Nostalgia

Nostalgia wasn't big then. It had started raining. The pitter patter was steady. It rhymed with the wind, and the trees swayed to the music. No soul, as usual passed by in our silent lane; maybe a lone worker heading off from some site to the unknown.

I was back from school. There was no electricity but no complaints there. I stood on the porch my arms extended to feel the light drizzle as the wind spray caressed my face.

Ms. Front Door too had come out to feel the same rains. Her arms extended her smile further more. It was time for many other things, but they could all wait; tuitions, football and friend meetings later that evening, cycle ride to school. The last one helped me understand how much I liked school and the thought-shelter it provided my brain.

The street smelled of nostalgia and looked like a black and white postcard from a distant land.

This is life as I have known, as I have seen. 20 years from now all playmates from colonies, mohallas and societies will end up in different parts of the world. Faces which we got used to over seasons slowly spread apart like ripples in pond formed by a stone-throw; never perhaps to be the same pool of droplets.

Monsoons of joy and splashing we shared, summers of indoor games we played, and winters of campfires we encircled, while always being stone's throw away from each other; all lost to the cycle of life.

Slowly, the parent generation; the string which brought us into an ornament that was our childhood, snaps, and we fall off into this world to become strings of different necklaces.

'I lived my ambition and made it where I wanted to be. I have a beautiful life now;' Or is it really?

On certain days, like one winter night, cosily nesting in our warmth, our child asks us about our times as them. For instance, "What did you do on a rainy holiday?"
Events from the days bygone flood the mind screen!

We built our own goals for life and walked the paths leading to them enthusiastically, also proving a needless point to all around, all the way.

Those joys had their own special place, however silly they might seem today.

The fabric of our emotional, physical and social constructs had long been woven in those days. What I am today is courtesy those times, hence a little wondering, if that part of life carried on for eternity or am I replaced by a different person!

It seems like one tired night, as I was sleeping under the blanket something happened. I walked out in the darkness without my body and a new being walked in, crept under the same blanket and occupied the body.

We contemplate as parents this day, both riding different memory trains to the same destination in the past.

She found it reasonable to be where we were, to be living what we live, to be doing what we do. I have different views. I couldn't possibly see how this was necessarily better.

Better lifestyle, better security, better facilities, better promises from here on. She squeezed our younger one teasingly as she mentioned these.

Never would I disagree with her more. Those two people on the porch that rainy day didn't make these calculations, never signed up an agreement for a perceivably better future.

They only lived.

Wading through the thick and thin we count our happiness now, don't necessarily feel it. Rains have changed. They have decreased. Winters have slept. Summers have troubled.

Back then, rains thrilled, winters hugged and summers liberated.

Do we have it then to go ahead happily? Well, to some extent yes.

But I would like to believe, I am what I am because what I was. Changes happened, most unwilling and some willing. But the essence that slipped out that night has still not returned.

Nostalgia is big now. Anyway, as I recall, this life seemed so desirable back then, but never in my little imagination think it would be the same the other way around!

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