When I was around five or six… I lived in santiniketan for a while. There I was … playing all afternoon right in the heart of nature. My grandfather has a big house there. My mother and I lived with him for a while.
Adjoining the house was a big garden, which had five guava trees itself. There was this one tree that I found was within my reach a I would scale up the branches and sit there perched on one of the branches have a nice time playing with the caterpillars. They were furry and cute. Yes, they were furry caterpillars. At the back of the garden there was a wood-apple tree and below it was a particular type of soil that is more traditionally found closer to rivers. It was ideal for making clay models, but unfortunately I lacked the necessary artistic finesse to make use of it in the proper manner so I made content with digging holes into it and building my own little micro-wells. Since the soil was of a special type it wouldn’t let water seep through it… so I would bring water from the kitchen and manually fill my pseudo-wells. On one such occasion when I was playing outside there were these weird rustling sounds it the trees. When I looked up I saw that the old garden had been attacked by a whole herd of monkeys. They jumped across our garden into the neighbours’ garden and a few minutes later I saw something that I would never forget. The entire group of monkeys each bearing something in their hands…papayas, brinjals, gourds, mangoes, and an assortment of fruits…they queued up in one straight line on the roof of a neighboring house and jumped away and soon the entire group had vanished leaving us all awestruck.
One of my neighbours had two children. A daughter who was about my age a son who was younger. The daughter, Mampi, was my best friend. Everyday I would wait for her to return from school and then she would come over and we would play together. One day her brother, papayi, brought home a small tortoise. We put it in a big plastic vessel a filled it with water. He had even gathered some loose pieces of marble from somewhere and made a sort of a small recluse for the tortoise within the vessel. He had even named it, I don’t remember the name. I would help my grandfather, who was very very strict, grow vegetables in his beloved garden and I would particularly enjoy cutting off the loosened leaves of the onions. I would water the plants… dig the soils around them to help the water percolate into the ground, and sometimes even talk to them. I rarely went out anywhere. Anyplace out of the garden was out of bounds for me. But I was content with what I had, after all what more does a six-year-old need? After six months we returned to Calcutta and I think this is where my conscious memory begins.
This is when I stopped being a child.
This is when I grew up… forever.
I last visited santiniketan 2 years back after over ten years since I left the place. I did meet mampi briefly, she is in college now, moves around the entire place on her bicycle I didn’t get to speak to her or rather I didn’t know what to say to her. Life becomes so much more complicated when we grow up, there are so many questions, so much that is not understood, so much that is unsaid, so much that we rather not know, so much we rather not say.
When I returned to Calcutta I had to repeat that year. I was kind of glad. I had strong a strong dislike towards the people of the previous batch, possibly because they were associated with a time that I’d rather forget. And I was a year younger to all of them.
Anyway re-joining Ashok Hall was a new beginning to me, or at least I thought it was. I distinctly remember the first day of school that year. I was early to class with a lot of time to spare before assembly, so I entered my classroom and sat at a random seat, suddenly a girl came up to me and said
“Hey you are sitting where I do”
“Oh, im sorry”, I moved to another seat.
“New to the school?” she asked. I didn’t know what to say.
“Yes”, I said. And that’s when it all began; I learnt that I’d rather lie than having to answer their questions. I was seven then, but I still feel the same way.
I don’t remember who the girl was but I remember that we had become friends. I did have a few ‘friends’ from my previous batch, but they would not talk to me anymore, they pretended not to know me. They thought I had failed class one, I let them think so.