One hot summer afternoon, a group of children convinces their mother to let them play outside, on the condition that they stay on the veranda of the house. When they decide to play hide and seek outside, they fight over who will be “It.” One of the girls, Mira decides that they will play a game to determine who is It. This results in an older boy named Raghu becoming the It, and the kids all scatter to hide. Raghu quickly tracks down a smaller, younger boy named Manu, who becomes the first out.
Another of the younger kids, Ravi, hides in a locked shed by sneaking through a small gap in the wall. He is excited by his ingenuity in getting into the shed, but he is also afraid of being in there. It is dark and smells like death and animals. At various points, he thinks that a snake might be brushing up against him, or that insects might be crawling on him or watching him.
Raghu walks around, catching some of the other kids. He bangs on the shed with a stick, which both startles Ravi and makes him feel protected since Raghu is there. Ravi feels a tickle on the back of his neck and hesitates in terror before squashing a spider that’s crawling on him. He stays frozen in place with his hand on his neck, feeling his legs grow tired as he looks around the shed. As Ravi’s eyes grow more accustomed to the darkness, he sees old furniture all around him and decides to sit in a bathtub that he recognizes.
As time wears on, Ravi contemplates getting caught by Raghu so that he can go back outside and be with the his siblings and cousins. But he is also excited at the idea of being the last kid who isn’t caught, as he’s never been victorious over all of the other older kids. He dreams about the glory and the triumph that he will experience when he emerges from the shed. It grows darker, and Ravi remains in the shed for what seems like hours. He wonders where the other children are, and whether the game is over—but he thinks that the game cannot be over without them having found him.
Ravi then realizes that he could have slipped out and run to their home base (a white pillar on the veranda) much earlier, but he had been so satisfied with his hiding place that he had forgotten this is necessary to winning the game. He bursts through the crack in the shed and runs to the den, tears streaming down his face as he declares himself the winner of the game.
The other children are stunned to see Ravi; they had completely forgotten about him. They had moved on to many other activities and games. Now, they are playing a game in which two children make a tunnel with their arms and the other children duck under it as they sing a rhyme about being remembered when they’re dead. The children and their mother tell Ravi to stop crying and join the game, but he doesn’t want to. Instead, he lays face down on the grass, feeling crushed by his own insignificance.
