Teddy Bears' Picnic
by Anjali Arulpragasam Ashley

“I   know where the teddy bears have their picnic,” Sita said, poking me in the side with a twig. We were sitting on a fallen tree trunk, eating a picnic lunch of curried corn beef sandwiches. I stopped in mid-mouthful to look at her.

“Really?” I said, my jaw hanging open.

At six, Sita was a full year older than I was and a valuable fount of knowledge. Our families were on a picnic with half a dozen other Sri Lankan expatriate families, all living in Rome in connection with the UN agency headquartered there. We were gathered in a large clearing in a pine forest near Ostia, the closest beach town to Rome. It was the early 1970s, when people of color were still rare in Italy, and strangers would stop us in the street to marvel at our abbronzatura (tan) or to squeeze my cheeks and exclaim, “Bella!” Although my family had lived in Italy for several years at that point, we socialized almost exclusively within the small, tight-knit Sri Lankan community or with other English-speaking families in town. Sita and I both attended the British school in Rome and barely spoke Italian.

Sita hopped off the log and tugged at my arm.

“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go find the bears!”

While enticing, her proposal went against our parents’ strict orders to remain in the picnic area. I glanced nervously at my mother, who was seated a good twenty-five yards away on the other side of the clearing. Dressed in a turquoise and pink sari and cat-eye sunglasses, she was absorbed in conversation with a few other sari-clad ladies sitting in a circle of folding chairs. My father stood behind her, gesturing wildly in a heated debate with another dad. The more they drank out of flimsy plastic cups, the louder they seemed to get. My brother was kicking a ball around with some other boys in the middle of the clearing, all infected with Italian football fever.

I kicked my heels against the log.

“But, Seets, we’re not supposed to leave this area,” I said.

Sita scowled and stomped her foot, eliciting a cloud of sandy dust.

“Come on. Don’t be a baby!” she hissed. “We’ll be there and back before anyone notices we’ve been gone.”

She grabbed my arm, yanked me off the trunk, and dragged me toward the trail leading into the woods. I stopped resisting—my initial hesitancy overcome by the prospect of the magical spectacle ahead.

Sita was only half Sri Lankan (her mother was English), and her skin was much lighter than mine. She was a full head taller than I was and sturdily built, with honey-brown eyes and a dark braid reaching almost to her bottom. She wore a light blue gingham dress that day, with frilly socks and her school shoes. In contrast, I was small for my age and skinny, with short black pigtails sprouting at right angles from my head like fountains. I was dressed, as usual, in my brother’s hand-me-down shorts and T-shirt, with athletic socks and tennis shoes.

The air was refreshingly cool under the canopy of giant umbrella pines. Soft afternoon light trickled through needled branches, casting kaleidoscope patterns on the forest floor. The path, covered in dead pine needles, was surprisingly springy underfoot. We walked without talking for a while: Sita in the lead, me trailing a few yards behind, listening to the birds calling back and forth. The only sound I recognized was the rat-a-tat-tat of a distant woodpecker. One of us would stop every now and then to gather pine nuts or baby pinecones, our hands soon sooty and sticky from the nutshells and resin oozing from the cones.

Sita skipped along, singing the ditty that had prompted our escapade:

		If you go down in the woods today
		You’re sure of a big surprise
		If you go down in the woods today
		You’d better go in disguise!
		For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain
		Because today’s the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic!
	

I joined in and we belted out the last line with gusto. A thought suddenly occurred to me.

“Hey, Seets, how do we know that the picnic is actually today? I mean, if we sang this song yesterday, wouldn’t it have been yesterday?”

Sita twirled around on tiptoes. Walking backward, she gave me a look that said no wonder you’re in kindergarten.

“It’s Sunday, right? Everyone knows that Sunday is picnic day,” she said, in a tone brooking no argument.

It wasn’t long before I started to feel chilly in the thick shade, goose bumps rising up on my bare arms and legs. I wished I’d listened to my mother that morning and worn long pants. When we reached a fork in the trail, Sita stopped. She looked this way and that, hands on hips. I felt a whisper of unease.

“Seets, are you sure you know where you’re going?” I asked, coming up behind her. She waved a hand dismissively over her head.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and took the path to the left.

The light was fading now. In the distance, all we could see were interminable lines of shadowy trees. The towering pines stood like a silent army of giants, plates of reddish bark peeling off their colossal trunk-legs like scabs. The trail ahead looked opaque and desolate, and it struck me then that we hadn’t encountered a single other person on our trek. The undergrowth had also become denser: it encroached more and more on the trail until at some point we were no longer on a discernible path. My forearm brushed against a prickly bramble and I yelped. My eyes welled when I saw crimson beads appearing above my elbow.

“Seets!” I called out in a shaky voice. “Let’s turn back. I’m cold, I’m tired, and I want to go home!”

I expected her to resist aborting the mission, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned around, very slowly. My stomach lurched when I saw her face. Her eyes were moist and puffy, her eyebrows furrowed in a deep vee. She had bitten her lower lip so hard it was bleeding.

“O-kay,” she said in a small voice, turning me around by the shoulders and giving me a little push. “You lead. Just go back the way we came.”

I stared at her, wild-eyed.

“B-but, Sita, I don’t know the way!” I said, my voice rising. I shoved her back hard with both hands, and she stumbled backward. “You don’t know the way either, do you?” I shouted. “Now we’re lost and it’s all your fault!”

She said nothing, confirming our predicament. I began to cry, wiping a grimy hand across my face to mix dirt with snot. Sita’s face was turned away, but I could see her lower lip trembling. She seemed smaller, somehow—and younger.

“Let’s shout for help,” I suggested. “Maybe someone will hear us.”

She nodded. We stood back-to-back and bellowed into the gloom.

“AIUTO! I-YOU-TOE!” we screamed. It was one of the few Italian words we knew, thanks to dubbed Popeye cartoons. An owl hooted back at us. Otherwise—silence. I fell to the ground, cradling my knees in my arms, rocking back and forth.

“We’re going to die!” I wailed. “We’re going to starve and die!” Reminded of food, Sita dug into her pockets and fished out a fistful of pine nuts.

“How many do you have?” she asked.

I extracted mine and we laid them all on the ground to count. Twenty-seven. Sita divided them roughly with a slice of the hand and pushed the bigger share toward me.

“That should be enough for dinner and breakfast,” she said.

I stared at her, aghast.

“Breakfast?!” Only then did it hit me that we could be spending the entire night in the woods.

“And then what?” I cried, shaking her by the shoulders.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to eat grass,” she replied in a small voice.

She put her arms around me, and we clung to each other, crying noisily. Sita composed herself first.

“We need to find a rock to crack the nuts before it gets too dark,” she said. “And we have to figure out where we’re going to sleep.”

She walked in circles, looking around. Then out of the blue, she squealed.

“Look! Over there!”

I squinted in the direction she was pointing. In a small clearing in the far distance was the outline of a car! I grabbed Sita’s hand, and we began to run toward it. As we got closer, I could see it was a tiny red Fiat, one of those shaped like a ladybug. The trunk of the car was open, and a man with shoulder-length hair and a beard was loading something into it. A woman stood off to the side, shaking out a straw mat. We were about fifty yards away from the couple when Sita stopped abruptly and ducked behind a tree. She motioned me over with a finger to her lips.

“What if they’re kidnappers?” she whispered. “You know, like the people who took that American boy?” John Paul Getty, heir to the Getty fortune, had been abducted in downtown Rome a few weeks earlier. He had been in Sita’s older sister’s class in the Upper School. I’d overheard two big girls talking about it on the school bus. One of them had been sobbing. I considered this danger for a second before pushing Sita aside and walking on.

“I really don’t care!” I called over my shoulder. “I’d rather be kidnapped than spend the night in these horrible woods!”

The woman looked up in surprise as we approached. She was young, with long blonde ringlets springing out from under a wide-brimmed hat. Her eyes were a warm, chocolate brown, and she had a kind face.

“Ciao!” she said, smiling, her head cocked to the side. “Che cosa ci fate qui? Dove sono i vostri genitori?”

We stared at her blankly.

“We don’t speak Italian,” Sita said, in perfect Italian.

The woman called out to her companion, and the couple exchanged words in rapid-fire Italian. Then the woman turned back to us, holding out her hand.

“Venite,” she said. Come. That much I understood. I took the woman’s hand and looked back at Sita.

“Let’s go with them, Seets,” I said.

It was dark by the time we got to the police station. The couple handed us over to the policeman on duty, got back into their ladybug car, and drove off, waving goodbye. Sita and I sat, holding hands, across the desk from the plump cop. A football match was in progress on the small black-and-white TV behind him. The cop would swivel around to look back at the screen whenever the commentator’s voice grew excited.

“Nome e indirizzo?” he barked.

We gave him our names, but neither of us knew our home address. The man rolled his eyes, exhaling loudly through pursed lips. He put his palms together in mock prayer and wagged them up at the ceiling.

“Dio Santo!” he intoned.

There was a sudden commotion in the hallway outside his office. We heard muffled voices, then approaching footsteps. Seconds later, my parents burst into the room.

“Oh, thank God!” my mother cried, scooping me up in her arms.

I buried my face in the folds of her sari and sobbed, relief washing over me. Then I heard my father’s voice.

“You bloody fool!” he thundered. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Of course! I should have known. I was in big, big trouble. I braced myself for an onslaught of scolding. When none came, I peeked timidly over my mother’s shoulder. My father’s eyes were red-rimmed, his cheeks bathed in tears. This was the first time I’d seen him cry.