A whole pocketful of marbles

When I was a boy of four or five, like every other boy, I would delight in collecting marbles of various hues and colors. My collection of marbles would give me an emotional high the likes of which I've scarcely experienced in my later years. I wouldn't be content in leaving some of them in a box on a table but  would insist on loading both the pockets of my knickers as I would frolic around the spacious compound of my house. The pockets would be bulging and the elders could scarcely fathom the delight that the collection of marbles would give me. I reckon I must have had over sixty-five or seventy of them in various colors. I must add that the marbles of those days really used to look very attractive. Some would be milky white with a fuzzy green band running sinuously around it. Some would be a dark brown translucent types. The patterns were really so varied and so attractive that it would set a child's imagination on fire.  Those days boys would even have iron ball-bearings of some wheel of a truck to be used at various games that involved marbles. Even I had two or three of this type and to get one of this type a boy had to shell out 25 paise, which was a princely sum for a boy, to pay a mechanic at some automobile garage. I really loved my marble collection.

Though I had enough and more of these marbles my greed for more of them was immense. Hence it happened that one of the gamin boys who was about a year older than me and lived a few streets away in a poorer section of the city happened to come by my house one day. He saw my bulging knicker pockets and invited me to a game of what in Kannada of those days was called 'goli - goli'. The word 'goli' in Kannada meant marble and this game involved taking careful aim at a marble of the opponent placed six or seven feet away and hitting it with a marble of yours. It involves accurate aiming and throwing. If you strike the opponent's marble, that one becomes yours to possess.

 In my greed for more marbles I coveted the collection of marbles the gamin boy had and got into the game of 'goli-goli'. This boy being about a year older was much more skilled than me at the game. After about ten minutes of playing, I had ended up losing about eight or ten marbles from my collection. My mother who was watching all this happening cautioned me to stop the game lest I lose more and become morose. But by then I wanted to at least regain the marbles I had lost so I continued. Over the next ten minutes I lost another ten. My mother kept on warning me that I would lose my entire marble collection and asked me to desist from further play. But by then I was too committed to recoup my losses. So it happened that over the next forty-five minutes to one hour of play I lost my entire marble collection. This despite repeated warnings by my mother not to venture further at various stages of the game.

After I lost my entire marble collection I started wailing out loud and asked my mother to retrieve my marble collection from the boy. Thankfully my mother rejected my plea in no uncertain terms. She told me "I had warned you to be careful but you didn't heed my warnings. This is a lesson for you not to gamble. After you lost a few marbles you should have realized that the other boy is more skilled at the game than you. You should have learnt to quit when the going was not good."

I am proud to say that my mother was fair and just in this incident. I am also proud to say that the gamin boy who was only five or six years old felt quite secure with my mother - that she wouldn't ever deprive him of what was rightfully his because he hung around in our compound till it was dark and time to leave. If he had felt insecure with my mother and felt that she would snatch his winnings he would have tried to scoot from the scene as soon as he had collected his booty.

Well, I should have learnt my lesson from this incident, but I regret to say that in several incidents even after I had become an adult I refused to abandon my path when I had ample knowledge and evidences that things would turn out badly. I don't seem to have the skills to minimize my losses but persist obstinately towards  perdition with the idea that, since I've already invested so much, why quit? This weakness of mine ruined my health and many possibilities of effecting improvements in my circumstances. Another observation that this incident draws to my mind is how people, despite having enough and more of wealth, desire to snatch it out of their own friends who may not be as well-off as they are, out of uncontrollable greed. But if disappointments and failures are to serve as instructions, one can learn to be a little careful as one walks through life.