Childhood: Lost and Forgotten

Here comes Scribbler’s tag again…and so I write once more, as per her request. But if you ask me, I don’t have specific memories like Scribbler does. Childhood for me has been a set of vague and beautifully melancholic moments…the kind KG was talking about the other day…moments that make you feel nicely weepy, and you enjoy rolling in that melancholy, realizing how oddly fascinating it is.
I am not sure if I am able to explain myself to any of my readers. If you want it simply, of course there have been those days when I would painstakingly accompany my dad to the robbarer bajaar just to pick up a Bikram aur Betaal comics, a cheap yo yo, or a pair of red sunglasses with a lion sticker in the middle, on the way back home. Ma would scream and make my hidden agenda quite public. But I would unabashedly accompany Baba again the following Sunday. Then there were days when I would feed the crows my share of bread and Druke’s orange marmalade, just because I was bored with the same old Tiffin Ma would give me every day. Once I puked on myself (however impossible that sounds; people usually aim at neighbours)…I was in the nursery class, and a compassionate nun sent me home with only my skirt on…can you beat it? Then there was this one instance when I chased a hen…for whatever paranormal reason…got pecked big time by the hen in return…this was in a remote place called Amarda…wherever that is.
My biggest childhood memories of course revolve round my sickening fixation with the supernatural…my loyal attachment to Ramsay horror shows. I would stay put in front of the television, watch the horror shows, and invariably roll down the bed, carrying with me the mosquito net and the paraphernalia, or squiggle in between my parents in the wee hours of the night, completely delirious with fright.
The beautifully melancholic parts of my memories however, pertain to all my vacations in school…when I used to visit my dad in North Bengal, where he was posted. If it was summer, I remember sitting in the backyard, by an old swing and an old well, counting martins, and thinking how lucky or unlucky I would be. If it was winter, I remember running for the quilt after lunch, ready for a siesta, smelling the sun in the warm quilt covers. Sometimes my grandmother would send some tetuler achaar (sweet tamarind pickle…I thought I should translate this one…way too remote for my non-Bong readers), and I would wallow in its tangy taste, gazing at the squeaky clean sky from the bedside window.

Gone are those winters, and the alluring smell of sunshine. These days, all we think about is work, money, promotions, and sometimes, well just sometimes, global warming. Kids play with mindless gizmos. The good old tales of a petni or a kimbhooth (Bengali names for two ghost varieties) do not fascinate them anymore. Maybe, forty years from now, a kid, if asked about childhood memories, will talk about how he had a whale of a time, listening to music on his dad’s Mac...or better still, how he drank all the sugarcane juice, stuff that his dad had saved to make alternative fuel!!!