I have always been terrible at remembering things. Things that are as recent as what dress my girlfriend wore today or what was it that I was getting mad an hour ago. But then when I go back and think about whether my memory is actually that bad, or I spend more time making them that these small details get lost on the process, I realize that though I might not be that great at remembering a lot of tiny details, I still very clearly remember snippets of my past, preserved as beautifully as possible. So as I rewind this reel of memories all the way to the start, the first memory I arrive at is with my 'grandmother’. I spent the first three years of my life with my grandmother. Both my parents were working, my father, as the principal of a school and my mother as a teacher. They didn’t have a house of their own back then, and with no nanny to take care of me, their next choice was to leave me under my grandmother's care. ‘Mummi’(mother) that’s what I have always called her. Children you know, have the strongest sense of grasping things. But what is even stronger than that is their ability to imitate. A research once suggested that children, when learning to speak, actually tend to imitate their mother's pitch, tone and speech. They constantly monitor their surroundings, and then imitating all that they see. This is the very reason why a family, where violence and fights are nothing out of the blue, has children whose life in the future; their relationships more often than not is a mirror image of their parent’s. They are highly likely to either imitate the oppressor or the victim.
Coming back to Mummi; the first instance of feeling that mother-son affection, the sense of being protected, of comfort and peace, for me was from her. Not once in those three years did she ever let me stray off of her sight. Her affection for me was so deep, that she would even take me with her to the washroom when she needed to relieve herself, fearing the worst might befall me if she let me out of her sight even for a single minute. I remember how she pampered me the most out of all my cousin s. To deny that my grandmother loved me a tad bit more than my cousins would be me not being true to them. But then, I loved it, and not once was I unhappy of the attention I received. It was that time when I didn't mind being special, being the center of attention. When I close my eyes trying to think about my first memory, a few fuzzy, blurry, yellow tinged snippets play before my eyes, almost out of focus but with a surprisingly clear sound. Our house (my grandparent’s house) was opposite to a government hospital. And adjacent to us, separated by just a narrow alley way lived my father’s aunt. In those small fragments of my memory, I recall my parents calling her ‘Chachi’. Something I picked up too (with minor changes that my grandmother asked me to incorporate) when I came of age where words would distinctly form and come out of my mouth. I was around two years old when my grandmother would let me roam around the vicinity of our house and the one that belonged to ‘Chachi Amma’ (Aunt-grandmother).
It was noon, perhaps; (I can’t visualise it all that clearly), when I stepped out of our house to go to ‘Chachi Amma’s’. Being just two years old, my ability to open the door by performing insane stunts like, jumping up to grab the handle of the door and swinging it open, or maybe linger there for a while as I enjoy the feeling of almost flying over the top of the world, was pretty much non-existent. So all I could do was stand before the door and shout in my squeaky little voice, “Chachi Amma, dwaja tol†(Aunt-grandmother, open the door), to which she would come out, pick me up and take me inside. Fun fact, my sense of smell was great when I was a kid and it would be at its best when I could feel that tingling sensation caused by black mustard seeds used in ‘kheere ka raita’. I remember playing outside my grandparent’s house, under the beating sun, as I picked up leaves and dropped them in a canal which passed right next to our house. They would float and then suddenly hide beneath the platform I was standing upon, to then emerge from the other side. After around an hour of searching big green leaves and dropping them into the canal, I was pretty much exhausted. I walked back home but before I could call out ‘Mummi’, I smelled something. It was very familiar, a scent that is etched in my memory like carvings on a stone. And so with my nose pointing up and a few sniffs I said instead, “Mummi, aaj kheere ka raita bana hai?†What proceeded this fragment of my memory is a short or maybe long incomprehensible blur.
Months passed, I guess or was it a year, it's hard to pin point time, especially when you are going back in it, through pieces of information you might very well have tampered to suit yourself. I recall I had a tricycle. Purple seat and handlebars, and pedals of the same colour. The main entrance of my grandparent's house opened to a lobby whose other two opposite ends led to two different rooms through a narrow aisle. The otherwise shy and timid fellow that I was, while on my tricycle I underwent a complete personality transformation. I would turn into this daredevil, who would whizz past the lobby, drift right on the edge of the aisle leading to the drawing room, saving the rear of my cycle from the washbasin by a hairlin, and then swoosh back to the other side. During all my Motocross stunts, I would see Mummi’s face gripped with horror, as she would stand frozen, not knowing what to do. I loved riding my tricycle. So much that I continued riding it till I was in the first grade. Until one fine day when I was testing its limit along with mine as I rode it downhill to a not so pleasant experience. The handle bar in my hand, as I felt the tricycle’s body ripping into shreds and trying to make me join the feat as I slid on the gravel face down. 'Ouch’. But then again, this memory is here because my love for my tricycle came into being when I experienced my first long distance scooter ride.
As I try to focus on the timeline of the events that happened in my life, I happen to see that almost each one of them (that I remember) are linked to the other through one thing or the other. I was older now and had started living with my parents, but my affection for Mummi hadn’t diminished one bit. I would still cry my eyes out when she would return back to our place at Haldwani, from where we were living. She would pretend going to the market to get some medicines for her and ask me to wait in our home at Ranikhet, until she returns. And like any child of four or five, I would sit at our porch waiting for her to return to me. And when she wouldn’t I would cry, scream and tell my parents and Mummi as well (on the phone) that they are all liars and I hate them. I would sit on my bed and cry till I fell asleep. But this is not the memory I was talking about. The one I hold dearly is my first scooter ride all the way from my parent’s place at Ranikhet to my grandmother’s place at Haldwani. My father as we reached closer to our destination asked me to stand in front of him, on the scooter. He then placed my hands on each of his, and my mother watched all this from the back, anxious about me and a little unsure of my father’s action. We resumed the journey once again and I felt a rush of emotions surging inside my tiny body. With the wind rushing past me, caressing my cheeks, I inhaled a deep, long breath. The sky was overcast and it wasn't long before the rain started to pour down on us. The same air that felt like the fingers of a lover, now laiden with rain drops felt like little stones being hit on my face. But did that matter to me more than watching the entire world rush towards me and then away? Nope. In that brief moment of delight, I heard a sound. It was deep and singing a song completely off tune, but there was this sense of being carefree, with not a single worry in the world, and even more, the feeling of enjoying the moment. Somethings, when I think about it now seems lost in that very same voice. It was my father singing, like us kids, with no fear or shame. He sang like the song was a part of him, and despite his being off tune we all tagged along, “Thande thande pani se nahana chahiye…. Gana aae ya na aae, gana chahiye.†(We should shower with cold water... We should sing even if we don't know how to.)