Friday, March 19, 2010

My home is in a memory land

I remember those childhood days of mine when I was transplanted from one city to another in every few years. I used to cry and revolt and get upset specially during adolescence and teenage year.

Leaving friends, neighbourhood and the comfort school zone every now and then is not that easy for a child. It used to take lots of pain and hard work to to earn good faith from teachers in each schools and whenever I started to get big roles in Drama or other co-curricular activities at school, I would be informed at home that we are transferred in another city.

Again a new place, new people, new school and new set of friends. 

When you talk about your schooling in one primary and one secondary school I remember class rooms of those seven schools where I did my schooling. When you talk about one or two best buddy of your childhood with whom you have close bonding till now, I can clearly see all those faces who where my best buddies, with each of them after getting separated, I tried to keep contact through letters but then slowly lost them while walking in the haze of present and future. You all have a home in a village, town or a city, I do officially have a home town where my parents are living now but I don't connect to that town at all as I have never lived there. 

Now we all are grown up many of us are  studying, working, living at different places to where we have grown.  

But whenever you get some days off you say that you are  planning to go home,  to those known streets of childhood, to those shops where you used to buy toffee, pencils, rubbers when you were a kid and to those shops where you used to buy greeting cards, story books and music cassettes when you pretended to be a grown up. You say that you yearn for that room of yours which still carries the flavour of your growing up years, some pencil scratches on the wall, some hand made projects and many photos.

When I get some time off, I also fly back to my home but that is in the memory land, which is situated on the parts of the streets and neighbourhood of all  those places (small towns of India) where I spent many hundreds of days.

I have very sharp images of all those places in my mind but I am sure if I get a chance to revisit I will not be able to recognise them anymore. 



1 comment:

  1. interesting read. I can understand your feeling here. Mine was a similar situation. I grew up in North India, then parents moved to Mangalore after dad's retirement. Now I visit Mangalore frequently- while I still vividly remember localities in Delhi with nostalgia, I dont have any childhood memories of Mangalore.

    ReplyDelete