The only childhood story one has of Chandrashekhar Azad is of an incident that occurred a few days before he left his home forever. It is of his mother admonishing him for not having gone to school. Seeing that he and his friends were playing with a box of matches, she shouted, ‘Why haven't you gone to school? What are you doing?’ He replied playfully, ‘Experimenting, mother. A single match gives a good deal of light. I wanted to see how much light a boxful of matches will give.’ Standing with one hand on her hip, his mother used the other to pull his ear. ‘Haven't I told you that fire is dangerous?’ Pat came the reply, ‘But it is also useful mother. It chases away darkness.’ A few days after the incident, in the dark of the night, Chandrashekhar quietly slipped out of his home onwards to his destiny. This vignette of Chandrashekhar playing with fire and leaving home in the dead of night was an allegorical interplay of darkness and light. Darkness standing for colonialism and ignorance, and also for subterfuge for a revolutionary to make his escape. Light and fire interchangeably refer to kranti, or armed revolution, and freedom. This story comes from the Amar Chitra Katha, which was an extremely popular illustrated storybook series for middle-class children that started in 1967. The one on Chandrashekhar was titled Chandrashekhar Azad: Freedom Was His Mission and was part of Amar Chitra Katha's larger ‘Braveheart’ series that had biographical stories of ‘India's bravest men and women from history’, which included warriors, legendary rulers of India, freedom fighters and Indian soldiers who had won gallantry awards. Azad's life story was one of the most popular comic-books as there was little information available on him at the time.

One finds a slightly different version of the story in Manmathnath Gupta's history of the Indian revolutionary movement. Chandrashekhar and his friends were playing with matches and wanted to see how much fire and light several matches would make in one go. However, they were also hesitating lest they singed their fingers. Chandrashekhar came forward and lit all the matches while holding them in between his fingers. The matches burnt to the end and singed his fingers as he stood there smiling.