Back to my old den...

Hey guys! Here I am, back after a gap of over a month now. Let’s start off with a small question for all of u; How strong are ur memories of the time when u were about 3-4 years of age? If u r’nt an elephant then I believe that all u can recollect are a few broken pieces of isolated events that were either too good or too scary on ur part. And if ur parents keep telling u abt ur childhood then it would be slightly better than what I mentioned above. Now just think what would happen if suddenly u r taken to that time again & everything comes before u as it used to be before! No I’m not going to give a lecture on a time machine but am going to relate to u how I felt when just this happened to me, when I went to Shillong last week.

Although I was born at Calcutta, Shillong is the place where I spent the first 6 years of my life. After leaving the place I never got a chance to visit it again until last week. My memories about Shillong were too sweet because I enjoyed the warmth & beauty of the wonderful place. The people around me were great and life was fun, coz I spent very little time of those years in school, yet the school too was like that of a picnic spot where even studying was fun. Our house, besides a thin stream of water flowing by a spring with a small cement bridge to cross it, had its picture firmly imprinted in my mind. My best friend then, Kutu & our games of playing Ram & Lakshman in the Ramayan(the most famous T.V. serial then) were very much in my agenda of thoughts when we left for Shillong from Guwahati last Tuesday. The pine jungle close to our house had a graveyard & even that looked scenic to me then, coz I was never told what were burnt there. I could remember a lot of things but I kept feeling restless coz every bit of memory was blurred & the only thing that I remembered clearly was the Elephant falls which was a regular picnic spot for the families which resided nearby including ours.

So we decided to go to the Elephant falls first & then move on to our old house. As there was no plan for a night halt so we could visit limited places. Everyone of our family were excited about the trip. We reached the spot & here we got our first shock. The falls which used to be broad & so natural has now turned into a cluster of narrow streams falling from a height. Even the altitude looked less than before as everything had been concreted & the natural touch was difficult to find. I kept wondering how could they limit the flow of the vociferous waters into a rather meek spring. Needless to say it disappointed me, yet I loved being there just because I could be there again! We quickly moved on & I was eager to enter the city. What I saw, at first, made me feel that I was never a part of the same city before. It looked to me like a well developed city with all facilities starting from pubs to shopping malls! People wearing the most mod outfits & roads full of expensive vehicles. Precisely the coziness of Shillong was difficult to make out. Finally I managed to spot something that mapped with my remembrance. The buses there have a frontal projection like trucks & a characteristic chimney outlet, letting the smoke out skywards on the front panel. There used to be a Police bazaar which was still there but in a new avatar. Traffic rules seemed to be too stringent as a traffic police almost fined our driver for spending just abt 30 secs in a crossing to decide which way to go.

Everything looked different but still I felt that this was a very known place to me. I tried to remember things about places that apparently had been a part of my daily life some time back, but could do little to soothe myself. Finally after some toil, with the help of some of the localites we reached the house where we used to live. Earlier the road from Umpling bus stand to our house used to be a road of boulders & mud, on which probably only my Dad’s lambretta could move. But now our car had no problems reaching our old house & it has become a bus route now. On the way my Mother showed me our regular grocery shop & houses of people who were close to us then, sadly none of our known ones stayed in Shillong anymore. I also had a glimpse of my sister’s school & the way to my school. I quickly recollected a scene of me walking to my school with a raincoat on along with my mother with an umbrella which was anything but manageable. Shillong used to be a place with over six months of rains a year. I say ‘used to’ coz we hear, now that has changed drastically.

As we reached our house, everything in my mind started to get organized together & the colourless & jigsawed picture started to get prominent. A lot of things weren’t the same, yet I had absolutely no problems in identifying them. The spring was still there, our garden space where my parents used to grow great flowers had been cemented to accommodate a car. The pine forest hardly had an existence & the graveyard had been abandoned even by the corpses. A middle aged person was there outside & as my father told him that we used to stay there 16 years ago, he welcomed us to the house. He turned out to be a Bengali scientist & said that he’d been staying in that house since we had left the place. What I was excited about was that I could get a glimpse of the house again & I had a look at the bedrooms & the kitchen. The drawing/dining room reminded me the position of our old Sonodyne B/W TV & the dining table. The verandah outside used to be the playground of me & Kutu. Time & again our cricket ball used to fall in the spring & so we had a special stick with a net to get the ball back.

So many other thoughts about my life then, filled my mind & I was just so excited. No one to meet though as almost all there had transferable jobs there, like my father & sooner or later they had left. I got Kutu’s father’s phone no. & I don’t know if I’ll ever call him. I wanted to stay back & examine every tit bit of that area. I wanted to see my school again & visit the most beautiful church in Shillong, I wanted to go to the cinema halls called Salty & Rhino where I loved to watch films, and what were my films? The posters of the movies that hung outside. My neighbours used to take me there(walking distance) & return with me satisfied of having seen an Abitabh movie in a flat 20 minutes time! I wanted to visit the grocery shop owner, Pal uncle who used to give me a chiclets packet for free every time I visited his shop with my parents. But time was playing the spoilsport & we had to Shillong before it was dark. So after taking a couple of snaps of our old house we bid goodbye to our old den & headed our way back to guwahati.

I still fancy about being in Shillong for ever. What if we’d stayed there, what if we had never left the place! Yes after being in Shillong again I miss it again, but when I think of what I’ve received from all the places where I’ve stayed after Shillong then I feel I may be asking for too much. It’s still a great place to be but probably, God allotted just six years of my life to Shillong, rest is history!