Smoking Lizard

When I was a young child, there used to be a pond on the back yard of Bal Mandir. We used to call this yard as statue yard, because there in the center of the area was the life size statue of the Rana ruler. Perhaps this is the right time to tell you this, that Bal Mandir, once used to be the palace of a Rana ruler. I am great fan of the building and its structure, the way its made. An example of a beautiful British architectural work. Needless to tell you this, when I was child I was not much aware of all this, because I just get a chance to live inside of the palace.

The building has spread in such a huge area, it covers three different areas of the locality. From the front gate which is west side of the building, its Naxal, the north side of the entrance gate touches the Tangal area and from east side, where nowadays there is entrance gate of the Brihaspati Vidhyasadan falls on Maligaun and the boundary walls on south of it touched the area again Naxal.

The rooms & verandas are big, the 20 step stairs is huge, the front yard is big but the backyard which shared kitchen garden area was even bigger. It never looked narrow to play for all of us. I was enough to play around 200 children at a time. Yes the huge kitchen gardens for different seasonal vegetables was also on this same yard.

Do I need to tell you this moment, how beautifully the backyard was made ? There was a pond on almost the centre of the yard, and in front of it stood a life size statue of the Rana ruler. His name was printed on all the bricks that was used to make the whole building.

Okay, I am not talking about the area it covered or the architecture or etc... sorry for off the off the track talk. But this particular day, some teen urchins had caught a lizard from the garden and then somebody inserted a cigarette on its mouth, then placed in on the center place of the pond where there was a small island. Poor lizard, was the victim of these urchins pranks today. Probably, it was trying to breath but it looked like it was puffing a cigarettes as the smoke went up in the air from its mouth. We the children, who had started to surround the pond in the middle of it and started to clap and chant in unison, ‘in-this gene-ration liiiiiii-zard is-smooooking-a-cigarette.’

Some teens were busy laughing, I mean laughing hard. Some even rolled on the lush green carpet of the yard. Some adults ( nannies and male helpers ) came to see hearing the noise, what had happened there and could not hold their laugh, seeing a lizard smoking.

The lizard was placed on the centre island of the pond. The pond could have been at about 300 cm diameter and the island inside it could have been around 120 cm diameter and the rest was filled with water with colorful fish inside it. Some teenage boys, could leap outside of it much easily, from center of the pond to the boundary wall.

Today, there is no more pond in the back yard as it has been buried because in the later years some children fell inside the pond and the muddy water make them sick as they unintentionally swallowed the dirty water while gasping for air. For some there used to be small garden but that too is not there anymore. Now a days, it has bring to normal ground.