Monday, March 26, 2012

Summers of Lost & Found

Summer was never a season for me. It was everything but a season.


In my kiddish days, my parents were posted in a small town, away from the town where my grandparents stayed. How I missed them! So, every summer vacation we would cross a mighty river to come down to my grandparents' town.


The last day of class before summer vacation would be so painful, so full of expectation. There would be the tinge of sadness of not being able to see my friends for a complete month. At the same time, the happiness and anticipation of being with my grandparents for a month. 


Summer gently taught me that the very thing that gives us immense happiness can also sadden us at the very same moment. 


The high point of this summer pilgrimage to granny town was crossing the mighty Brahmaputra river. This dangerous sounding water trip was always exercised through a age haggard ferry.  Looking from the wooden seats of the ferry, the mighty river looked like a baby, gently crawling. Until that one summer trip, when our ferry got stuck in a heavy down pour. And I got a awe struck look at another face of the old river, gushing and roaring. I knew how true are the stories of hundreds destroyed by the river in its flood days and ways. From then on, summer also came to meant to me the floods, the deaths, the destructions. 


That summer gave me one quick lesson: circumstances can so drastically distort even a benign presence. 


And in my granny place, I was another Crusoe exploring the gardens. And also all those lovely dishes granny would be forcing on me.

But each summer was the season for stories. Grandpa, with his treasure trove of anecdotes and stories. And that impeccable narration.
May be he sold me on the art of story telling. Each and every one of those summer evenings, he enchanted me with the magic created by story telling. 


And it was one of these long away summer day which took my grandpa away. I lost my magical story teller.


But the stories remained. So, did the enchantment of story telling. 
Finally it was the coat I decided to wear myself. All because of all those summer evenings and those magical stories.  


Summer always gifted me so much yet robbed me blind too.

They Don't Fit in the Pocket

I must have been in Class 7 when I read my first Hindi pulp fiction. It was a novel named  Sile Huye Honth  (Sewn Lips). The hero of the...