My grandparents' house had a severe lack of toys, which is why my cousin (I'll call him Rocky) and I had to figure out... other ways to have fun.

There was a small space between the bedpost and the cupboard, just enough for the two of us to snuggle. Rocky would drape a blanket over it and secure it with cloth pins. He'd also keep a chair in front of it, as an entrance, of sorts. To get inside the little space, one would have to crawl under the chair.
I would decorate the space with a blanket as a carpet, pillows, small plastic potted plants and toys.

That was our tent.

We would stuff ourselves inside the tent, armed with a torch and my grandmother's cell phone. We'd flash the torch at the cupboard, create shadows with our hands and play with them.

The cell phone had songs on it. Mostly devotional songs, but a few "normal" ones as well.
We would play just two songs from the playlist... One was called, "Chhoti si Aasha" (A small hope), and the other, "Mera Mann Kehne Laga" (My mind started to say...).
For some reason I cannot fathom, we would always cry when we listened to "Mera Mann Kehne Laga". We would cry and we would talk.

We would talk about many things.
We'd talk about how the two of us would someday be astronauts. We'd talk about dreams, and exams, and how awful school was. We'd make fun of our teachers, roleplay as cartoon characters (From Jake and the Neverland Pirates specifically).
We'd talk about death.

Our logic was that the old ones die first. Therefore, I would die before Rocky. He would tease me about it, saying how he would live longest in the family (His dreams were crushed when four other cousins popped into the picture).
Even as kids, we were enamoured with the idea of death. And we would cry when faced with the possibility.

We would weep and we would hug and we would sing along to that song, "Mera Mann Kehne Laga". And we would slowly droop our eyes and fall asleep, only to wake up when our grandmother called us for dinner.

My grandparents' house was later sold.
We have a similar space in their new house.
We tried to make a new tent there, a few weeks ago. Much to our dismay, neither of us fit in the tent.
We complained that the tent was too small. But we both knew that wasn't true...

We'd grown.

(Re-upload, sorry!
My memories are mostly uneventful. But they are still precious to me.
Should I write more of such memories, dear reader?)
© Alter Ego