You help a lady cart boxes of donated toys and clothes to her car. You ask her the destination. She says that it is a village in Zambia, through which she had driven some time ago. She shows you some pictures of the place. You see a couple of makeshift hovels huddled around a tree and a small boy with a bloated stomach, a sign of malnutrition. The lady tells you, in a voice with a register of distress, that she was distressed when she saw that the children in that village did not have proper clothes to wear and toys to play with.

So she had organized this drive at this church to collect and send clothes and toys to that village. She asks you if you too didn’t think it is wonderful that all these toys and these clothes – you see a lot of soft toys including a few corporate gewgaws, a cow with a Chick-fil-A slogan, a Toyota bear and children’s clothes in excellent condition – will bring joy to those children, perhaps that bare chested boy with the bloated stomach?

You notice that there are a lot of mixed emotions running through you as you consider her question and formulate a reply you would liked to give. You had grown up in a country, which largely lies in the long shadows of affluence, and which is crisscrossed with swathes of darkness. This African village is perhaps the heart of the darkness. You think how will, say this Chick-fil-A cow diminish that darkness? Perhaps that boy will be happy for a day, for a week, after he gets this stuffed cow, a shirt, and if he gets lucky a pair of shoes. But what about his bloated stomach, and after the dispersal and the end of First World junk, what?

Your mind also goes back to your childhood. You didn’t have any toys, except a plastic cat and a wooden cart when you were an infant and then some board games – Chess, Scrabble, Monopoly in the youth. Yet your imagination still took root and found nourishment in that magical, and toy-less, time. Yes you too desired to play with Lego sets, to make castles and spacecraft out of plastic pieces. You used to wheedle your aunt to allow you to play with the Lego castle her children, some years older than you, had received from their uncle in America, whenever you visited their home on vacations. You too desired to run around with Hot Wheels yet all this was at best was a passing fantasy.

What you were given instead was heaps of river sand - shiny, white and wet – plied five or six feet high around the various construction sites that dotted your expanding neighborhood. With this sand and the sticks salvaged from your mother’s used brooms, you fashioned your castles, towns and bridges. The small pieces of wood left over from the carpenter’s work became your cars, your tanks, and your rail engines.

You spent evenings perfecting these sets up, these stages for your solitary narratives. There you played out various war theaters: Rommel’s Tunisia, Hitler’s Eagle Nest, Stalingrad and so forth. You constructed civilizations, trading posts, organized safaris in which lions were played by big red worker ants. You were Livingstone one day, a Gaul in a Roman town the other. In this way you then, perhaps only by default, arrived at a truth: the exercise of imagination does not depend on the props.

However all this when you weren’t out with other yahoos in the neighborhood playing makeshift cricket – a discarded plank of wood or the wide stem of a coconut branch provided the bat, branches cut from shrub became the wickets, and a cheap rubber ball provided by one or the other rounded the requirements. The middle of the street was duly appropriated to become the arena for a game. You also played ‘I Spy’ in the pits dug for house foundations. You learnt to trade as you swapped cards of cricket heroes, rare matchbox covers and so forth. You ran up and down the street steering a discarded motorcycle tire with a stick, competing in a unique version of Formula 1 racing.

Yes toys did intrude into your consciousness once in a while tangentially. You remember borrowing some American comics - Archie’s - from a classmate, to whom these had been handed down by someone else. Interspersed with episodes in the comics were advertisements for various toys – you remember a telescope, a chemistry or physics set, a camera, a synthesizer, a trampoline. But just as the adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead were at once enjoyable, and alien, these toys were also to remain alien. And perhaps that is a great thing, which happened to you. Maybe even the best thing.

And on reflection you think, R.K. Narayan wrote about an almost identical childhood in his brilliant novel, ‘Swami and Friends’,