A trip down the memory lane..Sankrida

Along the hustle and bustle of the city life, there is a small part of me which stays with the calming memories of my village visits. My dad was a village boy, from traditional mud walls coated with gobar to traditional lakdi chulha, we had it all in our home back there.

Every year I try to visit it at least once, and it always hits me, the perception of same house changed over the years. Now we don’t stay back for night stays, but my mom tells me in my younger years we used to perch there for as long as months together.

I don’t have the full length memory, but now and then few bits and pieces of them resurfaces. Jotting down a few so I have space freed for more.

I remember being so small that a 4 feet water storage tank was my swimming pool, where my dad taught me swimming and I practiced all sorts of move, including a shallow dive at the over head partition, sectioning the tank from private bath chamber to outer collection chamber. Now I can barely fit in length wise in the same tank.

The tank was also out freezer of sorts, many a kgs of mangoes and watermelon were made refreshingly cool by keeping them submerged in the water. What more, no one weighted the mangoes those days, we would have bucket loads of it and us children would come and gobble one up whenever we felt even tiny bit hungry.

I remember, tea being prepared in batches on kerosene stove by my mom and aunt, for all the people visiting. It was poured into kettle to be able to serve warm while the next batch was being prepared. Ah the old days, when kettle was actually used not just a home décor motif.

The biscuits were bought and stored in big tins, the variety being coconut biscuits or glucose. Naturally, I haven’t still been able to develop a taste outside them. Before you start thinking, yes I drank tea in the village, milk was scarce for so many guests, even the tea was made with milk powder.

Milk powder was actually a cossetted commodity with us children, if we didn’t pester mom much and the ration permitted, we could get to eat scoops of it or lick the final scrape from the can, carefully so as to not cut ourselves at the rim.

Then there were the sweaty summer nights, we would have two rope cots in the outer-middle courtyards(yes, we had three!!), one creaky table fan barely reducing the heat, mosquitoes buzzing around, gazing away at the star studded night. Sometimes the fireflies would hover around, looking back that is what I miss the most. The beautiful bugs with twinkly lights were sheer magic for us kids.

These memories are not continuous, they burst forth during a conversation or looking at an object, to reminisce and feel blessed for that tiny moment of what was..