Sharks weren't very popular with us when we were kids. Maybe it was Jaws which set the tone for how we were to think of sharks for the rest of our lives. When we were growing up, sharks were not wearing ties or tutu and dancing - they were ruthless killing machines. And somehow a bunch of us cousins made it our mission to kill a shark and save mankind from utter ruin and devastation. Or so we thought.
Imagine six kids, between the ages of 14 and 4, who held meetings (mostly outdoors) every week during hot, sweltry July afternoons in Karachi. Why afternoons? Well, that was the time when our moms were mostly out to buy stuff (trips to Zainab market and Tariq Road), our grandfather was taking his afternoon nap, our Uncle was at his job and our grandmother was engrossed in her Urdu digest magazine. The servants were also not around and so, it was the perfect time for conducting meetings to discuss how we were going to, well, kill a great white shark.
I think I've skipped the most important part of this entire endeavour. Each one of us (except our eldest cousin) was supposed to bring some sort of snack at the meeting. Before the meeting started, we placed our respective snacks on the table as a sort of offering and prayed for success. I recall our last meeting very vividly. We were all sitting on folding chairs in the porch (I'm not sure if we had the pedestal fan or not) with the table laden with goodies in the centre and each of us was trying to come up with a grand plan. My eldest cousin suggested we talk to my mother's uncle who was in the airforce as we might require air power to kill the shark. But how will we go out in the ocean in the first place? A valid question raised by another cousin. To which I had replied that my paternal uncle would help us as he was in the navy. With the logistics settled we started munching on the biscuits and daal moong and cake rusk when suddenly a voice broke the spell, asking us what we were doing sitting in the hot summer afternoon in the car porch?
It was our grandmother who, finding the house very quiet considering her six grandchildren were around, had put her digest away and got up to investigate. I think she was amused but we were terrified. We had taken stuff from the cabinets which we knew we weren't allowed to unless we got permission from an adult. And the cook had been complaining for some time that the dry goodies were disappearing rather quickly. Anyways, our grandmother told us all to get our asses inside, put the goodies on the dining table and do something constructive like read a book or play a board game.
We were quite disappointed that our secret was discovered. What came as a bigger disappointment in the evening was when we told the details of our mission to the elders at the dinner table and our uncle told us that there are no great white sharks in the Arabian Sea.
Childhood is so innocent and now, when all of us cousins are in different countries and haven't come together in years, these memories are a reminder of the good times we shared. Memories have a way of resurfacing and while I hadn't thought of those 'shark-hunt' meetings for years, they came back to me one evening as the twins were listening to the current nursery rhyme sensation, Baby Shark. At least the sharks have nothing to fear from this generation.
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