It’s been almost twenty three years and a half… I’ve been through stages of life, places on earth, people in the world… I’ve done things, been at places, met people, seen imageries, heard sounds, this, that…
I’ve had memories. I’ve stored them well. Not in buckets or ibibos, but deep in my mind or deep in my heart.
And even today, when I close my eyes in the dark, I can go back to those days, good and bad, happy and sad, be there at that time, feel what I felt then…
I still… remember…
When I went for that interview to nursery and the Father (of the School) gave me an eclair…
When one day my dad came to drop me to school and turned back without saying ‘bye’ to me, and I cried…
When I fell sick and vomited in the school, and told my classmates “those are digestive juices”…
When my bench-mate who used to eat samosa everyday in the canteen, bumped a pointed pencil straight into my wrist…
When I played ‘nibbles’ (snakes) for the first time on a computer way back in 1991…
When I fell down from a tree, while I was trying to climb it, in order to look beyond the compound wall, where we believed there were ghosts in the pond out there…
When my masi bought me a toy BEST bus and I drove it all over her house…
When I walked through knee deep water during floods to reach the hut of our maid servant, just to check if her family was alright…
When I used to sleep on the floor in the afternoon, trying to observe the dust particles that would be clearly visible through narrow rays of light coming through the little space below the door…
When I drew the flag of India and waited eagerly for my dad to come back from office so I could show it to him…
When my mom bought me the first ‘hot-wheels’ car and promised to buy me one every month so that I could make a collection…
When in 1994 I would carry my brother double-seat on my cycle to his teacher’s place…
When I ventured too far away from home cycling on my new cycle in the rains and my grandfather came walking all the way looking for me…
When I made paper planes from lot of junk paper and flew them out of our new flat on the seventh floor, the year we shifted to Bombay…
When I was made to sit with the worst performing student in the class, who used to sing everyday, pulling my cheeks: ‘you are my masala dosa, you are my vada paav’ …
When I used to play cricket in the school lunch breaks and used to make fun of the vice-principal’s driver, who always pissed on the wall we used to mark as our stumps…
When I went for an interschool competition where none of my schoolmates came to cheer their team, but when I went to collect the first prize on the stage, I happily saw my father standing in the crowd and clapping…
When I used to go back to Baroda for a couple of days, the homely feeling that I always got there, something that I missed in Bombay…
When I was thrown out of Agrawal Classes with Ketan for apparently ‘being too happy’…
When we used to make infinite fun of the teachers and teaching methods followed by them at Agrawal Classes and Bhavan’s College…
When I was at home for one whole year after 12th, walking every evening to the temple, hoping for better days to come…
When I had a fight with my parents regarding which bicycle to buy, when they came to leave me at IIT…
When I spent the whole night distributing chits with my name in all the hostels, promoting my candidature in the gymkhana elections…
When I was made to play nude football in the hostel grounds, on the rainy day in July 2005…
When I first saw the glimpse of beautiful Trishul peak from very close neighbourhood in the Himalayas…
When all I could eat for a month was curd and ice cream, while I had got total mouth ulcers as a result of injections I had to take after I had fallen off a bike and got stitches…
When Roshnai fell down from her bicycle, trying to hold the umbrella in one hand and control the cycle with the other, and still got up with a lovely smile on her face…
When I stayed awake all night, grumbling but determined to complete an assignment all by myself…
When I walked my way back from the lab to my room through the student market and restaurants during my 10 week internship in Korea…
When I played endlessly in the snow near Nathula border in Sikkim… and then could no longer bear the cold and the sunshine getting reflected from the snow…
When me and Roshnai had mango milk shake with ice cream that one last time in kgp…
…
And the rest are all recent memories…
Memories will keep accumulating. Some with some sounds, some with some picture, some just as a memory. Eastman colour, or maybe just black and white…
The piano keys are black and white,
But they sound like a million colours in your mind.- Katie Melua
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AWESOME!!!!! I went back to my old times…
Well you weren’t thrown out of Aqarwals for “being too happy”. Makes you sound too innocent. It was more than that.
wonderful post! i lived two years next to you and still didn’t know you had such great experiences in life. i can totally relate to your childhood memories. our childhoods are something which we’ll never forget about. btw, you could have included “living next to a weird guy for two year” as well :P
I liked nibbles too. And Gorilla also.
@maitrayee, unitechy: thanks…
@roshnai… well… im shy :)
@sudhanshu… thnks :) and yes.. masala dosa, vada paav is TRUE~ :(
Gr8!!! Simply gr8.The more i read ur blogs the more u inspire me to write.Its been rightly said that…….its been rightly said that…its not always that u get to learnnthings from ur seniors.There is lot to learn from ur juniors tooo….Gr8 job…carry on blogging…
wow wonderfull,
coolstuff…really enjoyed reading it…cud identify with quite a few things thr…the hotwheels..bombay floods…
“u r my masala dosa..u r my wada pav”!!!!!….really???? lol
wow…lovely…i think this is ur best post till date…u knw i feel so proud to knw u somehow :)