One minute you have it, the next minute it’s gone, snatched away. When I hear that statement, I am transported back to the days of my youth when as a ten-year-old, a game of cricket at lunch was akin to a dream realised in all those periods before the lunch bell tolled its song of freedom.

A giant bell it was, too, housed in an archway above the school. We longed to have access to the rope attached to it, but it was guarded by a locked inanimate wicket-gate and a very animate watchman whose whiskers bristled threateningly at the merest hint of competition. He was the designated bell ringer and didn’t brook challenges from young upstarts.

We dreamed away a good percentage of our History, our Geography and a sizeable portion of Mathematics, the end product of all this meaning we scratched our heads in vain for answers if the elders quizzed us about, say, the dates of the French Revolution, or whether the Trans-Siberian Railway train made stops at Irkutsk and Minsk.

The tuck-box man who vended beyond the bounds of the school gate encouraged us to dream in Math class, so he could short change us at will after selling us his sticky toffees at what would, today, constitute Harrods prices.

The one thing a schoolboy doesn’t dream away is his lunch after a morning spent cooped up in class engaged in the process of ‘attention giving’ when one so much preferred ‘attention getting’.

All this focus made one hungry, so lunches were devoured and just as well too because in that way there was more time to play cricket. And this routine of course must have become very familiar to the conniving eagles in the sky (we call them kites in India) which, unbeknownst to us, were making their own plans.

With consummate ease

One such plan involved waiting for me to be seated, sandwich in outstretched hand, engaged in passionate debate with a classmate under a tree that I am sure had aspirations at one time to be a big green leafy umbrella, but failed miserably, so that the shade it put out was only marginal.

When the sandwich was plucked out of my hand with consummate ease, my first microsecond reaction was to look around accusingly for a practical-joke-playing friend. One second later, the upward thrust of beating wings told a different story and I actually saw my sandwich being borne skyward. My fingers, fortunately, were spared.

Many years have passed since, but that same phrase of having something one moment only to have it taken away the next was brought home to me again last week in reading the story of a young man who, at the age of nine, had his property taken away by the government which, following several scientific studies, discovered that the site was sitting on large deposits of bauxite.

One minute a family was living communally together, the next its nucleus had changed. Land gone, property gone and each one forced to go their separate ways. One can only imagine the effect on one so young. Anyway, life flows on as it always does and so it did for the young man who took up work in various outback capacities, always mindful though of the deprivation suffered earlier, but marching on resolutely. For ten years, as the story goes, he’s been given to playing the national lottery. Unsuccessfully, as is the case with 99 per cent of the others who engage in the same pastime. In his instance, though, the young man — not so young now at the age of 50 — had been playing the same set of six numbers, for ten years.

And a few weeks ago, the numbers thanked him for his loyalty. They all came in for him making him yet another Aussie millionaire. Alas, I have no parallel to offer personally vis-a-vis the eagle and my sandwich. Or perhaps there are riches I haven’t discovered.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.