Quaint Quarters

My earliest memory of a stranger is when I was five years old.

 Years ago, a lonely afternoon. In fact one of those bad afternoons when Mrs. Michael  made me a target for all her frustrations in life. (Testimony at http://lifelineanusha.blogspot.in/2011/10/bully-butcher.html

One of those afternoons,  when my little legs could  hardly reach the rough pedals of my red bicycle.I did all that I could with my bicycle, I burnished it till it shone, but then  being bad at cycling I usually walked beside it. I was more the means of transport for the bicycle than the other way around. I was known to frequent odd places and  my five year old self met the first stranger in my life.

 Strangers I was warned are not to be smiled at. I was also often admonished for my rotten habit of staring at people. Well bred women I was told never stare at strangers But then the woman in me was too unruly I guess and staring agape seemed a skill I was born with.

But then I saw him sitting beside my favourite haunt, a lonely, half destroyed building, behind  trees that nobody cared to visit. He and I noticed each other almost at once, and he smiled amused at my irked look in my eyes. I disliked the fact that someone had discovered my haunt. But then I liked the fact that a stranger smiled, it was against the rules taught to me by my school nuns...Don't talk to strangers...Don't smile... Don't take any chocolates even if offered...! I broke the second rule first....I smiled back at the first sense of a stranger in my life...I gave him  a smile right from my five year old heart. And then he asked me, " How come a baby girl walks into such a dangerous place?" I disliked being called a baby girl, so I replied indifferent, " This is mine. I discovered it first."  Then, He smiled again,  too  kind a smile for strangers,  picked up his bag and said, "You can have the place for yourself. After a few weeks I return to a place faraway form here. Back home I have a little girl who smiles just like you do." 

 He never asked me my name nor I his. But he asked me, "Anything? You look rather piqued?"

I turned to him surprised that he saw through my self and replied, "Mrs. Michael...she will wait to pounce on me, tomorrow..again and again".

He smiled at my distraught face and said," She is just a puny rat". 

 He offered me his stranger smile and me my best five year old smile. 

 Before he left, he gave me  a packet of chocolates in orange wrappers. I broke the third rule with the first of those chocolates. But that was also when I realised a stranger sometimes can be warmer and kinder than a friend.

Years  rolled by...
Another lonely afternoon, but then a "grown up" afternoon. When your legs need to be placed well in view of table etiquette. I sit among strangers, and then I meet the second stranger whose smile is warmer than a friend's. It is the first warm smile I receive at a strange place.
History repeats.
He never asks me my name, I never ask his.
Yet he sees through my raw self in more ways than one.
Again, we exchange our "Hi stranger" smiles. Perhaps, I reminded him of somebody.
Across the years, perhaps due to stunted growth of a dormant brain, I still stare at people in quite an 'unlady- like' way.I sometimes stare till I irk him enough to ask me, a question that a five year old heard years ago, "You need anything?"
I shake away an empty head in the negative.
Total strangers to each other, I still manage to hear the stranger say, ".... is just a small fly"
The quaintness of life perhaps is that the warmest message will ever be received from unknown quarters.