The curious girl

9th of November

The flight was delayed several hours so I had some time to kill at Delhi Airport. I’d finally escaped Nepal and was currently on my way to the southern sunny beaches of India. With the time to spare had I unsuccessfully tried to find a currency exchange before settling for an ATM, just to pay for something to drink. With my bottle of water in my hand and a content smile across my face did I take a seat at the gate and turned on my laptop.

A little girl was sitting beside me, about 8 years old and curious about everything. She had a bright yellow hat with big white eyes on, one of those hats parents for some reason find suiting on a child, but in a very humiliating way. The girl and the hat were both curiously facing the movie on my laptop, an American action comedy which none of the girl and the hat likely understood the least bit off. They were both frozen in excitement still.

I offered her an earplug to hear the movie. She smiled big and suddenly got really shy. Apparently hadn’t it dawned on her that her indiscrete tries to watch the movie had been that obvious. Her eyes searched for the safety of her mother’s gaze, who smiled back at her daughter. Then she smiled at me. The girl looked at the movie, then at me and when meeting my eyes she turned to her mother again. This repeated itself about five times before she at last agreed to take an earplug. She was beaming of happiness.

The movie ended shortly after, possibly because I sped forward a bit, so we continued to go through the alphabet. School is much funnier on a computer as we both agreed on. She knew it well after a couple of tries, so we continued with creating words and then sentences. As a nice finish did she lost all interest in the teaching aspect and got confident to just type whatever she felt like. It was something like this:
“
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssjhhhbjhbjhjbjafsassssssssssseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggheafajfakglaalcdknafafkbhawbhwbhasldajda;;ca;q214o9r787654345678gtyfyuvggfderyuklnbkujjiuhj
“

I won’t pick up my laptop to teach a strangers child again, no matter how cute they are. Unfortunately was her seat located directly behind mine on the plane, to the regret of both me and the man beside me. Let’s put it like this: None of us got any sleep that last flight.