A rainy day

As the bus passed the group of shops a small board caught his attention. It announced "Best clinic wanted doctor". For a moment, he wondered if the best clinic had found the wanted doctor and the reason the doctor wanted for. The clinic did not seem much like a clinic and to top it it did not have a doctor; that too in the past tense. So how was it considered a best clinic? He let the silliness of the moment pass. He heard the little girl in pink call his name. He looked around and found her smiling at him. She pointed at her friend and said "In the mornings, I sleep on her lap and in the afternoons she sleeps on my lap". He smiled and said "That's nice! There is no better place to rest your head than on a friend's lap." The little one changed the topic abruptly by saying "Look! Her bag's pink and so is mine." She and her friend spent the next few minutes identifying every pink object near them. He listened to them with a smile on his lips and provided the concluding remark "So much pink! I think we should call this bus 'the pink bus'". The two of them giggled with happiness and repeated "pink bus" a number of times. He smiled and looked out of the window at the wet landscape crawling past.

That afternoon, he sat in a corner of the classroom and looked at the centre of the campus through the windows. The centre being the centre was the lowest point of the campus and hence rain water from different parts of the campus congregated there. Two sequences of stones, each perpendicular to the other peeped out of the water. These small islands provided limited amount of safety from water for the human feet and the slippers that adorned them. The children had been warned of the ill effects of rain. They were reminded to wear rain gears and to keep themselves off the outside. But as researchers have found some of the children possess a complementary circuit between their ears. So they indulged in the exact opposite. 

A set of seven years old walked up through the water before turning around and walking right back. They turned right, walked a bit, turned around and came back. They, then turned left, walked a few steps, turned around and came back. They continued such maneuvers for many minutes. At all times, they took care to keep their feet submerged in water and when they took a foot off the water, they ensured if re-entered the water with some force. They squealed and screamed as the water splashed about. The rain fell on their heads at a steady drizzle. A girl, unlike the boys, used the stones to walk across the stones. She took care that that the water did not wet her red shoes. When she reached the last stone she stopped and looked at the water-less ground for a moment. The ground was just out of reach for her. She took the longest stride she could but could not cross the water. Her red shoes landed on the water with a sploch. She waved her right hand in annoyance and walked looking at her wet red shoes.

An adult followed the girl. She walked briskly from stone to stone with an umbrella held above her head. When she reached the centre of the path, she paused abruptly and as a result nearly lost her balance. She turned unsteadily and decided to use the path perpendicular to her initial path. The stones of this path were placed at some distance from the stone on which she was standing. She stretched her right leg and managed to land her foot on one of the stones. Almost instantly she lifted her left leg off the stone and placed it on the stone ahead of the stone on which her right left was placed. She had changed her direction of motion successfully in a matter of two seconds. 

The boys continued playing in the water unaware of the complex maneuver attempted by the children and adults walking on the stone.