Teen Mundi

As a kid who’s grown up in a locality that had a lot of kids her age, I would look forward to the time the clock struck 6 p.m. For that would be our “playing” time. No sooner would the afternoon sun become less harsh, than one would see a bunch of 12 or 13 year olds all geared up to play all sorts of things – some like the good ol’ catch-n-cook or others that we just made up. But our all time favourite was chor-police or cops and robbers.

I remember once, when we were playing cops and robbers, some of us dared to venture into the place that had the teen mundi (3 headed monster). This was no fragment of our imagination. Teen mundi used to live in the New Building, an under construction building in our campus and we kids used to be very scared of him. But since I was the robber, and since I was with the big kids, I put fears aside and decided to take the plunge.

Now the place where teen mundi used to live was this dark, dusty place full of rubble and bricks. While this was the perfect haunted house for me, it was the perfect hiding place for the rest. So while everyone else climbed over makeshift counters and piles of bricks, I found a corner to stand in. Till the time we were caught by the ‘cops’ some fifteen minutes later, I took my time to see the place. And it was only then I realised that teen mundi was the big kids way to scare us off while we were the cops. I will never forget making those hooting sounds to scare the other kids off.

Today, the New Building, as we would call it then, must be over ten years old. And even though teen mundi’s place has now become the lobby of a very posh hotel, everytime I walk in that lobby, I can still picture a little girl standing in the corner making hooting noises to scare off the cops.