Punjabi children's games have names and rules and almost none of them has been written down: kikli, the spinning game girls play in pairs holding crossed hands; stapoo, hopscotch; pithoo garam, the seven-stone game; gulli danda, played with two sticks; bandar kila, the monkey and the peg; kotla chhapaki, the cloth-dropping circle game; khido khoondi, a field game with a rag ball and a curved stick that is an ancestor of hockey.
The equipment is nothing: sticks, stones, a rag, a wall. That is why they were universal and why they vanished so completely when a screen became available.
The songs that go with them, particularly the kikli rhymes, are a body of children's verse in Punjabi that exists only in memory.
Khido khoondi has been revived as a heritage sport in some districts.
The games were the same across both Punjabs and across all three communities, and children in Lahore and Ludhiana played the identical thing under the identical name.
They were age graded without anybody grading them. The smallest were given the easy roles, the older ones enforced the rules, and disputes were settled by the group where they stood. A street game is the first institution a child belongs to that no adult runs, and that is the part that has gone.
The rhymes that go with them are a body of Punjabi oral literature nobody has collected, and they vary from village to village.
The games went with the street. What replaced them is the phone, and the change happened inside about fifteen years.