S.P.Ramalingan had always been a precocious child..above average in school,he found little interest in the mundane affairs of boys his age such as playing 'marbles' or stealing mangoes from the neighbour's orchard..

What he liked most was to sit somewhere quiet beside a grassy pond and contemplate...how far away was the sun,why were the twinkling stars invisible during the day time and what happened to the sun at night...

At night,the stars seemed to be beckoning to him,he keenly followed their travels in the sky...sometimes they played hide and seek with him,sometimes they laughed at him and mocked his outrageous attempts at reaching up to them and holding them in the ball of his palm..

S.P.R. wished he could visit them,play with them,find out what made them shine and give out that sparkle..they were like his mother's diamonds!!

Once he was thrashed by his father when he evinced interest in visiting them and begged him to please get the tickets....Each star his father explained was a massive ball of fire and gaseous matter,billions and billions of miles away...many many light years away....some he said may have conditions to support life similar to Planet Earth...

S.P.R. did not sleep that night...the stars,his playmates were many light years away...a light year,his father had told him was the distance that light travels in a year.A light year is a way of measuring distance.The closest star to Earth besides our sun is 24,000,000,000,000 miles away.That's the closest star!!There are stars that are billions of miles farther away than that.Now when you start talking about those kinds of distances,a mile or kilometre just isn't a practical unit to use as the numbers are too big.Nobody wants to talk about or write numbers that have 20 digits in them!So to measure really long distances,scientists use a unit called a light year..

So how would S.P.R. visit them?He would have to be a scientist to visit them...he sat in his bed that night,folded his legs the way his grandmother had taught him and prayed to Ayyappa to take him to his favourite stars..

Around this time he made an important discovery..in his grandfather's room on the terrace was an old unused telescope...it was covered in a large black cloth but years of dust and cobwebs had settled on it so he had to wipe it and get coated in the dirt before he could peer through it and become a part of the fascinating sea of stars up there..

to be contd..