Memories

have you ever passed a street where you lived as a child... and caught a waft of something that definitely smelled familiar. be it the delicious aroma of the roadside pani puri stall, or the car mechanic's shop round the corner which, like always, smells of grease, or the fragrance of agarbattis from the shop owned by that extra religious uncle, now old and grey... or a mixture of all of these, and many more... fragrances (or even stenches from the nearby dumpyard, that was almost never cleaned) that somehow evoked childhood memories so old that you yourself don't have time to reminisce about them...

have you ever visited the place where you studied years and years ago, when you were still an eager little child, bright eyed about "going to school every morning"... walked down the corridors where you played i-spy ( which we all called ice-pice for some reason) with your friends, seen the old gong with which the peon used to announce "chhutti" everyday, and had been replaced by an electric bell long ago... gone to the classrooms where you carved your names on tables and played baseball with charts and a duster... sat on the same benches where you laboured through hours of extremely boring 'moral science' lessons. (ummm... i was always a bigtime nerd, i found every other subject interesting.)

have you been dragged by your parents to visit a godforsaken village to meet some distant relative, in a rickety bus which takes more than 4 hours to cover something like 100 kms... have you grumbled all the way about how the ride was extremely bumpy, how it was awfully hot inside that village bus ( express buses do not ply on such obscure routes), and how the smoke from beedis bothers you a lot. but on reaching that relative's home, you realized that it was all worth it... to see that glitter in your father's eyes as he describes how he played in those fields of corn, how all of them used to bathe at the well which is now dry because of years of drought, how they used to walk five kilometers on a dirt road everyday to reach the only middle school in twelve villages... to try and grasp what your father is saying to his grand aunt in hadoti , the local dialect, a language left far behind in the past, as you moved to hindi, english, and even french, but never cared enough to learn your 'original' mother tongue...

that is what memories do to you... they come flooding back at the tiniest, most insignificant trigger, and leave you overwhelmed with emotion, nostalgia, and fondness... they make you want to reconnect with your past, to open an old family album and refresh the images which have been blurred by the burdens of time, to smile again at the picture of a one year old you taking your first, unsure, unsteady steps, a picture of your father recieving his graduation degree (in his bell bottomed trousers), look at all the cousins whose weddings you weren't able to attend since you shifted abroad, miss your grandmother, even though you have no recollections of her because you were so little when she passed away... struggle to remember the name of the spectacled girl whose pigtails you were caught pulling... they make you feel guilty for not keeping in touch with old friends, who then slowly faded into oblivion... they make you resolve to visit your ancenstral home the next time you visit india... they make you shed soft tears which speak of so many feelings... they make you want to go back in time and relive all those moments again... jagjit singh was right, "magar mujhko lauta do bachpan ke woh din, woh kagaz ki kashti, woh baarish ka paani"...