective arm around her baby brother. She never hesitated to take him under her wings.

"Mommy too is playing hide-and-seek," I felt like telling them. "Just like she did when she was little."