Ants

This is one of the oldest memories I have from my childhood. We had a small four-legged iron stool, its seat woven out of plastic strips across the frame. I must have been three or four, small enough that the stool looked big in my hands. It was winter, the floor was cold, and I was dressed in barely anything, struggling to carry that iron stool across the veranda.

Big ants used to loiter around the veranda back then, wandering from plant to plant. I stepped on one, and it wedged itself between my big toe and the one next to it, and bit down hard.

That was the first sharp pain I remember feeling. I cried and fell to the ground, squeezing my toe with both hands. My mother came running from the kitchen, prised my toe open, and there it was — a dead black ant. She laughed, then consoled me, sat me back on the stool, and gave me something sweet to eat, jaggery, most likely.

That early-morning fragment is one of the very few memories I have from an age so young.