Where has gone my childhood?

‘Love all,’ father would say and start our daily quota of badminton at night in the front garden. I would pair with mother and father with my elder brother. The game would stretch to five setter most of the times. The winners would jump up in joy and the losers, heads down, would fold up the net and switch off the lights that were mounted from two bamboo poles that held the red net. The dinner after badminton was a simple meal of roti, cabbage curry and payesh done meticulously with dates jaggery. The sweet delicacy was enough to wipe out the bitterness of fight just an hour back. When we went back to our respective rooms after dinner the wintry fog would descend on the garden densely.

I would spend my days with kite. Right from morning to afternoon I was pre-occupied with kite flying. For me then, sky was the limit. I preferred to fly white kites; a self-proclaimed pacifist. But the rest of the fliers of Nutanpally would ignore my peace move. They would engage me with a kite-fight. I wound find out after a protracted battle that honours were shared evenly between peace and the war-mongers.

Relatives would gather at my grand-father’s house. Picnics were held under the jamrul tree on the northern bank of pond. The jamrul would shed all its leaves and look life-less in its multiple stick-like branches. The chorus song of ‘ Sheeter haoay laglo nachon…’ of my masis and mamas would give some life to the lone jamrul. The dayful of giggles and laughter made the sprawling field and the house come alive with a vibrance that otherwise lay dormant for the rest of the year.

On Sunday mornings there was “Rabindrasangeet Shikshar Asor” on Akshvani Kolkata. Konika Bannerjee would teach ‘ Ami marer sagor pari debo go… .’ I would pick up the song and sing. My parents would smile at me when I sang the song aloud sitting on the boundary wall of our garden dangling my legs sometimes slowly sometimes wildly. After the radio affair, I would go to Professor Dhruvo Tara Joshi’s Academy of Music to train in Classical music. In the evenings sometimes Goutam and Bappa would come. I would sing. They would listen.

After the music, it was time to hurry to Adhir da’s chop outlet at the corner of Naree Colony. Potato stuffed chops would get sizzled in warm mustard oil on a kodai and a unique aroma wafted; typical of chop. We would gorge on chop one after another in a crazy competition among us.

Like the cut-out kites childhood has vanished to a fog that came down dourly on the garden of our house at night after badminton decades back. It became distant and a fuzz like the winter morning. Like the Sheulis, the diggers of date trees to extract their heady juice, I, nay, we all sometimes like to go for a memory trip to peck at childhood.

It sometimes pays to look back rather than look forward.