Author: Mithran Ladhania, Class VI C
Yes, I know you’re saying, “Autobiography of a Balloon? Yeah, that’s all I’ve got time for these days?’’ But check it out.
I hope this reaches you some time in the future. Don’t even ask where I am because I’ll already be out of your reach by then.
So let’s start from the ‘start’. When I was born I was nothing to take pictures of and make albums and look at me and go ‘awww . . .’, to be truthful I looked like a squished up wad of clay on whom everyone in the city had stepped on. I was bunched up with some other guys (can you call a balloon a guy?) who were twice as grumpy as I was. Have you ever been in an elevator for ten and been pushed in with twenty people? Yeah that’s how it felt.
My packet was transparent and I was stuck on the side of the packet and looked at these things that walked on two stick-thingies and made sounds with their mouths, which I now know as humans.
I kept observing them for a few months. Or years. Who knows.
After these months (or years) I was taken out of my packet. I was so excited that my whole body buzzed with excitement. I, along with my twenty packet – mates ( balloon ‘guys’) was inflated with a funny gas that tickled me all over made me rise into the sky.
I was tied to a cart. I was free! Not one-hundred percent free but at least I was not a squished up wad of rubber. Oops! Let me tell you about how I looked. I was brilliant blue and shaped like an upside-down water droplet (but of course, I was way more handsome).
I was now aware that we balloons were sold to you humans for rectangular slips of paper. I was sold to a nice little girl of four, I think. She was O.K. But it was her brother who creeped me out. He smiled in a way a wolf smiles at a helpless goat. Anyway, she was wearing a shiny blue dress that complimented my colour (or maybe my colour complimented her dress. Aaargh I’m getting confused.)
I spent five days with her. She would talk to me about the world and how huge it was and that I was just a little balloon (who was very handsome, of course). I was bouncing around in the house with the little girl chasing me when her creepy brother caught me and pulled my string. He threw me out of the window and smiled (also in the way a wolf smiles at a helpless goat).
Well, I guess that was the end of Chapter One.
