A Coin's Sticking Warmth

 

Those were diminutive, sleepy times in the eighties of our childhood during the last century. Now after almost four decades, little-little memories peek over gentle facades. I must be eight or nine. I was walking by the pot-holed district road on the way to our fields about a kilometer and half from the village. The little tales in schoolbooks with their moral lessons, at least during those times, laid a complex and experiential field to test the lessons.

I was also put into a predicament. I found a fifty-paisa coin. My brisk pacing got slowed down. I had to avoid moral bankruptcy. A fifty-paisa coin carried enough weight till that time. It would fetch ten sugar candies or even fifty little buttons of candies that came one for a paisa. I carried it in my firm, warm, moist, tight fist. Candies would make the day of any child any day in any age. I hope they still carry the same charm.

Still it wasn’t my money. I knew by rote learning that one should be honest and should try to return the lost money to the owner. I saw a group of girls cutting wood by the road and instantly the opportunity to clear my conscience arose. ‘Has anyone of you lost a fifty-paisa coin?’ I asked them. I was expecting a no but one of them said yes. It dumped my spirits. The coin seemed to be glued to my palm. ‘Tell me where did you lose it?’ I raised the level of my enquiry. She was a very intelligent girl. ‘Anywhere between that point and the village school on the road,’ she swiped her little axe along the road to cover two kilometers of stretch. Under the spell of mouth-watering candies, morals can be stretched. I elongated my next query along the lengthened morals. ‘Tell me the year on it,’ I asked. To clear my conscience she had to fail in the test. She hazarded a guess that came to be wrong. So there I carried my coin with a clear conscience and in full honesty.