Memories of the Kuwait War~Chapter 2~ The soldier and us

Picture courtesy: Google

Our building was on one corner of a perpendicular road, and opposite a supermarket, not the Jamaiya my father went to that day, and we had a good view of the supermarket across the road from the huge window in our parents bedroom. We lived on the second floor which is actually the 3rd storey (Ground +2) of the building. This was a spot my brother and I often stood staring out from. After homework and study, we used to watch people walk, and then imitate their walking style. Can you believe it, we used to do it in turns and laugh like crazy!! Naughty us!!  

But those days, we used to lodge ourselves by the window for something else. Our eyes were always glued on the road. I was looking to see if there was any shooting or sort of violence, while my brother was all eyes for army trucks, tanks, and big vehicles. We didn’t have to wait long, we saw it. We saw him! Wow!! It was the first time we saw.....No!! Not Saddam Hussain!!....a soldier in uniform!

There was this tall, lean and handsome (note the keyword 😉) soldier in his camouflage uniform and biret, walking towards the supermarket, right in front of our building. “Wow, chechi!! A real soldier! Maybe he came on the tank. Where did he park it?”, my brother was impatient. “See...Tanks are not to be driven on tarred roads. Haven’t you seen, they are driven in the desert on the sand. He must have come in a jeep”, was my intelligent counter. “Jeep enkil jeep!! Where is it??”, he grew impatient.  “Keep quiet and watch the soldier, let’s see where he is going! Maybe he will take out his gun and threaten the supermarket man”, I added a new dimension to the silly boy-world jeep craze. “Oh yeah, let’s watch him secretly”, my brother had now diverted his preoccupation with the vehicle to the possible weapon encounter. 

The soldier went in through the automatic sliding doors of the supermarket. What happened inside was left to our imagination as nothing could be seen, of course. We were tensed. After all, we had never been in a war before, and since we weren’t allowed to see war movies or anything with violence (well, actually even anything with hugging or kissing)we had no clue how things worked. Both of us waited by the window for that loud bullet sound. Not that we wished for it, but we didn’t know what else to expect. Minutes seemed like hours. I badly wanted to pee, but was holding myself. What if the bullet went off while I just sat down?! The tension was building so much that I didn’t know what would go off first, the bullet or my bladder. 

As if God didn’t want me to explode, the soldier came out suddenly to our surprise, or my relief, rather. There was no gun, no bullet shot, nothing. He had a plastic carry bag with some bread and a small bottle of juice. ‘A snack, huh?’, I thought. We continued to watch the soldier walk out of the shop and in front of our building. For some weird, unexplainable reason, as soon as he reached the bottom of our 2nd floor window, he quickly looked up almost instantly fixing his eyes on us. “Dunk!!”, I shouted, and both of us crouched on the bed, on which we were standing. “Sho!! He saw us?? Will he come up?”, my scared brother asked me....Me, who had been holding my bladder for so long and thought I  almost lost it. “lets see if he is gone”, I somehow gathered the courage and slowly stood up against the window. We saw the soldier walking away with a smile on his face. “He is smiling, means he knew we were watching him, chechi?? And he is making fun of us because we got scared?” “Maybe”. And now that the soldier had gone, off I dashed faster than a bullet from the gun, I had a mission to accomplish. Peace at last!

~priya~