IT was at the beginning of the summer holidays that my cousin Lily arrived at our house, whining about how she had been dragged here against her will to accompany her parents here.

Her main source of displeasure was, of course, I. Back in school days, we used to be arch rivals in everything from sports to studies. She had the habit of embarrassing me so that she could have the illusory satisfaction of being the queen in her utopia. But this time, I was adamant not to be tricked.

On the second day of the holidays, all of us went to a really lovely forest-like place, with quite a few apple trees scattered around it.

“Hey!” Lily said to me in a challenging tone. “I’ve thought of a competition of apple-picking. Let’s make teams, you and your siblings against me and mine. But if you’re too scared of losing, you need not be ashamed.”

If I had refused to take part in the competition, I would have been considered a coward and that would have been degrading, not to mention a victory for Lily. So I replied in the positive: “I have no idea what ‘scared’ means because I’m ready for every challenge, whether it is of apple-picking or something as perilous as facing death.”

“You can choose a tree of your choice and I will select mine,” Lily said, giving me an arrogant look. “At the end, the person with more apples at the end of half an hour will win the game, while the one with fewer apples will be considered the — you know it too well, darling, - looser!”

The game started at two, and with it began our apple-picking. My chosen tree was very far from Lily’s, so far in fact that we couldn’t see each other. The apples on almost every tree were small in size and a little green. Certainly not ripe. I chose a tree which had bigger apples in general. At first my siblings helped me reach the tree’s top and I picked the apples one by one. It proved to be a very time-consuming and laborious technique, although by using it we had collected a number of apples.

In the meantime, one of us hit upon a plan. We surrounded the apple tree and used every ounce of our strength to shake it hard enough so that a number of apples were accumulated in very little time. So deep were we drawn into the fun of it all that we could hardly remember that this was a competition we had to win; in which we were the rivals of Lily and her siblings.

The half hour flew by. Eventually, we counted the apples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… and 19 apples. Already feeling like victors, we darted towards Lily, who we found occupied in eating one of her collected apples. When she heard the number of apples we had successfully gathered, she snickered and said with a cunning smile, “I’ve collected 35, excluding the one I’m munching on. You can count yourself if you have any suspicion.”

When we counted the apples, they turned out to be 35, just as Lily had already claimed, though they were surprisingly large in size. As a result, all day long she teased me, calling me a loser and ruined the picnic for me. And all I could do was resent her and blush whenever she paraded her victorious smile in front of me.

The next day she and her family left. I thought, mean as she was, she would have whisked away the apples she had collected the day before. Instead when I woke up I found them in a basket in my room. I thought she must have sneaked in at night and left it there as a token of my humiliating defeat. At closer examination of the basket, I found a receipt in it that bore the words: “4kg apples — Rs.1000”.

“Fraud!” I whispered under my breath. It was clear now. Lily had tricked me. The whole of the last day I had spent feeling like a loser, and here she was, having the upper hand yet again. I was furious. I ranted and raved. The urge to avenge was wild in me. But she was gone. Nothing could be done now.

But who cared? We had got so many ripe apples that they compensated for her fraud. They were sweeter and bigger than those we had plucked from the tree. And really, what use would it have been to waste any more energy resenting someone who appeared only once a year in the summer? I had lost the competition, yes, but I enjoyed the defeat. You could say I behaved like the fox who said that the grapes were sour.

Well, maybe I did. So what? Though the grapes were sour, the apples were sweet! I can still feel their taste in my mouth … luscious!