Its evening. All “worker bees” have retired to their “hives”. Its time for some rest, some leisure, some family time. But there is someone in a little apartment round the corner who seems to be very busy. And anxious. Payal is searching for something. The thing must be a very precious one. But no, its nothing precious. Actually, it IS precious. It is precious to HER. It’s a set of Tom & Jerry comic books. And right now she is no less than an Income Tax officer.
As she is searching, she is swimming into a pool of flashbacks. Of those times, when she just started going to school, when she began to read and understand sentences in English, when she got the taste of “Brittannia Treat ” cream biscuits, when she and her maternal uncle exchanged the Tom & Jerry comic books that came as free gift. She happens to love reading books. Over the years she has read numerous novels. With growing maturity the genre of her reading keeps changing. But she never gets tired of cartoons. No other story could give her that pleasure what a simple, illogical story of a cat and mouse chase could give.
There was a time when Payal’s postal address kept changing (within the same city). During these changes, some little things might get misplaced. Its natural. Those comics might have been some of them. With time Payal had forgotten about them.
And today, when she has graduated, all of a sudden she recollects about those little comics. First she asks her mother about them. But her mother has forgotten where she had kept them. And then begins her investigation.
Its been about an hour but no results. She is sad, sometimes anxious and sometimes irritated. Any third person would think she is looking for some treasure, some gold or similar stuffs. Who can anticipate that those little books are much more precious to her than gold ????
