Subhadra Sen Gupta - Lets Go Time Travelling

Urpi and her older brother, Kira, accompanied their father to the market. There they laid out the earthen bowls and pans that he had made on his potters wheel. Nearby, a woman sat with a pile of fresh vegetables; the fisherman had laid out rows of fish that he had caught in the river that morning; and a farmer had parked his bullock cart in the corner, piled high with baskets of grain.

The workers from the granary were carrying baskets to the warehouse at the top of the Citadel where the grain was stored. So whenever their mother needed wheat or barley, she would go to the granary to buy some. Just then a woman came to buy two bowls and paid for them with a bunch of bananas. That made Kira smile as he loved bananas. Urpi wished someone would pay for the pottery with a few beads, for the new necklace that she was stringing together.

Urpi watched an important man walk pastit was the High Priest from the Citadel temple, wearing his flowered dress, a diadem around his forehead and a stone seal hung around his chest. They both stood up and bowed to him, but he was too busy to notice the two children standing behind their stall of pottery.

The High Priest goes past every day and we always bow, but he never smiles at us, said Kira, puzzled.

Why should hewe are just the children of a potter. If our father had been a rich trader sending ships to the west he would smile at us, Urpi said shortly.

Then we should ask Father to become a trader and send our pottery to the city of Ur. That would please the High Priest, wont it?

Hah! Urpi swung her pigtails. I can make him smile any day I want. Just watch me.

You do that and I will get you more beads.

How? Like magic? asked Urpi disdainfully.

I am growing carrots at the back of the house. Ill exchange a basket of them for beads.

Done! High Priest here I come! declared Urpi.

The children knew that in the afternoon the High Priest headed home for lunch. As he came down the steps of the temple, Urpi ran up to him carrying a pretty pottery bowl and bowing said, A gift for Your Honour.

Oh! the High Priest stopped in surprise. What a beautiful bowl and it is a gift for me?

I admire you, sir. You are such a great and powerful priest.

As the High Priest took the bowl from Urpi he gave a wide, toothy smile, Thank you my child! and still smiling, walked away.

Urpi skipped back to their stall in triumph, See! Everyone likes a free gift, even our gloomy High Priest!

True! And flattery makes everyone smile, sighed Kira. Ill start picking the carrots.

Urpi and Kira lived at Mohenjo-daro, and what is amazing is that we know quite a lot about how they lived, even though it was nearly five thousand years ago.

It all began with huge piles of muddy brown bricks and broken walls that could be seen in the desert lands of Sind and Western Punjab in todays Pakistan. They looked really old. No one knew who had built their houses with these bricks, when they had done it and why they had gone away. The villagers living near one of these mysterious brick piles called it Mohenjo-daro, because in Sindhi it means, the mound of the dead.