* From An Old Apartment * My father works in a public-sector bank. As a result, we often had to move places and cities. Now, I will not tell you where this particular story took place, because the name of it, somehow always manages to leave me feeling haunted. I must have been six-years old. My father had got transferred yet again. Bags had been packed. Furniture had been stored. The moving company came and loaded our things and in about two weeks, we had settled into our new apartment in a new city. Now, the building in which we took up residence, was an old one with a dull, grey back-yard. There had been five more apartments, besides ours, of which only two had boasted of residents. Curiously, none of the two flats had belonged to the one above us, below us or across the floor to us. Hence we rarely ran into our neighbours and other kids were an absolute rarity in that area. Yet, within a month after our arrival I had made a friend. We use to play together in that grey, dull back-yard every evening. She would come over to my place after that and we would color pictures in our room, with the lovely set of crayons that my father once got for me from a trip to the Great Britain. My friend was very dear to me. She had made my lonely, dreary world in that strange, new place, bearable. She used to wear this beautiful corn-blue dress, with the loveliest work of white lace that I used to envy and with her big, black almond-shaped eyes and the most glorious black hair, I use think she looked like a princess. Oh, how I loved my friend. But. My parents did not. Every time I use to tell them about her, they would get angry. I would shout and scream and cry with as much angst as a six-year old could muster to defend her only friend, but they had never relented. They even took me to see a doctor. A kind, old lady who had tried to tell me that my friend was not good for me. I did not believe her then. I dont even now. In the end we moved away from there. The day before we were suppose to leave, my beautiful friend did not come to play. I waited for her in the back-yard. I waited in my room, with the crayons and the papers, ready to draw pictures when she would arrive. She didnt. I never said goodbye. Eventually, I forgot. And so, the memory left my brain for sixteen years. Until two months back, as my mother was going through our old moving boxes, she found my crayon set and the stack of papers, with those paintings on them. And I remembered. I spent the whole evening that day wondering whether she had been of my making : an over-active imagination of a lonely child acting out or had she been real but a lost soul who just wanted a friend in me. I got my answer when, amongst that stack of papers, I found a drawing with a spitting image of me which, as a six-year old child, could have never drawn. I still havent showed it to my parents. - Mahasweta © Mahasweta Paul, 2014
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 14:30:25 +0000
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