Nostalgia…
Filed under: Behind the screen..., Down the memory lane..., Family..., Friends..., uuphh yeh life!!! — chapters @ 1:37 PM
At sometimes, I want the power to roll back my life till the point when I was 10 yrs old. I accomplished many things since then, but at the same time, the list of lost things is also not very negligible. Sometimes, I sigh on those thoughts those come out of my buried memory and start taking a stroll.
In Bhubaneswar, we live in an official quarter, which my father’s office had provided. It was even before my birth that my parents and my brother moved into this quarter and since then it is our home. Well, within few more months we will be leaving this quarter and will move to our own house. But this quarter is the perfect home for me. I was born here and spent my life’s first 22/23 years. Whenever I close my eyes and think about my home, then the picture of this quarter comes into my mind. It is nothing more than a 2 BHK flat, but you can imagine a Govt quarter and its condition. Sometimes, when it rained heavily, the roof leaked, and the side walls were soaked with the rain water. When summer comes, it becomes almost unbearable to spent even a single day in that quarter as it becomes nothing less but a hot oven. But still I love it… it has my memories engraved in its walls. If you can just peel out just 2/3 layers of distemper, then you can see my pencil drawings on the drawing room walls. Someday, when I played teacher-student, I being the teacher with few imaginary students, then this wall became my black board. Then I spelt an Umbrella as “Umbrela” and drew few sketches which proved my lack of knowledge in that area. The walls were like that for few more years till my father’s office approved his plea for a re-paint to hide those crafts of mine. And I remember the day the quarter was -repainted and my father warned me to think atleast thrice before trying my drawing/english teaching skills again on any of the walls.
Then come to the first bedroom which is near the drawing room. There remains the foot-mark of my brother’s Oriya handwriting and first alphabets of his first, middle and last names in english. Well, my father was not very lucky when he tried to paint the house to get rid of those marvelous crafts of my brother. Layers and layers of paint also could not hide them, as my bro was intelligent enough not to use a pencil. He went for an iron nail to dig his marks on the wall, which became almost embedded there. He later confessed that he did this to mark his territory… err his room so that in future nobody captures that. And I forgot to mention that, he also wrote “Bapa” on the other bedroom wall and “Bou” on the kitchen’s wall. And when I grew up to write something, I could not make out why he had written only “bapa” and “Bou” on wall when we have so many relatives. So, I almost took it as my sole responsibility to finish the work he started. So I took a pencil and wrote everybody’s name (not real ones, but what I call them) on the wall one after another, in a line, with commas exactly at the places where they should be and marveled at my own capability.
The quarter we stay, is on the first floor, which also happens to be the top floor of the block. There are 4 houses in one block and 2 adjacent blocks are inter-connected by the terrace. There used to live 7 more families like us and together we were like a community.
The family that stayed just in front of our quarter, was a family of many ladies. I mean uncle had 3 daughters and 2 sons. His wife, elder son, and youngest daughter used to stay at their village. Uncle had almost adopted a lad from his village who stayed with him and his other 2 daughters in the quarter. Well the boy, S, was only 1 year younger to me and what I meant while saying almost adopted was that, he was not legally adopted, but he still lives with uncles family after all these years and he IS a member of it. S and I played together. I never had a younger sibling so S was a like a little brother to me whom I ordered, scolded and at the same time took care of.
But my play group was not complete without K, the girl who lived in the quarter that was the adjacent block to ours. Her quarter and S’s quarter were interconnected by the terrace. She was 2 years older to me and behaved as the mistress of our group. Sometimes, I admired her and sometimes I conspired against her with S and planned to boycott her from our group which never happened. 3 of us grew up together. Now, though I am still in touch with K, the same I cannot tell about S. I had last met him during December 2007. I still remember all those games we used to play. All of us used to study in the school which was just around 100 feet away from our blocks. So if the school’s last bell rang by 4 PM, then we were there on the terrace by 4.30 PM. We played “Bisha-Amruta”, “Lucha Kali”, “E pai- Se pai”, and numerous such games. Then came the days, when we started to have small terrace parties and the food was bought with the small amount of money we three could manage (as we did not have the custom of getting regular pocket money during those period and money was only provided when the child cried for buying something on his/her own and the amount was also very low… so low that if somebody got something which could be counted as Rupees they he/she was lucky). Then came the days when K and I started cooking on the terrace with a small kerosene stove. But the first feast we had was meant to be remembered forever. One day, when we got tired of playing, we wanted to do something new. So we thought of cooking. K brought a small kerosene lamp, which was nothing but a small glass bottle containing oil and the lead had a hole out of which a thick cotton string came out. The end of the string that was out of the bottle was point where it was lighted and the other end was immersed in the oil in the bottle. So we took that and placed it between 2 bricks and lighted it. Then took a earthen pot, some water and few rice grains in it and put it on the bricks so that the bottom of the pot was heated by the below single flamed lamp. And both of us were analyzing the rice grains when K’s mother caught us and gave us a sound scolding. Then she gave us shift-able chulhaa which used wood as the fire material. We did not get wood to burn, so we used paper from our old newspaper raddi and burnt them to make khichdi & alu bhaja for the very first time. Then there was no looking back… We continued to have mane feasts on the terrace for many years till K got married. Now both of us are cooking… she for her family and I for myself. Ohh… did I tell that K has a 1 and 1/2 yrs old son now, who has got the very same mischievous eyes K has???
I never knew that, I was about to write such a long post that I would need another day and another post to continue. But Nostalgia cannot be nostalgia if it has not enough to write about… isn’t it??? 
