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- Herausgeber: Knights Of
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: Mind & Me
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Maya is excited to join Cricket Club at school, but between sports superstars, the big green monster, and her ACTUAL MUM coming to coach the team, she has a lot to handle. And on top of that, Mind thinks they've forgotten something important… like sending a letter to Grandad in India! Can Maya and Mind work it all out in time for their big cricket game? Funny, and with heaps of heart, this is a delightful story for younger readers accompanied by beautiful and dynamic illustrations. "An adorable mindfulness story with a splash of funny." Rashmi Sirdeshpande "A comedy double-act starring a young girl named Maya, and Mind, the physical manifestation of Maya's emotions and mental state. There's a relatable dynamic between the pair, with Mind hindering and helping Maya in equal measure, and the book serves as a great introduction to emotional literacy for younger readers." CLPE Recommended Read
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DEDICATION
To Gaurav, my star. Everything I do is for you, Shreya and Aarav. Family trees are forever.
To my grandparents, Asha & Ganesh and Raj Rani & Murari Lal, for all our memory moments.
To my parents, Rohini & Rajiv, for helping me solve life’s puzzles.
To Satya & Satish for cheering for me.
To my brothers, sisters, family and friends (you know who you are!) - the best team I could ever wish for.
To Avani & Jovan, Leela & Nikhil, Roman & Keirsson.
‘All the carrots of all the tomorrows, are in the seeds of today!’
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
‘How do you say ‘Dear’?’
I pushed my pen into the paper and watched the ink spread a little.
‘Pree-yuh,’ Mama replied in Hindi, rolling out a chapatti on the stone worktop.
I knew Mama wouldn’t look up now. She was too busy. I didn’t look up either. I was busy too.
Dear Grandpa …
P-r-ee-y-uh …
G-r-an-d-p-a …
2Mind spelled out the sounds of the letters in Hindi, as we made a start on the letter I’d meant to write almost a year ago.
How did we know it had been a whole year since I last wrote to Grandpa?
Well, it was just before Tanya and Anya’s 7th birthday party when we last wrote to him. And now there were only two weeks to go ’til they turned 8 …
TWO WEEKS TO PARTAYYY TIME!!
Mind pointed with a shimmy towards the bowling alley invitation card we’d pinned up on the wall calendar. It was printed on shiny photo paper and I’d put it right in the middle of the 3month of April. So there was no way we could miss it.
Then I looked back down at the letter Grandpa had sent me in reply to mine. The paper was crumpled and torn. I hadn’t bothered to keep the letter safely in my memory box of special things from Grandpa, so it had gotten lost and took ages to find.
Mind tried to press the creases out … How could we let it get ruined?!
We’d left it so long to write back, that Mind couldn’t remember what Grandpa had written in his last letter to us, without looking at it again.
At least we found it in the end … Pffffffft! Mind blew at it, still trying but failing 4to straighten the paper out.
Grandpa’s handwriting looked weaker and wobblier than I remembered. Then Mind noticed he had scribbled the date in the top right corner.
It’s almost as if he forgot to leave enough room and then couldn’t quite fit it in.
I tried to think of what I could write about to Grandpa. Grandpa wasn’t like anybody else I knew. He liked to do things his own way. He always said that following was for lemmings. Just because everyone else likes to use phones now, and spend all their time looking at screens for just about everything, he wasn’t about to change his mind and follow the herd. His mind was set on going the other way … So he refused to buy a phone! He said that the only real connection you make when you use a screen is plugging the charger 5in. He said there was something special about connecting with each other when you write a letter: it feels like you’re sending a bit of yourself to someone you love, who then sends back to you a bit of them to take with you wherever you go and keep with you forever.
When I first started writing letters to Grandpa, it was just a fun way to practice my Hindi with Mama! It was a part of me, she would say, and important to hold on to. I loved filling Grandpa in on everything going on here and hearing about him in our letters. We usually couldn’t wait for his replies in the post, Mind and me! Opening the envelope from India when Grandpa sent us a letter felt like we had another missing piece of a precious puzzle; one made up of our memories of Grandpa and our home in India. And Grandpa always 6said that reading my letters made him feel like he was right here with us.
He couldn’t travel much anymore, so we hadn’t seen Grandpa since we left India. It was strange. Someone who we once saw every day, we didn’t see at all any more. And we had no idea when we would see him again.
I felt more than a bit guilty that I hadn’t written back to Grandpa for such a long time. But Mind had a different take on it that spurred me on –
Grandpa will be just as happy to see a letter from us now as he would have been a year ago. PLUS, we have so much more to tell him, like all of the exciting things we’ve been up to over the past year! Like finding Pooey after she went missing …
7Mind was right. What an adventure we’d been on! Ever since we’d gotten my pet rabbit Pooey, Grandpa loved to hear about her. Whenever we sent him updates we called it Khargoshi Khabari! That meant: Rabbity News! But believe it or not, I hadn’t got round to telling him about the time Pooey got LOST and how we finally found her using everything he had taught us about … playing CRICKET!
Go for it! Mind nudged the nib of my pen. That’s a GREAT way to start!
Then again, I really wanted to tell Grandpa about everything that was happening right now. It was back to school tomorrow after the holidays – the start of a brand new term and a brand new club … CRICKET CLUB! It was all my idea.
AHEM! (Oh, and Mind helped with the idea too.) 8
There was so much going on … Where to begin?!
My gaze drifted back over to the pink glittery party invitation. Clearly Tanya had won on the choice of colour this year. Being twins meant that Tanya and Anya shared their birthday. They have a big party at the bowling alley every single year. Anya would never have gone for something so bright and sparkly.
9Mind imagined the twins tussling over their invitations, making me smile.
Having my cousins Tanya and Anya living so nearby is the best thing about being here. It means that the three of us go to the same school and we get to play together every weekend – usually at our place because Aunty Dolly likes to come over for a ‘change of scene’, as she puts it. But, over the half-term holiday, Tanya and Anya were away visiting their Dad. I had really missed them.
Wonder if they missed us too? Mind was never sure if Tanya and Anya thought about us anywhere near as much as we thought about them. After all, they had each other.
Mind you, we’ve hardly thought about Grandpa lately … Mind realised.
It had been a BUSY time. Since we left India and moved here, years ago, I missed 10Grandpa less and less with each year. I couldn’t remember much about India at all. I was only three years old when we left!
Mind turned into a magician and tried to conjure up a memory of India. A sight or sound, a smell or taste, anything would do, but we had …
I stared out of the window, my face as blank as the piece of paper I was supposed to be writing on. It was another rainy day and the back garden looked just like it did on the day we saved Pooey. Mind wanted to feel that winning feeling again. 11
Mind picked an apple from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table, ready to replay the brilliant ball we’d bowled, that had helped us save the day all those months ago. Mind tossed the apple up with a flick of a wrist before catching it.
How’s that? Mind’s eyebrows hopped up and down, with a cheeky grin underneath.
‘You mean, HOWZAT!’ I remembered the way bowlers actually said it to the umpire (that’s the person on the cricket field who makes all the big decisions, like deciding if the batter is bowled out or not).
Then, Mind swooped past, like the fastest fast-bowler you’ve ever seen, both arms stretching out wide and cutting through the air, like the blades of a windmill going around in giant circles. Without actually chucking the hard apple (Mama says no throwing indoors! Mind squeaked), Mind 12pretended to bowl it and yelled out, pointing at me as if I was the Umpire:
Mind imagined bowling someone out and everyone in the crowd cheering for us to win, as I, the umpire, in charge of everything, lifted a finger to the sky to signal: OUT!
Yes! Let’s GO OUT!!! Mind pulled at my dungaree straps, desperate to go find our old cricket set and play.
Right on cue, sunshine splashed in through the backdoor, lighting up the 13laundry room and our exit. It had stopped raining! But, who had opened the backdoor?
I looked at Mama. She was still busy making chapattis. She was concentrating so hard on dusting the rolling pin with flour, she probably wouldn’t have noticed even if we did throw an apple across the kitchen.
Mind knew better than to risk it. The last time we threw something inside the house (my space-hopper) Pooey had gotten such a fright, she'd hopped so high that she nearly ended up hopping herself into space!
Lesson learned! Mind put the apple down.
But, I still needed to finish my letter to Grandpa.
You’ve made a start and we need a break, so let’s go … Mind moaned at me. It’s already a year late, so one more day isn’t going to matter!14
Mind was changing like the weather. As tempting as it was to go out and play, I had to keep us on track. I twisted the pen lid off, ready to write.
Tap … Tap … TAP!
Where’s that coming from?
Mind ran over to the back door and the sound got louder – a light tapping at first, followed by a solid KNOCK … KNOCK … KNOCK!
But, it wasn’t the knock of someone knocking at the door, or the knocking 15of Mama’s car when she turns the key to get the engine going and it just won’t start up …
It sounded to Mind and me, like … THE KNOCKING OF A CRICKET BAT?!
That got us wondering … WHERE ON EARTH was Grandpa’s lucky cricket bat, the one he gave us just before we left India? It was SO special to him and to us.
Like our letters, it was another piece of the puzzle of memories that Mind usually kept safely tucked away, for us to pull out whenever we needed it. Grandpa gave us his lucky bat to take along on our journey, in the hope that wherever we went, even when we couldn’t go together, part of him would be with us that we could always remember him by. We had promised to keep it safe forever. 16
But what if, just like his last letter, we’ve LOST it?!
IMAGINE if we could find his bat and send him a photo of us playing cricket with it? He would LOVE that. It would make him smile such a big smile that there wouldn’t be any room left on his face for any kind of sad feeling. He would know that we were always thinking of him, even when we were apart. And that he mattered enough to us that we looked after the things he gave us, like his lucky bat.
Mind was sure that the bat was the KEY that would UNLOCK all the magical memories stored somewhere deep inside us; of India and of our time growing up with Grandpa. Just holding it again would 17take us back there, to the first time Grandpa taught us how to hold a cricket bat.
I bet it still smells of Grandpa!
We breathed in and stepped forward, imaginary bat in hand, like we were taking guard, marking where we would stand on the pitch, ready to hit a SIXER! That is when you hit the ball so HARD and so HIGH that it shoots like a star through the sky over the boundary of the playing field and right OUT OF SIGHT! Now, that was a shot worth wishing for.
We had to go outside now.
Letter – later! Fun – first! Mind grabbed my arm and we lunged forwards.
Jumping out into the bright sunny garden, we were like a pair of skydivers ready to freefall!
CHAPTER 2
THUD.
We landed with both feet, firm and flat against the stony slabs of the patio. So much for a thrilling freefall!
Looking around, we couldn’t SEE anything that was knocking. Worms were wriggling out from underground because of the rain. Birds were tweeting tunes in the trees. But there was no sign of anyone knocking anything.
KNOCK … KNOCK … KNOCK!
We heard it again! The sound scared Mind, who had turned into a squirrel and raced around a tree trunk all the way up to 19its top branches.
KNOCK! KNOCK!
It was coming from BEHIND us! Squirrel-Mind chased me around the side of the house where our garden gate had been left open, like a clue perfectly placed and pointing to where we needed to look next.
It was chilly in the shadows. Wet gravel scrunched under our feet and we became explorers trekking through snow covered terrain in climbing boots. At the end of the path (or at the top of the mountain – according to Mind!) we found one very 20serious-looking Papa, leaning over in a batting stance, wearing thick gloves and holding the long handle of a … SPADE!
Not a cricket bat, after all … Mind was disappointed.
Papa squatted down and pressed the soil gently with a gloved hand. Then, hunching over, he knocked the muddy spade into the wooden sides of his vegetable patch, setting them deeper into the ground.
KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!
‘Maya! Want to help me plant these?’ He grinned and waved a couple of packets of seeds at us.
He chucked a pack our way and I caught it with both hands, pulling my hands backwards like a fielder catching a fast-paced cricket ball.
Nice catch! Mind nodded proudly. 21
I knelt down on one knee, excited to do something together with Papa. He had worked long days this week, which meant he left early in the morning before I was up and some nights he got home so late that it was past my bedtime and I didn’t get to see him at all. But it was the weekend at last. And the weekend was our time …
Time for fun and … GAMES!!! Mind poked me with an elbow, reminding me that we were here to play the one and only game of cricket.
