Old Familiar Places Back in the days when I was growing up, I spent 6 years in Aurangabad, which was an unusually long time for a cantonment kid for staying at one particular place. But it presents a sense of something unsettled in me at times. I never went back to Aurangabad after leaving. It feels like Ive left a significant amount of my lifetime behind. Sealed somewhere only in the depths of my memories. I oft wonder how will it feel when I go back. Will the streets look the same? Will my house look the same? Will there still be my name present under the bed where a little girl etched it on the stone of the floor? Or will what greet me only be disappointment, of not recognizing the very building I lived in. I spent years looking at the sun rising every morning from my balcony, when I reluctantly drank a glass of milk my mother gave me before rushing for her job as a school teacher. I remember the first day I entered that house and being marveled at the thought, that the balcony had two entrances and I could escape mummy when she ran after me with a glass of milk. On every morning, I laughed at that initial thought and sighed at the fact that it never worked. I remember days when I had a music class in school and I forgot to pick my casio keyboard. I remember rushing back to home from my bus stop, only to realize that the door was already locked behind me and I would get punished for not being sincere that day. Every day had a common routine. Coming back from school, changing out of my uniform and immediately rushing out to play. There were seldom times when I stayed at home to watch tv, or play video games. I remember running freely in the park, cycling to unknown places, catching butterflies with my sister, running in the rain, slipping over puddles, picking up stray animals from the streets and begging in front of my folks to let me adopt them, studying late in the night before exams because I spent all my time playing otherwise, exploring places, coming up with enterprising ways of earning money, and the list is endless. All of this happened over a decade back in that place of my childhood and on the streets of my locality. The street in front of my house haunts my dreams at times. I see myself walking on that street, I see myself standing in front of the building that housed my home. I see the light yellow and red paint still fresh on the walls of the building. I enter the building, climb up stairs on which I once raced against my dog on daily basis, I see the plants that lined the entrance of the house. I open the door and walk inside. The house looks exactly the same. Floral curtains in the lobby filtering sunlight falling on the dining table, is the first sight that meets me. I peek into my parents old room to find the old TV visible. The kitchen window still has my full grown adopted street cat sitting on the sill and asking for milk. The rest of the house looks just the same. Then I finally enter the room of my childhood. It is changing like a series of time lapse shots taken over the years. I see the millennium mickey mouse calender first, then the collage of my favorite disney and cartoon characters, then the shapes of grass and mushrooms, I and my sister cut out of coloured paper and stuck on the wall to make it look like a garden out of our favourite Enid Blyton books, then the theme of sky we created out of paper cuttings, the long Kareena Kapoor poster somebody gave me on my birthday, the bright blue curtains, mummy bought for our room in 2002, and finally the room as it looked in the year 2004. Time freezes at this point. I walk deeper into my room, the old, familiar place. I walk towards the cupboard and open it. I see my name written on the inside of the left door and my sisters on the right. At this moment I usually wake up. In the first week of our stay in the city, we lived in a small damp house around wilderness. It rained for a few hours and I kept looking out of the window. When the rain finally subsided, I went out excitedly to explore my vicinity. I found a peculiar bunch of brownish coloured worms squirming and bundling one on top of the other. I prodded the amorphous colony, and instantly they started crawling in separate directions. A hundred worms or so, broken out of their slumber, scurrying away from their nucleus, radially outwards. Its a disgusting description, I agree. Even watching this sight then gave me goose bumps. But the day I finally left the city, sitting in a train, looking out of the window, and reading the last sign board that read AURANGABAD, I remembered those worms. From my first memory, to the last of the place, it was the most significant part of my childhood. I sometimes wish, my nucleus had not been prodded and i did not have to move away from my old, familiar place. But there is a reason why the worms behave that way. Branching away ensures variety, increases probability of survival, leads to evolution, improves mortality and saves their species from extinction in the long run. However, those old, familiar places live in our memories forever. That is the only plane of space where they are frozen in time. If I went back to Aurangabad, I know my street will now be filled with different faces, the house would be occupied by a different family, most of my surroundings wont be the same as they were some 11 years back, there will be no cat waiting for my arrival at the kitchen window sill, the insides of my old cupboard would have been repainted and my name that was once etched on stone may have worn away with time and faded forever. - Tanya Khanijow From Mindful Musings- Articles from our blog Syaahi sahityablog.wix/syaahi-sahitya#!rates/cfvg
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 09:23:40 +0000
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