There was consternation and panic all around. It had just been discovered that one-year-old Nishi was missing. Her mother was in tears - she had gone to have her bath leaving the baby in the care of Anju, Nishi's fifteen-year-old cousin. Anju was beside herself and sobbing uncontrollably; she was a responsible girl and generally took care of her favourite little cousin when the elders were busy.

Nishi had been playing with her toys in the sitting room of their ground-floor flat. Anju had gone to the kitchen for just a minute to ask her grandmother something and returned to find Nishi gone. She raised an alarm immediately and she and her grandparents rushed around searching the other rooms, under the beds, the tables, behind the cupboard, in the bathrooms - all the places they could imagine the baby might be but Nishi had disappeared. Nishi's mother emerged from the bathroom hearing the noise - she sensed the disturbance was because of the baby and, crying in fear and terror, hurried from room to room in search of Nishi.

Nishi's grandfather, glowering and nervous at the same time, blaming everybody in the house for the accident, ran to see if the baby was outside. There were three stairs leading from their flat to the porch-like cemented area around the apartment block. Nishi could climb up and down the steps by herself but had never been outside the house on her own, of course. From the porch it was only a few paces to the main gate of the compound. Had she managed to go that far? Had one of the neighbours seen her and taken her with him but without informing her family? Or worse, had some villain seen the baby wandering alone and whisked her away?

Nishi's grandfather found nobody till he got to the gate. As usual, one side of the double gates was open. Outside was a busy, traffic-filled street with a crowd of people waiting at the bus-stop at the corner. Nishi was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if he ought to go up to the corner and look. Maybe they had found her in some place they had overlooked inside the house.

Just then he heard a shout from Anju who had come out after him. He turned to see her running towards the rear end of the compound, directly opposite the gate. Then he saw Nishi in her little white dress with its colourful floral patterns. The wave of relief left him almost immobile. When he reached his granddaughters, he saw Anju clutching the baby and laughing through her tears. Nishi, gurgling happily, held out her hands to her grandfather. In those tiny hands were a few bright yellow flowers. She had walked out of the house and headed for the spot where the tree from the house behind their apartment block spread its branches into their compound and had been picking up its flowers from the ground where they had fallen.