Skip to main content

Lockdown tales : i

As i hit the road today, I over heard a conversation between two adults.

"Gone are the days when days were filled with laughter", she sighed.

"Look how we breathe let alone laughter", came the other's terse reply.

"The world was once filled with so much of life and light and look how we can't afford to give our kids even the freedom to breathe freely, these masks are giving hard times".


I took a steep turn no longer wanting to hear dismal stories. As i was about to reach my home, I saw my neighborhood baa ( grandpa). I couldn't even recognize him as he clung helplessly to his wheel chair. I knelt near him to greet him with a "namaste" and his eyes shone when he recognized me. He flashed a welcoming gap toothed smile and the next moment I saw him mimick a frown.

" What's wrong baa?", I asked.
"I no longer have a candy for you like yester years", he winked.

This made me giggle hard. Memories came streaming live when we both talked about the days when baa threw candies at us while returning from office. He would halt his bicycle, make a sharp whistle and we would run for those candies protruding from his shirt pocket. I couldn't run fast and each day would be the last to receive candies but he would make sure that he had one of them reserved for me.

As we sat together under the evening sky, I realised that it's in memories that we relive beautiful days. Time isn't favouring us today, but in our memories we live those bygone days everyday.

With a promise of buying him candies, I relived my childhood a little.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading between the lines

"Read between the lines",  I heard our professor say. We were in midst of a Victorian text. I looked at her point blank. She had spoken about something which I had no clue about. "Ma'am,  would you please elaborate? ",  I tried framing this sentence in my mind but my introverted  self overpowered my inquisitive soul like everytime. I hopelessly waited for an explanation. Ma'am started explaining about how beyond the surface meaning of any written text, there lay a wide plethora of meaning which wasn't explicitly stated. She talked about finding a void between the written words and our imagination, that void which shapes our interpretation. That explanation opened doors to my perception of reading a text. It wasn't that I had never considered about the possibilities of meanings that lay coated in words until then, but, what perhaps I lacked was to look for that void where I questioned the layers of meaning, where I put myself in those layers of wo...

What do you want to be?

While I was in my 10th standard, almost everyone I met wanted to know what I wanted to be. This question always perplexed me. From the lens of a fifteen year kid who was not yet sure of the changes which awaited in the near future, this question gave me nightmares. I would constantly sit by the mirror and ask myself, what actually would be my answer. My friends always had fancy answers at their disposal. They would confidently chirp whenever any one asked about it. What amused me most was, my friend who had no inkling to study Biology wanted to be a doctor and another friend who detested the idea of even cooking noodles, wanted to be a chef! But whenever they spoke about their wishes, they would always sound confident. And there I was, fumbling for words which refused to escape my lips. It was not until I entered Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya to do my plus two, I found my voice. The teachers there have a different way of viewing life. For the first time, I no longer felt the classroom...

"My love is enough for both of us"

"My love is enough for both of us", she often felt those words ring in her heart. She finally had understood that life wouldn't always follow her designs. That people are meant to leave but their memories won't. She often had wondered how someone could love her to such an extent when that person had always known that she wouldn't reciprocate those feelings. How could a person stand by her when she always acted as a fleeting shadow. She never had given hope for she knew the pain of dejection but he kept hoping like a hopeless vagabond. How she wished that he would some day hate her enough to let go. She devised ways to free him from this web, she acted cold, turned indifferent, did everything he detested and she finally saw some changes. It was a relief, he finally seemed to take hold of his life. She could see him grow responsible. He finally it seemed was learning to love himself. Phone calls died, meetings subsided, they become known strangers. All this while ...