Moon Pizza

The story you will be listening to today is Moon Pizza and is being read to you by Daniel. Moon Pizza, by Anurag Minus Verma. Tinu sits on the grass in the school grounds one afternoon and opens his tiffin. What’s this? Broccoli and peas again! Whenever Tinu sees broccoli, a strange sadness comes over him. Tinu thinks broccoli is a plant that grows in dry deserts. And green peas are deflated footballs. What’s worse, the rotis are made with spinach. As if they didn’t come from the kitchen but straight from some garden! It doesn’t matter what Tinu thinks, though—he thinks up all sorts of things. Tinu’s Mummy has made these rotis. She thinks a lot too. She watches YouTube videos and makes healthy broccoli sabzi and spinach dosas. Yuck! Tinu’s friend Monu opens his tiffin. Five slices of pizza stuffed into a small box, like people stuffed into a lift in a crowded mall! Tinu wonders, “Why can’t I get pizza too? Why should I be the rat in Mummy’s health experiments?” At night, Tinu sleeps between Mummy and Papa. Papa starts snoring. He sounds like the toy train chugging up to Darjeeling. No wonder Tinu wakes up. It’s a full moon night. The moonlight has painted the whole city white. The scent of night jasmine floats into their house. Tinu stares at the moon. The more Tinu stares, the more the moon looks like a pizza with no toppings. “A pizza in the sky? For whom? For me, maybe? Oh, if only someone could fetch it for me! Tinu’s mischievous mind starts thinking of ways to bring the moon to earth. “Can you get me the moon on a plate?” he closes his eyes and asks Santa Claus. “I don’t need anything else. We even have oregano in the kitchen. When Tinu opens his eyes, he sees the moon is slowly disappearing. Bit by bit, as if someone’s rubbing it out from the sky with a Natraj eraser. In a few seconds, it’s gone completely. “Oh no! Did I swallow the moon?” Tinu begins to mumble. His stomach starts to gurgle. The whole city is wrapped in a blanket of darkness. “What have I done!” “Eaten the moon? How greedy am I! What will happen to the city now? Will every night be this dark? Mummy’s going to give me such a scolding!” Exhausted by such thoughts, Tinu goes back to sleep. Tinu wakes up early the next morning. He pats his stomach. Then he runs to the window. The moon is faintly visible in the sky. It isn’t in his tummy! He can hear the TV in the next room. A news anchor is shouting: “There was a lunar eclipse last night! The earth came between the sun and the moon! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and now we’ll tell you the real reason why the earth keeps doing this!” Tinu perks up. He hadn’t swallowed the moon—the earth had! Sometime later, he goes into the kitchen. Mummy is making broccoli-and-pea parathas today. Everything is just as it used to be. But who knows why, today the broccoli-andpea parathas taste very, very good The End. Moon Pizza. Translated by Rahul Soni. Written by Anurag Minus Verma and published by Pratham Books under a CC BY 4.0 license. No modifications have been made. Creative commons license link can be found at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/