Nostalgia, triggers a strange churning in our hearts. It comes in various colours, shapes, sizes and smells and invariably changes the way we see the world around us just like faint mountain sun coming out after a heavy downpour. Feeble, mild, it’s almost as if it wasn’t for real and yet your eyes can see vividly tiny droplets of water on leaves shining like small pearls, sunrays falling on your skin, giving an impression of seamlessly diluting your spirit and merging it with the surrounding. A slow diffusion process.
Strange, that after all these years of living away from dehra, i still have so much of affinity, sweet and bitter nostalgia and remembered almost all the by lanes and alleys of that beautiful valley town. I remember pedalling the school in cold mornings with numb hands with the sole purpose of reaching the school early and playing football with a tennis ball in our makeshift football ground, so much for carpe diem. I remember preparing the list of latest bollywood and pop songs to record in a blank T Series audio cassette, with sony cassettes reserved for popular English songs of those times, mostly by gaudy, popular boy bands. I played these songs every morning, at full volume, with school, studies, tuitions they were my only panacea, won’t be able to withstand them today.
Those evenings at Rajpur road, aimlessly following girls after tuitions. Those beautiful fascinating faces will be part of me forever, they are images that no guy just in his teens forgets. I am no mills and boon kinda writer nor marquez, so can’t emphasize what those faces mean to me. I guess i just have to leave it there, relying on a few aimless souls just like me to empathize.
I see my past in blue. Halka sa blue, just like mussorie , its just as if those mountains were witness to everything that happened and in their backdrop my life just moved, from lying in my school ground in bright afternoons to loitering in the recess with arms around ‘bestest’ friends, from watching shanti, junon and swabhimaan in succession to falling asleep dead tired only after this daily ritual, balla leke gali main nikal sonu monu ke ghar ja unko cricket ke liye bulane se lekar buaji ka mujhe gusse se bhaga dene tak. They were there, witnessing every moment of my life.
- to be continued
