When we have nothing much to write, we usually tend towards two basic things, one is nature and the second one is childhood. Both, in their unique way provide momentary respite from our self-induced ennui and boredom. To write about nature requires exceptional skills and a good knowledge. So the lesser mortals turn towards their childhoods, in a attempt to relive it as we did it then, and sip some more nectar, attach some more nostalgia with self serving imagination of the good old past. I, as a child, had always met with the feeling of other worldliness and wonder, when I used to see the pictures of the loved ones taken before my birth. Whatever we may call it, it was a feeling that it all existed when you didn't. Although a Hindu upbringing try to put things in perspective with you being somewhere else in your earlier birth, but those photographs were a proof that you are just new entry to the whole system. In my stupid imagination routine, I have wondered what it would be like when we die, will we hover over the skies and try to find out what every body felt about the loss (?), or just die out and be as non-existent as we were before our birth. I know that memories will last in the minds of certain people but it cant help but wonder at the exactitude of the childhood feeling of you being not there at some point in time, and the world was, as you saw in those picture, same and as good.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of a wedding in Moradabad, and I remember very vividly that it was all crowded and my mother was always leaving me with some old lady. When I ask about that wedding now, I am told that I was just over one at that time, but it is one of most clear of the childhood memories, the next clear one is not till I turn three, and then comes the school and a whole new world into picture. I wonder how some authors remember things with such exactness, with names and colors and flavors. I only remember the collections of memory, like a bunch with all the morning walks to company garden and a bunch with all the mosquito-filled nights. I have never thought what time and stuff means to me, but I know, although it feel like free flowing ,its like an arrest in a big prison. Except for some exceptional times, you never cross the same thing in the prison park, the same way the second time, but you can, with time, relate to the vicinities and identify them with smell, color and touch. Any attempt to trace back to the same old happy point, results in chaos and the knowledge that its not possible.
The first dream, or the most recurrent dream of childhood is quite vague and as I try to recall now, it happens to be a cold foggy early morning and our village house is attacked by some weird ghostlike people. I get out of my bed and go to the first floor and stand near the point where I can (over)see them but they cant see me. They roam and from my strategic position, I try to call my parents and grandmother to be alert, but no one listens to me. The monsters, after the inspection, go away. The later dreams involve face to face encounter and the sudden break of sleep and finding by mother nearby, and the versions where monster took faces of some of the deadly teachers and some of beautiful ones standing by me. Later in life, I have stopped dreaming, the sleep looks like a blink with the waking point mixed with the tension to go to work, and actually I have even tried to redream (my mother told me as a child that what you think just before your sleep come to you in your dream) the monster dream, but without success. Now dreams are an occasional affair and they are more convoluted, they don't follow a pattern and I am not a hero fighting monsters in house with beautiful teachers backing me.
