It was my aiding day at my son’s school. I was already done with my morning slot. The children were finishing up with their lunch and I was waiting to go home right after. The bell rang, it was time for the kids to go back to class. They ran in hordes like the migrating animals in Serengeti. From the slides, the monkey bars, the four square courts, the tracks; from different directions they swarmed into their respective rooms. The play structure was quiet and empty now save one person. It was a fellow mother, perhaps done with her aiding slot too, crouched on her knees digging silently.

Gently she zeroed in on a spot, moved the tanbark away and felt the ground for something. Then she moved a few centimeters away and repeated the same actions. I figured she must have lost something precious, perhaps her wedding ring or a pen drive full of pictures. I walked up to her and asked: “Are you looking for something”. She looked up and calmly replied, “Yes. It’s a little peach and blue animal. You know, the kind that can be any kind of animal a child imagines it to be. Its tiny and my daughter thinks she buried it here. I promised I would look for it for five minutes.”

There might have been a 100 other things she had to get to; errands to run, meetings to attend, presentations to make, meals to cook, miles to run. But for those five minutes, she forgot everything else and gave herself completely to the search. I looked around with her for a bit. At the end of five minutes, she didn’t find anything. She got up to leave, and shrugging her shoulders, looked at me and smiled. In the evening her child would maybe throw a tantrum or maybe have forgotten about it already. But as she walked away, her head held high, I knew she had kept her promise. A mother’s promise.