Recently went to attend the marriage of a friend of mine in a small city in Kerala called Calicut (or Kozhikode ) ... i had decided to travel alone in train (good time to read books/introspect was what i thought) . Anyways i finally landed up in Calicut (as i like to call it) after a journey of 20 hours ... actually i was landing up in Calicut after a journey of 15 years....
When i was a kid ( my parents were getting transferred every 4 yrs to another location at work) i had spent 4 yrs in Calicut ..that was between age 9-13 of my life ...so when i think of childhood .. this is where the rewind lands ... we lived in an apartment complex (rarity in those parts in early 90s) , lots of kids to play/hangout with , tht school , traveling by buses alone for first time in life , playing cricket / football in the play ground we had ... there were lot of memories ...
During the journey , i was reading this book called "Istanbul" by Orhan Pamuk , in which the author reminiscences about his childhood in Istanbul , so promised myself tht maybe i will just go and re-visit these places i last saw 15 yrs back ... a couple of times i had passed through this city , i was always tempted to those parts of the city i grew up in .. but never went ... infact i have never re-visited any place of my childhood or previous years ... thats something people who grew up in same place may not understand .. every time u shift ur base to a new place u leave lots of things behind and start afresh and then again leave it behind and move on .. thts what we did and i actually liked it .. its a bit sad . But again things are never same even if u stayed in same place as my friends tell me ... even if u don't physically move ... things around you will change
Anyways this time i was in Calicut the day before the wedding and i had reached much before even the wedding party had arrived .. so i checked in to the hotel and after debating internally whether to actually make the visit or just stay in the bed watching cricket on tv ... my friends were supposed to join me there in the morning called up to say they wud arrive by afternoon only ! so there u go .. i showered got ready and stepped into the heat ... it felt good to back in this place .. the sun ,the heat , the bustle .. the language ... the shops .. all so familiar ... locked away in a corner of your memory ... occasionally i wud see a building/landmark which i knew from childhood days... the hotel was located in a place i used to visit frequently earlier , so easily located the bus-stop and got into the correct bus which wud have taken me 'home' 15 yrs back ... now its another place, just an address .. took the ticket till last stop as i ddnt know from where i wud start my 'back to past' tour .. how much i wud cover ... there were so many places (2-3km radius tht kids of 10-12 yrs explore ) to see .. so many memories to revist ... before i knew it i was in familiar land .. things had definitely changed ... but heart warmed up whenever a familiar house , building came ... the bus was moving in a cruise mode (there were stops every 500m) finally reached the last stop ... it was bang opposite my School ... the school was located in a house/palace once owned by the erstwhile ruler of the place the Zamorins , the school had expanded with main building being the 'palace' like one , but most of the classrooms were in proper concrete buildings built nearby in same sprawling compound ... whenever i think of my school i always remember the huge building and big wide open space in front of the main building ...we used to play cricket there and scoring a boundary / hitting six then was very tough as it was really huge... So I got out of the bus and headed to the school .. it was a Sunday , so the gates were shut ... the walls which were huge and intimidating then were just my chest height now .. the playground looked pretty normal ... infact school was looking much smaller , cramped as opposed to a spacious sprawling palatial building tht was residing in my memory ... i somehow couldnt go in .. it was looking strange n different in someways unsettling .. anyways no one was around and the gate was closed ... i turned back and decided i shuld probably walk as sometimes i used to from school to home ... i knew a lot of shortcuts ... while walking on the main road .. i cud see a lot of such smaller roads i used to take as a kid , roads leading to some friend's house ... seemed familiar , but cudnt recall ... so i stuck to the main road as i was not sure whether i shud venture down those lanes ... after walking for 5 mins , the heat got better off me ... i hailed a rick and reached the area where i used to live earlier , got down and saw the video library there had become a VCD/DVD shop ! my barber shop was still there , so was the bakery and the grocery store , some things hadn't changed ... i walked to my apartment complex ... there was a security gaurd there ! What do i tell him ? My house address ? i used to know a lot of people there and almost all of them were locals who owned the flats surely there must be people i know over there still ... as i paused outside , the gaurd just got up and went out ... should i go in or not ? ... finally had a good look from outside ... took a walk down the road remembering the good old days .. flood of memories rushed by when i took in familiar sights the house nearby where cricket balls used to disappear if we hit a six from the playground (it was six and out as balls were tough to retrieve !) ... decided to check out the playground on the backside , wall on the other side was pretty low so cud see the apartments more clearly ... they looked different now with a different shade of paint ... i saw the playground of my childhood where we used to play cricket and at times soccer / badminton ... in my memories it is a sufficiently big ground ...but as i looked over the wall at tht ground suddenly things seemed to have changed just like my school .. the ground was so small ... it took a while for it properly sink in .... what had happened here ? what had changed ? How did it reduce in size ? why is it all different i wondered , got back to my hotel room without any further exploration ... then the obvious answer came to me .. nothing had changed .. it was just the perspective ... the boy who was looking at these things had grown... maybe thats how the world changes ... u just grow bigger !
13 comments:
Believe me nostalgia is better lived through with a set of friends. Collectively, reminiscence is a different experience altogether. I have a great set of school friends and we are still very much in touch. Every time we meet all we do is share school times. Much fun ensues.
@places growing smaller – never ceases to amaze me. I mean, sometimes the places look subjected to the machine in ‘Honey, I shrunk the kids’ …!
@“maybe thats how the world changes ... u just grow bigger” – cannot imagine better words to encapsulate it..! :)
nice one!
It is even more fun to do this, when u get together with ur old friends :p
Nice one...!
and do remember some of those places near those apartments myself..so helps me relate to them better :)
I guess we also did talk about this trip once sometime back...
It is a brave thing to actually go look at those places...places growing smaller and insignificant is something that I fear when visiting places of childhood...! Let me not get started here...
@ Abinav , Bharat
Thts another of my problems ... i have no idea where those kids/boys are .. the ones i grew up with during my childhood days .. never had this e-mail/gtalk thingy those days u know ... so never kept in touch .. letter writing was for girls !
@ Vaidya
it is scary dude ... maybe memories shuld remain the way it is .. believe me even though i saw the reality 6-7 months back .. by now tht is no more fresh .. when i think of those places , my childhood memory itself returns !
Lolz @ letter writing..!
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?
We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting
,
with reunion and with passing on
as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.
And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
:)
sums it up neatly ... ah those days !
Been through the kinda feeling you expressed through the post sometime back when the township where I lived for the first 12 years of life was abandoned and evacuated due to the naxalite issues in the remote areas of Chattisgarh. Think about it, you are lucky - you can go to the place where you grew up, I cant even do that.. My school, my house, my street where I picked up the cricket bat for the first time etc are not even there anymore.. Its weird..Its hard to fathom at times.. Friends of mine from school are disappeared in this seemingly 'small' world that I am hoping against hope to bump into them sometime.. But ya, you always cherish of those memories. They were so pure (guess thats the word, pure).
Nice post ...
I have lived close to 20 yrs of my life in the same place where I live today and the changes around the place never ceases to amaze me.
- I am not able to go for a peaceful walk for there is "Main Road" there now.
- The ice cream shop at the end of the road is now a Jockey showroom (!)
- The 'mottai maadi' of one of the houses [again @end of rood] where we played is now a Dominos Pizza - Cell one combo!
- The road gets packed with cars during festival season for there is a Nalli next road.
- Cannot take the same cycle route to school coz the roads r one way now!
I could go on and on ... But yeah, sometimes "development" sucks!
MJ - yeah, development sucks big time.
Problem started, I think, when man first asked 'Why?'
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