emerging from the darkness. He stains to hear the other children's voices and is surprised when it sounds like they are involved in a different game. Ravi then realizes that the object of the game is not simply to remain hidden but to dash to the "den." He emerges from his hiding place, and the other children stare at him in amazement. Ravi sobs as he recognizes that the children have continued playing without him, not even noticing his absence.

The structure then switches the narrative focus, going back through the events of the day from everyone else's point of view. All of the other children had been found hours earlier, and then they had fought over who had to be "it" next. They had carried on with their games, unaware that Ravi wasn't there. He had simply "disappeared from their minds." This structure allows for the focus to remain on Ravi while he is hiding in order to demonstrate the emotional devastation he feels after realizing, along with the reader, that he is ultimately insignificant to this group of children.

An example of flashback occurs in these lines:

Ravi had once got locked into the linen cupboard and sat there weeping for half an hour before he was rescued. But at least that had been a familiar place, and even smelled pleasantly of starch, laundry and reassuringly, of his mother.

As Ravi waits, he recalls another time he was hidden from everyone and the emotional reaction he experienced during that time of being "locked" away.

An example of a flashforward occurs as Ravi considers the predictable end to the day that is soon coming as he waits in hiding:

It would be evening soon. Their games would become legitimate. The parents would sit out on the lawn on cane basket chairs and watch them as they tore around the garden or gathered in knots to share a loot of mulberries ... The gardener would fix the hosepipe to the water tap and water would fall lavishly through the air to the ground.

This story is told in chronological order. The kids beg to get outside. They are let out. They play a game. Ravi worries about Raghu. Ravi claims victory, and nobody believes him. I can't say that there is any well-defined flashback or flash-forward; however, the story does ever so briefly give readers some information about the past. The information comes just before Ravi hides himself in the garage. He isn't keen on hiding there because it's "dark and depressing" and only gets cleaned once per year. We are told what happens at that time.

That shed wasn’t opened more than once a year, when Ma turned out all the old broken bits of furniture and rolls of matting and leaking buckets, and the white anthills were broken and swept away and Flit sprayed into the spider webs and rat holes so that the whole operation was like the looting of a poor, ruined, and conquered city.

As for a flash-forward, the only thing that resembles it in the story is when Ravi envisions what it will be like when he wins the hide-and-seek game. He believes that he will be hailed a conquering hero of sorts.

He hugged his knees together and smiled to himself almost shyly at the thought of so much victory, such laurels.

Unfortunately, these thoughts do not come true. Ravi is only hailed as every bit as insignificant as he ever was.