MEMORIES

As I sat and thought about the days that I had spent at the house where my dad grew, I could distinctly smell the betel leaves that my uncle used to collect from the creepers and arrange them in bundles of 25 according to sizes for sale in the market. The house was, and I say was because it sadly does not exist today, located in a valley in our village where we had moved from Mumbai. My father says that his father had built the house, in which my grandfather lived with his wife and ten kids (may be all ten did not reside in that house at the same time). The grandfather and grandmother passed away, the kids grew up, got married and moved to different places. One of my father’s brothers continued to live in that house with his family. Now thanks to the advent of a special economy zone, the land and house has been confiscated for industrial development. The once beautiful house is now just a ruin – all that remains of the house are memories. Memories of a big meal with the family members, the time spent with my grandmother, the sound of crickets during the night, the animals raised in the household, the fields, the trees, the cashew-nut seeds that my grandmother used to roast and give us, loafing around in the hills with my cousins, taking bath in the open with eyes burning from the smoke from the hearth, the cheerful neighbourhood and the bed that my grandmother used to sleep on. The bed was not actually a bed, but a platform on inside the hall on which she used to sleep - the last time I visited my uncle at that house, I had slept on that bed. Now I will never get to see that house or live those moments.

There are so many places in which we spend moments of life sharing experiences and emotions with people. But as time progresses, those moments, experiences and emotions, and those people pass by. In some instance, those places also fade away into memories. Most of us would now be sitting back during our daily routine taking a moment to recollect those memories of our childhood, of our friends, of the neighbourhood where we played with the friends, of our school, of our teachers, of our classmates, of our games, of the exams, of the fun and of the journeys. Then we would smile and sigh, and move on with our life to create more memories for another day.