An Ode to Piku Mama

Part VI of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Piku Mama, a lovely soul, became Arin’s brother figure for the time he sojourned at the Trishul Park wonderland. For only a year. Back in the year 1986-87.

Arin’s life seemed to take on a fascinating turn just by meeting Piku Mama on the first day at the Saha family’s dormitory, where he went visiting off and on; sometimes to watch Chitrahaar, Udaan, Malgudi Days, Katha Sagar on Doordarshan, or simply to browse through the tabloid-like, image-heavy Mayapuri, Manohar Kahaniyan, and Filmi Duniya Hindi magazines Mrs. Saha, former Bengali cinema actress, acted with Uttam Kumar as his sister in a 1969 movie, voraciously read every week without fail, never missing every issue that came out.

When Mrs Saha was not cooking, she read the popular Mayapuri most lovingly; even holding it in her hands, reading while tackling in the kaṛā'i (cauldron) with a steel khunti (flat-bladed ladle) the Drumsticks curry she cooked often, soaked in a lush golden mustard sauce the flavourful aroma of which filled the house, while her husband Mr. Saha, an Army man, strict in a certain sense but not too lenient, and disciplined as they usual are, took it all easy on a Sunday, doing a little bit of gardening out in the backyard. Watering the maturing shoots of tomatoes, green chilies, even gazing at the drumstick tree that has grown so tall, with lots of drumsticks hanging from its many branches, etc. Plucking out shrubs and weeds of multifarious kinds that grew incorrigibly along the periphery of their moderately sized backyard garden. Their school-going son, Raja, ministered to Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny while doing his homework, his books spread out on the bedroom floor.

And Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s younger brother and Raja’s own Mama, took off on his oil painting expeditions on the veranda adjoining the kitchenette, holding an oval-shaped paint palette in his left hand and using brush strokes on the canvas with a thick-bristled paintbrush (probably made from some animal hair) in his right. Wearing his trademark lungi and a plain white Sando banian, he painted with a childlike obsessive passion. Dark, curly hair grew like a veritable rainforest, softly aglow beneath the white vest he wore. His concentration was so deep on the canvas board on which he painted for several days together, emphasizing specific areas of his painting, which, he said, is still ‘under construction,’ with rapid but brief brush strokes that he probably didn’t hear the doorbell ring twice and Arin coming in at 4 o'clock in the evening to the veranda to fool around with him and Raja around the Saha household until 6pm. Arin suggested that a Picasso or a Leonardo da Vinci was surely in the making this evening. Piku Mama smiled broadly, liking the allusion to the painting greats, and with a laugh said, “Yes, it’s a Piku da Vinci!”

Roxy yapped away in the backyard garden while little Binky the bunny hopped around looking for a taproot of a carrot to nibble on. Wise old Mithu Pakhi kept saying when she saw Arin approach, 

“Hel…louwww…! Greetings from my cage!”

“Thank you, Mithu Pakhi. How are you? Kemon acho?” said Arin.

“Awlright! Awlright! Awlright...!” replied Mithu, teasingly.

And then again she said,"Bhalo... Bhalo... Bhalo...!" (I am good).

Even before Piku Mama talked about being an amateur creative visual artist, Arin intuitively knew the man, several years his senior, whom he was meeting for the first time, could be broadly defined as an artist engaged, right from school age, in fine arts. Maybe associated with painting, or authorship in an academic field, as Arin noticed Piku Mama’s artist-like long, elegant and graceful fingers that could only be at best be described as someone who is morally and mentally invested in creative pursuit of the arts, such as painting, and that he liked to live—as he related to Arin later during the long course of his sojourn at his sister’s house—in a sort of creative zone of his own at his traditionally, old-world house back in Kolkata, a heritage city which was (is) perhaps more splendidly cultural, and intellectually emotional in the eighties.

For Piku Mama, however, the kind of conscientious artist he was, with a paintbrush that creates marvellous wonders on the canvas, no put-on perfectionism perspective (that even in those days people lectured about every so often, and still do unsparingly) or self-imposed idealism on himself to show the world how hollowly idealistic he was would never do. Just the normal qualities that his friends and relatives around him appreciated—of being simple, polite, with wonderful prosocial behaviour, and tranquil grace that charms anyone who knows him socially had made the man Arin still considers himself more than fortunate, no less, to come into contact with. Piku Mama was truly one of a kind.

--∞--

Arin had been overcome, as he realized many years afterwards, simply with the unrelenting effluxion of time running so fast and that the universal truth in the fact that good things don’t last forever, which had placed on someone like Piku Mama—the truly benevolent person, malleable to a fault—maybe also as nostalgically inclined as Arin, an unexpected excess of denial probably coming from someone else, say Mrs. Saha, maybe something on a sudden whim, exhorting her brother to desist from continuing the cheerful camaraderie with Arin, and this actuality had moulded itself to situate his trusting teenager’s soul permanently in a different direction in life: a life of never-ending nostalgic longing for that lone year of the 1980s.

A continuity of time that never liked to pause or look back, not once, not ever again. Perhaps it was an obstinate churn of History, whose irreversible progress is generally understood among those coming of age—especially Arin, Raja, or, to some extent, of older age, Piku Mama himself—that it never forgets or obscures its own absolute ‘situatedness’ in the centre of all things past and present, except to persist wheeling onward, regardless of life's encumbrances we human folks face. Yet, during its creation and for the first time at the delightful Trishul Park dormitory of the Sahas, which continued to have its three resident pets: Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny, time routinely chose to forego the pleasure of placing it in its nostalgic canon and conveniently forgetting it forever after. For time itself, its inevitable succession from the past had always been a festering necessity as it moved forward through the paltry convolutions of human hopes and desires, which are ruined beyond salvation anyway. Nothing else mattered. No one can conquer time or silence its ticking clock, so live deferentially with the present day going by while we lose ourselves in fading history. Time will yet move on.

But Arin grew unwilling to succumb to time’s forgetfulness, as it were; he jogged his memory from time to time to reflect on the past about that particular point of his life, as he had always been doing and overdoing sometimes, no matter what time had granted him for being so nostalgically inclined to the good old days and the old-world grace. For Arin, however, the past is the future. Period.

(To be continued…)
(End of part VI)

By Arindam Moulick

Memories of Lost Year

Part V of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Arin’s mind grew into a veritable museum of memories. Verdant with his vivid longing for the magical span of twelve successive months between the magical years of 1986 and '87, when Piku Mama, Raja, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Saha, were staying in a Trishul Park dormitory, not very far from Arin's.

A wistful yearning for the distant past drives him to anthologize every little memory he remembers. Memories that may be faded but never forgotten. As though wanting to revive that particular moment in his personal history that would evoke a beguiling sense of nostalgia for what used to be back in the neon-lit late eighties, he likes orienting himself towards the good old nineteen-eighties era chock-a-block with personal associations, one among them being the charming Saha family, and Piku Mama in particular.

While being a sentimental person, emotionally captive to the faint echoes of what once was, Arin replays those lost moments. As though attuned to an endless, opiate loop of an old saga of songs his heart loved to sing while being firmly rooted in the same home life of the distant, unforgotten yesteryears he wouldn’t forsake for anything—leave alone any suggestion that the fountain of eternal nostalgia had all but dried up. Without pretending, however, that all had faded into a faraway, forgettable oblivion and nothing was left behind, so forget about it. Nope! He still likes to stick to the art of strolling down memory lane, preferring to be a loner in this regard, choosing solitude over any external validation, purely for the reasons of necessary introspection.

Those earliest memories, which now may ring as old and ancient, long-forgotten, left in obscurity or something of that nature, have been encoded in his living cells that formed part of his genetic machinery, so to speak; that is, whenever he took a stroll along this familiar pathway edged by the double-storied dormitories to the remembrances meadows of the 1980s Trishul Park, or even writing about it or relating with someone close now and then, as those boyhood time tales are still raw and has always been relevant to his way of life, he remembers everything at a moment’s notice, recalling every element in photographic detail, as if verbatim, word for word, scene for scene—those absolutely life-changing, simple but magical experiences still count as a throwback as time moved forward becoming his life’s first-loves collected in an imaginary melodious album of Alwal’s ‘greatest hits’ reminiscences, liberally complemented by an inherently deep feeling of nostalgic yearning for that wonderful lone year to come back in Arin’s life.

Arin can still vividly recall a major part of his earliest, seemingly infallible, childhood memories: dates, names, faces, voices, sights, and sounds of that gone world that, every so often, rise in his mind’s eye like the gentle embrace of a warm, golden sunrise. The shape of the chin or the colour of the eyes; the nod of the head or the smile on the face. Every little happening. Nothing malleable or fictional, just purely realistic to the iota.

So could he get on with his life as if those things no longer existed? Nah, he couldn’t; he carried them in his heart and mind through all these years, decades of deep longing. Memories may be lost, but never erased. As far as his personal experiences are concerned, his hippocampal ‘memory retrieval’ has remained strong. Up till now, at least. He hopes it continues, as long as it takes.

But Arin could not, could he, act as if nothing would trouble him anymore if he distanced himself from those slow-paced, good old days that brought so much joy worth a lifetime. What could have happened, really, had he done so? (Maybe nothing, and past the realm of your constantly longing heart, it ceases to remain validly important, perhaps.) Or as if he could stay the same, unchanged and unaffected by the kind of friendship he had cherished and nurtured over the childhood years, somehow learning to finally let go of it when the era of the 1990s came as another promising anchor in his life. Na! He still will not forget and will definitely not. (And nobody is asking him to; he knows). While it must be said that holding on to the comfort of memories of old lost friends, Arin went ahead and made new ones: But yet, his heart was sombrely heavy with an unspoken weight of emotions as though everything had started to fall apart as he felt immensely saddened when Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn had come to an end… A silent weight pressed against his ever-longing heart for the old times and, with the earlier era ending, partly in 1987 when Piku Mama left and partly in 1988 when Raju (Rajveer), on account of his father’s posting, had to leave Trishul Park forever, Arin made new friends, reluctantly. Only in 1990, when the new era (decade) had just settled in, and new friends arrived in the form of Subramanium Strong, Bhale and Satish Gupta, did Arin stumble upon a little solace. That was hopeful enough for this solo rider of nostalgia.

--∞--

That was a really long time ago, and things are not exactly in the nature of memories smudged beyond recall, an imbroglio of sad thoughts that torment night and day, and the hurried deception of touchy-feely what-if scenarios become definite—all these would have to get a silent move on, he supposed to have understood. And Arin finally resolved (with a heavy sigh, not wanting to let go even then: not even a fraction of those nostalgic days) that things would perhaps look after themselves while he went to spend some of the time he got on Earth. Such a thing was enormously difficult to think through and carry on.

Nostalgic thoughts remain, however. No matter where you go, they lurk deep in those corners of your heart. They could strike you in a good way, as those days lift him up every time he pictures Piku Mama, Raja, and Saha uncle and aunty and their collection of animal companions awake and astir in their dormitory back in the late '80s, in the Trishul Park. That’s how it was, beautiful and a heart full of longing.

Arin still remembers that year as the year of life transition, a final reckoning with family and friends as he explored close personal relationships, and quiet realizations that made him see certain things in a clearer light, self-adjusting to soften his presence while navigating the complexities of life, which was about tending to the little things, even if the objects of your admiration and affection disappeared at a distant time in the past. By the end of that year of Piku Mama’s sojourn with the Sahas, tiny mini-waves of grief poured from the heart like a mountain stream; the brain functioned in isolation of itself: a little too much to think normally, as Piku Mama began his departure from Alwal. Arin bore it as an acceptance of destiny, learning there and then the subtle art of letting go, without, of course, fully understanding yet how much it takes to cultivate discernment. If that is too much to deal with, he felt he still had his whole life ahead of him, possibly remaining friendless or having some friends. Just as beloved Rajveer (Raju) made a huge impact during most of Arin’s childhood years in the ‘80s, Piku Mama, for a brief year, had similarly made a lasting impression.

(To be continued…)

(End of part V)

By Arindam Moulick

Roxy, Mithu and Binky

Part IV of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Keeping pet dogs was not uncommon, but there were very few at Trishul Park dormitories, kept safely harboured in their owners’ indoor environments, chained outside by the foyer, or taken out for a stroll. Even, there were hardly any scavenging pariah strays that roamed around the parkland.

One or two ferals were free-roaming, but that’s about the size of their population in the huge, wide-open, windy cantonment area. The strays were almost always shooed away, not mistreated, from afar in mock aggression, before they ever got a chance to bite! Or, feeling sorry with one's heart sinking or something, someone would toss some food and walk away. Cats were hardly seen around.

Labrador Retrievers to German Shepherds, and Pomeranians to fox-like, small-breed Pekingese Shih Tzus—these were the favoured breeds the Trishul Park denizens liked to own. Especially the last one, the so-called toy-dog species, which Mr. and Mrs. Saha started calling Roxy and got stowed away on the open veranda at the back, where it had its own boxy den, which it used only at night. Arin didn’t ask where it actually came from, what breed it was, except noticing that the hairy little thing seemed inscrutably put out by something or other that no one had quite understood its purportedly clangourous behaviour, including the somewhat breed-conscious Sahas.

Nothing seemed right or ‘working’ for this whining ogre. Food, the place, the atmosphere, and the daily evening strolls out in the bushes apparently did not meet the expectations of this hairy, new, showy piece of Canis familiaris in the Saha home, which was kind of close to being kiddingly called a small zoological household.

Roxy continually complained, tending not to get along well with people, as if it always smelled a rat. Outsiders or guests who dropped by fared worst. Yapping away night and day, it seemed to us, was its best manner of communication, noisy and very persistent; no matter how much dog food it was given, it would yap, and yap, and yap, as if everything depended on its contestable yapping and nothing else mattered. Else it's doggy world, as it knew it in its one-feet height, might cease to exist. Yapping shrilly was its innate specialty; the Sahas had no choice other than to live by it, literally. Perhaps more and more yapping helps it understand the world through its beady eyes, which were permanently hidden by copious pelt of hair falling from above his smallish, hairy head and all over its face, and unhelpfully, poor thing, it can’t dodge the falling hair away to the side by aiming strong puffs of air to its face — “like these humans around here, oh so towering these people are, have a habit of doing so easily for themselves, I’ve noticed many times.” (Soon, Mrs. Saha would give it the haircut it needs.) Arin and, to some extent, Piku Mama, resolved that there’s something constitutionally wrong with this sassy pooch and left it to its own devices out in the backyard garden where it roamed about untethered. And as usual, it continued its yapping while it roamed.

That may be true, but these domesticated hounds, in their tail-wagging happiness, seemed to make exceptional watchdogs for families who preferred them not so much for security reasons but merely as lifestyle-oriented animal companions, as these friendly bowwows or powwows enjoyed human care in the roomy dormitories and open backyards. With a lot to go on with the humans, such as loyal companionship, etc., they would squeal in lively delight. Nothing, no place, could be better than the ones they found themselves in, in the open, wind-swept green acres of Trishul Park, where the domesticated singles happily thrived.

They thrived, of course, with no bone to pick with those who owned them. Sometimes, hell did, however, break loose like a runaway thunderstorm if they happened to spot any neighbouring dog loitering around in the vicinity, or, perish the thought, if they caught sight of a plump, delicious-looking bunny rabbit living next door, down the lane, not too far away, just a hop, skip and jump and it’ll be there before anyone knows it, the animal chemical smell being too strong for them to resist having a go at it. Such contingencies occurred nowhere, at least not that the pet lovers were cognizant of.

--∞--

Mercifully, no house dog ever could, just like that, have a go at a neighbouring bunny Rabbit or any other dog of its own species as food. But stray dogs from outside the Park may have had other ideas!

For instance, Mr. and Mrs. Roy’s local lanky dingo named Goldie, who may or may not have harboured any such ill intentions. Or, for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s spiky little Pomeranian yap-yap doggie named Roxy. In the grand scheme of things, every creature behaved well within its limits, except that they barked often—out of their primal instinct, of course—and that was fairly frequently.

However, only once did Arin, Rajveer (Raju), Rinku (Raj Kumar), Ganeshilal, Tinda, and possibly even Rajesh, who were playing a friendly cricket match, accidentally witness an act of cannibalistic behaviour by a roaming feral dog that, while loitering around the cricket ground, happened upon a carcass of a dead stray dog lying on its flank. Flies buzzed furiously around the carcass as the dead dog’s entrails spread all over the grassy pasture, which was by the Trishul Park’s one of many inner roads: this was the route that went straight ahead via the Jhula Park on the left, leading up all the way to the old railway bridge to the east across which lay the great pastoral range of the gorgeous Sub-Arean county, as they played cricket on the open, windy meadows.

How the feral dog seized and tore away the skin of the dead dog to consume its flesh! Wild with fury, as if it were! A dog-eat-dog grotesqueness that all of them unconsciously placed their hands in their armpits while they stood still to watch the National Geographic in real-life action, dumbfounded and struck equally by the animalistic ferocity of the flagrant scene unfolding right in front of them. The feral dog was not really chewing much; it swallowed the decaying flesh in great dripping chunks, in large gory lumps, crushing bones and slurping maggot-infested dark blackish-reddish blood spread out like cold molten lava, as quickly as possible—just in case an aggressive rogue dog might suddenly run in and scavenge it all away—even as the thick, whitish, slimy saliva clung unobtrusively, forming intricate patterns to the sides of its ravenously hungry mouth tearing and ripping apart, sinking its teeth into the shanks of the dead dog, and which kept having a go, in repeated fierceness of primal hunger, at the smelly, putrid dog meat.

Civic workers arrived soon after and shooed the cannibalistic scavenger away. It went off running across the open ground, positively disgruntled. Two of the three sanitation workers stood aside and talked among themselves for several minutes as they wore rubber gloves and cloth masks, probably weighing options on how best to remove the dead animal's body: whether to drag it or haul it. Or torch it by pouring kerosene over it. Dragging is out of the question. Hauling is best, they decided. By carefully hauling the large carcass, which had probably died due to some extreme infection, one of them held its hind legs. The other propped the dog’s head up using a metal rope sling tied to it and carried it off. The innards and offal slid down heavily as they expertly stepped towards their waiting dump truck and hurled it steadily over onto the truck bed. One of the men took care to spread white bleaching and lime powder over the place where the dead dog had perished. Like a broad expanse of white snow, that section of ground had appeared, intended to disinfect the spot and eliminate foul odours.

--∞--

A Parrot That Talked:
Others kept an Indian parakeet—rarely, though—as a pet in a cage.

Little wonder the green parrot started mimicking basic human speech and tone, beginning with grunts and advancing into full-blown outpourings of a discourse that amazed everyone. It spoke a smattering of Hindi, Bengali, and English.

None could tell what had become of the 19/4, Trishul Park’s famous golden-speech parrot that Mr. and Mrs. Saha kept as not so much as merely a house pet but as a useful minder of the Saha household. Arin and Raju personally knew the caged bird. Mithu Pakhi, it was called. It lived with the Sahas for years before they were posted to Gwalior. Talking to it often and getting amazed by its abilities: one of which is repeatedly mimicking human voices, whistling melodies, and even dancing—all from within the cage. Its whistles and squawks were a wonderful fun. Mithu was a medium-sized Indian Ringneck with a large red beak, and it was an incredible marvel in its own birdy way. When the Saha family moved out of Trishul Park, probably around mid-1988, the high-profile parrot had to be taken away to Gwalior, where Mr. Saha had to report for duty. And that was all Arin and Raju knew about what happened to that incredibly funny green talking parakeet belonging to the lovely Saha family.

As has been seen, the Saha household had a family dog, too. A fluffy, untrimmed Pomeranian (or was it Shih Tzu?) doggie named Roxy; her face was never visible, wholly concealed by furry hair cascading down like Niagara Falls all over its diminutive body. She was a super sassy, temperamental canine that Arin always gave a wide berth.

Piku Mama was Mr. Saha's brother-in-law and his spouse’s brother. He arrived as a guest to sojourn for a year in the Saha home. To Arin, he did not particularly seem to be much interested in that attitudinal fur-ball called Roxy that yapped from its wooden trunk all day, for what seemed to be a completely woman-owned dog that hated being around men and other members of its own species. Maybe a-pat-a-day care, that’s how far Piku Mama would go to acknowledge its ever-shifting, undersized existence in the dormitory, where the Sahas had, apart from other flowering plants, a huge Drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera) in the backyard garden. Not to mention, this potty-trained, damn so noisy little nothing to speak of smidgen was shampooed every Sunday! Hoof hoof!

As regards the word Drumstick quoted above, more on the delightful vegetable pods that were easily plucked from the tree, enduring all these years in their garden patch, to make a culinary masterpiece of a dish, simmering in a rich golden brown mustard gravy the Saha household loved to cook almost daily, which Arin would teasingly call The Saga of the Drumsticks of the Sahas (too many S’s there!), is coming up shortly in the next autofictional instalment of yours truly memoir posturing as a short (or long) story, entitled as Piku Mama, in whichever way you look at it.

The pet lovers, the Sahas, also had another house pet called Binky: a white bunny (Rabbit, Khargosh) with reddish eyes, that only liked munching on vegetable peels, lettuce, and carrots. Most often, it nibbled on carrots and cucumbers nonstop, never being satiated. Once Arin held a carrot in front of its archetypal bunny face, it took it with its front paws and began gnawing at it, still not looking satiated. It wanted another. He offered. Clenching it, Binky went off to the side of its small wooden hutch box in the big veranda to nibble on some grass hay while also enjoying eating the carrot Arin handed it. The furry white bunny often hopped around the house when Piku Mama, Arin, and Raja played card games, probably to say hi.

Raja, Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s one and only son, wouldn’t mind taking care of both their ‘Aesop’s Fables’ creatures, a dog and a rabbit, equally.

An era had come to an end with the Sahas’ departure from Alwal: a place of Arin’s childhood time, while Piku Mama had been gone for less than a year before, which in itself was even more heart-breaking for Arin to realize, having lost all contact with them since 1986-87. A quiet heartache that stayed all along. Destiny seemed to have conveyed its Sayonara once again.

(To be continued…)

(End of part IV)

By Arindam Moulick

Memories of Trishul Park

Part III of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Raju and Arin cycled and played all kinds of outdoor games around the dorms or in vast open landscapes and grounds far out in the uncharted backwater of Earth’s orbit, which were freely accessible through the short scenic vistas within the broad Trishul Park’s suburban isolation of the cantonment county. It was their desi little around-the-town Tour de France, or still better, Tour de Alwal.

Driven by curiosity, like young, cycle-riding Marco Polos, Raju and Arin explored as though the unknown ‘Silk Routes’ of the outside world beyond their homely Trishul Park lands, while expecting to discover something beautiful or unusual as they navigated the whole area on their boy’s bicycle, riding slow through the baffling winds of their wonderful Deccan fatherland, which often carried aromas of chameli and jasmine flowers and MS Subbulakshmi’s enchanting morning stotram floating on a dream from a nearby dorm, in the mists of early morning trance.

The largely empty “civil area,” where houses were few and far between, mostly single-storied, rarely double, with a nice little garden as a frontage beauty to the simple house, and neem, papaya, guava, tulsi, or peepul and lime trees had a fundamental overarching presence at the corner side of the amply spaced courtyard. Ordinary lives, lived ordinarily. And it was so meaningful and peaceful to live a small-town life here; ordinariness was a common beauty that every resident cherished every single moment of every single day, beyond the sweep of bling and the fancy of worldly economic desires that had consumed this little town of Alwal forever.

Most homes in the “civil area” looked like peaceful, high-ceilinged farmhouses, with ample space left unused at the rear and around it, creating a tidy, laid-back, natural ambiance that soothes your life with the morning-fresh greenery around the house, until the jasmine blooms in the evening. A family pet dog, usually always a German Shepherd: An Alsatian, residents in Trishul Park society commonly used that term for that kind of dog breed, would hoof around the house courtyard in the late evenings, while during the day it was safely tethered with a metal link and soft collar near the foyer by the front door inside the compound in warm sunlight. Its life was an ordinary dog’s life, joyfully pampered, and a well-cared-for house pet—same as Goldie, the not-so-domesticated, constantly barking dingo Mr. and Mrs. Roy owned back in the early 1980s. Kids used to call out sportively, “Tommy…. Tommy… shoo shoo… shoo…!” whenever they noticed a dog loafing around, wagging its tail in the meadows of Trishul Park. 

Mr. Roy had a characteristic speech pattern of saying, “We’ll see…, we’ll see…” So, “we’ll see” about their house dog, Goldie, in a separate short story, coming up shortly.

--∞--

Garden Talk:
Mr. Dwivedi of 5/8, Trishul Park, used to joke around while he tended to the baby plants and saplings in his nicely grown home garden at the back of his dormitory, where he grew a mango tree at the south-west corner three years ago, “One of these days, I’ll own a black crow and a grey Dove!”

To which Arin finally said, “Why not, Uncle Ji, just make sure you don’t put them in a cage. They’ll be around anyway. Besides, you don’t put a crow in a cage; it brings bad luck.”

Dwivedi ji would state, “You have a point. So I cancelled owning them. Thanks.” 

Arin thought he should have known better, but then realized Dwivedi ji, normally a serious type, was barely funny; however, he tried in deep earnestness, maybe that was more important than attempting a joke. Never mind.

“You’re welcome!” said Arin.

Raju looked at Arin, raised his eyebrows as he remained perfectly still between the neatly tended rows of cauliflowers and tomato plants just in case he didn’t trample them, and widened his eyes for a split second, meaning to say, "What’s going on with Mr. Dwivedi?” and pouting the words…HOW BORING!

Arin just shrugged, and they giggled with glee, enjoying the playful moment. And still couldn’t help giggling at the sight of Mr. Dwivedi, a strict army man and a strict vegetarian, cultivating veggies with fairly good ‘military mechanical engineering’ craftsmanship.

Arin and Raju went home afterwards, as it was lunchtime. They had had enough talking about ‘agriculture’ at Mr. Dwivedi’s well-cared-for backyard garden. While on the way to their dormitory, Arin looked at Raju and grinned, and said, “See you later, alligator!” Raju was not surprised to hear what Arin said, and seeing a chance, he responded in kind, as he would when they jested back at each other, “After a while, crocodile!’ Geee!

--∞--

[An Anecdote: Arin’s strict and traditional school teacher from St. John’s, Savithri ma’am, who taught Hindi, lived in a small house on a lane shaded by a canopy of tall banyan, peepul, coconut, and palm trees, next to a baori (a deep water well) that had been existing there for generations up till the late 1980s.

Sadly, by the time it was late 1990s, the old baori that had once been a drinking water source in the locality, was filled with earth, and a piece of human aberration: an ugly multi-story apartment building was erected in the place, decimating the little patch of paddy farmland that surrounded the baori, habilitating the open space greenland into an economic battlefield of rampant commercial activities of big retail stores, shops, cluttered mudgies (small outlets), parking of polluting vehicles of all kinds, and whatnot, bankrupting the local population with their discount offers, effectively annihilating Mother Nature forever.

Among her former school students, no one knew what Savithri ma’am thought about this new real estate ‘development’ in her residential neighbourhood of just a few small houses, suddenly devoid of its trees and a natural, farmland kind of atmosphere on the land outside, of which she was so well pleased to live on the ground floor of her old cottage. Savithri ma’am might have regarded this towering concrete structure that came up in the late 1990s with nothing but pure contempt.

After her superannuation from St. John's school, she may have given up in unpretending grievance that she’ll have to go about her life in her little house that now came bang under the dark shadow of the massive building which blocked the sunlight forever until the mid-2020s, when she passed away, bearing perhaps no small amount of resentment towards how the way of life has changed in the decades after the peaceful 1980s. She might not have appreciated much anything that came later on in her life at Alwal; she lost her husband decades ago when her cradle-bound firstborn child was very little, and that little brooding, low-lying, ineradicable heartache stowed away somewhere within her heart since many years had kept lingering throughout the remaining years that she lived a lonely life. Savithri ma’am missed her prime years of the 1980s, as did Satish and Arin, her students, their school life.

Arin and Satish still remember her robust command over Hindi literature. But once, when Savithri ma’am asked Arin to read the new lesson, he pronounced the Hindi words which were something like, “Ameriki samvidhan”— “American Constitution.”

She thought Arin was wrongly spelling it. Interrupting him, she said, “It is not Ameriki, as you say,” and began mocking him, saying, “Amerikiii…” “Amerikiii...!” One of the students in the class prompted her, “Ma’am, it's indeed Ameriki written on the page!”

Savithri ma’am fumbled about, checked the text, and became instantly embarrassed that she had unnecessarily mocked her class student. She rectified, saying, “Oh yes. It is Ameriki. It’s a Hindi word, students; I was thinking in English, ‘Amerikan.’”

Looking at Arin, she sounded faintly apologetic, “Go on, read the lesson in full.” Arin never forgot that episode from when he was in the 7th grade at St. John’s. She prided herself on predicting that the coming decade would be “full of death and destruction”— “mrityu aur vinash se bhara hoga.” That’s true. That was precisely the case.

Savithri ma’am had some crow to eat that day.]

--∞--

Back then, there were open spaces everywhere, with no plot markings or boundary walls indicating ownership, and hence, Alwal—a quiet suburb with low-density housing—was known, back in the day, to be a really breezy place you’d be feeling gratified to live in.

Vast open no-man’s land would beckon Raju and Arin, as they cycled around, as if with a heartfelt welcome: “Hey, boys! Come hither and play.” With the continental breeze blowing from the west, the two school-going childhood friends would maintain a steady pedalling pace and coast smoothly about on their all-terrain bikes with the wind blowing into their faces.

Raju and Arin would ride around on scorching summer days as part of their, if you like, “civil area” exploration in their Deccan fatherland, and once, when winding up among the old shady trees that grew in the unrestricted parkland, they would drop off their cycles under one of them temporarily and loiter about the place, while plucking tamarind pods and taking small, careful bites on them. On Sunday afternoons, playing cricket matches with others using a red cork or a yellow tennis ball was a holiday staple.

On other days, they walked the old railway bridge leading to the Sub-Area to proceed to the other side of the desolate C. Barracks station to see how the Major General Commandant’s bungalow actually looked, or cycled through the tree-canopied, leafy green avenues of the peaceful Sub-Area region under the clear blue sky. Spring birds sang songs, butterflies flew about the bougainvillea, rhododendron, and periwinkle flowers that were plentiful in the Trishul Park-bound lands, and a couple of beehives buzzing with bees in the long, tranquil afternoons. Tamarind trees were aplenty, as were peepal, banyan, and yellow flame trees. Arin and Raju would park their cycles under the tree, pluck the ripe black-brown pods from the branches, and eat them; the intensely sweet-and-sour flavour of the Tamarind would make them cringe in an unexpected delight.

Traffic was zero, hardly a bother. The weather was less hot and milder. Winters were colder. Power outages were few and rare in the cantonment county. Roof tops were dotted with TV antennas. Boys played games, mostly cricket and hopscotch. Girls indulged in pretend-play cookery, making doll porridge for their dolls under the cool staircase of the dormitories. Most boys were named Pappu, Raju, or Bipin; girls were named Gudia, Munni, or Bitiya Rani. Wednesdays were for Chitrahaar, and Sundays for the weekly movie on Doordarshan. Other days were for 9 o'clock TV serials. Nobody worried much about anything back in the day in Trishul Park. Being one with nature was everything.

In mid-1988, Arin inherited a deep longing. His boyhood friend, Raju, and his family left Alwal forever on account of his father’s posting, moving to northern India. Decades passed, and Arin never saw them again.

Wonder where all the years went.

(To be continued…)

(End of part III)

By Arindam Moulick

The Melancholy of a Lost Time

Part II of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Time flew. Especially after the senior academic college years of the 1990s, which seemed to rush by like sand through an hourglass.

After the year 2000, Time inspired disbelief among the four friends. It quietly blurred the nineteen-nineties generation into the brand-new millennial decade, which was literally loaded with the onrush of the information technology (IT) revolution that went on to change the world entirely—even the aspects of a decade-old friendship among the four boys who loved hanging out on the rocks at Trishul Park, later at Subranium Strong’s Lake Park dormitory for a year, and then at his Govind Palace Apartment’s low compound wall adjoining the entryway.

As things stood then, and luckily, the four friends became consciously aware that the coming millennial age of “echo boomers” (which included themselves) would soon take over the supply chain, as it were, the IT world had known until then, forcing them to follow through the fright of the curveballs life was certain to throw their way. The old order changeth. They perhaps knew that life would never be the same again thereafter. It’s already changing. This is the final hangout.

That’s how it was back then, and how it is now, and how it will be. It's all in a lifetime.

--∞--

Their “new normal,” metaphorically speaking, came sooner than they had thought, and the final year of the 20th century felt like a turning point: an endpoint in itself, concluding their growing-up years to a fair degree, even as the sweeping currents of possibilities, disruptive changes of InfoTech, the inevitable highs and lows of humanity, in the wonder-filled world had tested their patience. They too weren’t let go for anything they did or didn’t do in their lives. Taking it one day at a time became a pressing priority, however.

For the first time, this little (but all-important) continuity of time had hastened an inevitable truth the universe had long defined, setting a slow (yet steady) realization within their friendship quartet that nothing would be the same as it once was. The 1990s were too far into the past, beyond recovery. Only worth seeking in their memories of those days. From the new millennium onwards, the chronology of their foursome friendship would also change; a strange newness they have to accept. A quiet shift in perspective was also necessary.

--∞--

At that precise juncture, they understood (on a natural gut feeling, one supposes) that time was on their side too, but compelled by its age-old, long-standing, hypertensive urgency after all. Wheeling endlessly in the universe from day to day, year to year, decade to decade. Ultimately, steering headlong into a millennial economic boom following the turn of the century. The 2000s and ever since saw corporate India rushing in.

Be it what it would, the unfamiliarity of their circumstances in the 21st century, each choosing a different career path, had changed the emotional cornerstones in the lives of the four friends from the late 1990s, as all sought to hit their own stride. Getting a job became paramount as they acquired their educational degrees. Even if they weren’t entirely baffled by its meaning or implications, they definitely felt a touch disenchanted since their ‘90s golden age of great music, movies, and television: the humble and simple pleasures that crafted their identity and self-expression had indeed come to a close. Oh hell, such is life, they said to themselves, letting go of the old: those nostalgic embers to burn bright, and moved on. The emotional baggage of the 1990s was weighing heavily on their minds, despite everything. Arin's is the case in point.

Hotfooting forward with relentless, alarming zeal was not a part of their intimate personality; therefore, the new era seemed too indifferent and crude for the four friends of the old days to value, whose deeply nostalgic, analogue roots kept them from enjoying themselves as they had in the past decade, which had been wonderfully meaningful and personal in a way that was nothing but charming. They knew things would never be the same. The arrival of the 2000s felt rather unwelcome. Now, it doesn’t feel like home. The Alwal of yesteryears has disappeared; it feels alien to live here now. No close friends, only soulless acquaintances. This ongoing 21st-century millennium brings only blinding change and cold indifference; the free-range childhood of Generation X would never be able to give much importance.

Time had had its sway, always did, and always will; however, it was not that brisk in its rhythm and flow, it looked like it, back in the day, except now it is insanely ticking forward… as a demon possessed, totally wrung up dry about anything and everything in its realm that one might refrain from making the cardinal mistake of suggesting…Go slow, constantly ticking-time buddy! But only a feeling of the concussive nature of loss that mourned all through Arin’s growing-up years after the ‘90s, as it crept up in one contiguous haptic memory of wonder days past: of the charming old wind-touched and spacious world—which was once deeply rooted in naturalness and was far, far less dramatic in reality than it has now become—had passed us by. That is all that remains, a sweet old memory, as his heart keeps beating for it, recollecting those bygone days in his lonely moments of tranquillity.

Nostalgia for a lost time: Long gone are the glory days of the tight-knit, slow-growth, and politically unsavvy Socialist era of the 80s and 90s. Old wine was sweeter than the new, in a manner of speaking and speaking fairly. When Kolkata was Calcutta, Chennai was Madras, Puducherry was Pondicherry, and Mumbai was Bombay. People were happier with less, despite the many problems the pre-liberalized era had faced before the 1990s. The nineties were definitely exemplary; they offered stability and peace of mind, not much change yet. Then, after the 2000s, all old-school mechanisms fell apart like a cheap Chinese knock-off, discarded and dumped for the new things to come. With the arrival of the era of economic prosperity, the so-called post-liberalized era that brought such, millennial digital natives took over and made everything look spectacular and effortless, pushing the envelope further and further until, of course, AI (Artificial Intelligence, with no actual intelligence) took over: throwing the cat among the pigeons, and how! At least the old-schoolers ate fruits plucked straight from the trees. Like jungle jalebi, tamarind, and jujube berry.

All around: shreds of incandescent nostalgia hung like a pervasive charm of melancholy in Arin’s heart ever since those sweet, leisurely, educational years he still adores so much, almost psychologically living it every day, have begun to ebb away into the faraway furloughs of memory…

(To be continued…)

(End of part II)

By Arindam Moulick

Sayonara

A long story of sorts

In the quiet lap of a middle-class home in Trishul Park, Arin was born and raised. When he was about five or six years of age, he knew how truly extraordinary this residential abode was, where he grew up to adulthood, right up to his college education.

Trishul Park lay in the vicinity of the Sub-Area. This Army-controlled restricted cantonment zone was nestled between the town’s civilian urban locality on the western side, directly across the interstate highway, where, to say the least, it was a genuine blessing because of the naturalness of the well-kept, shipshape military surroundings: the privilege of staying at 6/1, Trishul Park residential premises and a furlong ahead, the great expanse of the Sub-Area.

Even today, Arin’s breath stalls as he recollects the heavenly magnificence of the surrounding lush meadows, clean as a whistle. He still remembers the sprawling grassy knolls in the backwater of the Park: it is where he and his childhood chum discovered Jungle Jalebi way back in the mid-1980s, pristine grey rocks dotted the reddish grounds a little afar from their dormitory, and the Jhula: the children’s park—all of which were part of Arin’s and his dear boyhood friend Rajveer’s joyful havens. During the hot autumnal months, Congress grass—a common weed—would rapidly grow unchecked, while greenish grasshoppers, praying mantises, fluttering, iridescent butterflies, and magical dragonflies hovered over the grass, searching for food and mates.

Sparrows and crows were pretty common during those days in Trishul Park, compared to today’s head-bobbing health hazard that is the omnipresent feral pigeon. Back then, it was quite common to catch chirpy sparrows nesting on balconies—corner preferences were their specialty—while glossy black crows would swoop in and caw outside for lunch nibbles. Not surprisingly, even Koels made their presence felt in the lush green glens of the residential area, while Coppersmith Barbets echoed their fine took...took...took...took notes from the trees along the deserted roads of the Sub-Area. 

A lone Skylark would fly high in the cloudless blue sky, singing for rain.

While in the Sub-Area, sunlight rippled through its tree-lined, winding roads leading up to the little-known Club, the vacant polo ground, the citrus-sweet fragrance lingered in the air of the Krishna Mandir temple gardens, the colonial-era single-story bungalows sat amidst the open parkland of Tamarind, Ashoka, and Gulmohor trees, and the gentle sweep of the valley beyond the Club via the Brigadier’s bungalow revealed the dewy golf courses that looked like verdant green oases, spread out scenically among the ancient trees and scrubs drenched in peaceful morning sunlight. And during the rainy season, the entire landscape would be enveloped in the cool monsoon mist, veiling the bungalows, grounds, and pathways, utterly silent, still as a woodland.

Arin and Rajveer (easily his classic nickname: Raju), his childhood buddy, would go jogging or waltzing through the deserted yet impeccably maintained Army cantonment area, way farther until one hushed roadway wound up at the easternmost fringe of the heather-covered landscape to reach Allenby Lines. There stood the white-washed, rather staid-looking Army bungalow, The Retreat, where it’s speculated that the grumpy old young subaltern Winston Churchill, who became Britain’s prime minister and despised India and Indians, stayed for a while at the end of the 19th century. It is said that the man found his first love here, who, Urg! didn’t care much for him in return. So he, too, was not really rejection-proof! That’s like receiving pre-punishment in advance for calling Mahatma Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir.”

What was still wondrous to Arin was that he always had an uncanny aptitude to reminisce about long-forgotten days. Past experiences that mattered and made him a nostalgically-inclined person—seemingly, the quiet motivating force of those boyhood memories that wouldn’t let go of him; those and many others that his heart possessed. Not even letting a tiny jaded fragment evade his memory-grasp: of the past days coexisting with the present, even as he nostalgically, yet consciously, held them close to his heart, where they accumulated like a snowball of old sacrosanct commemorations, turning them over and over in order to try and make sense of his life story up to now. His mind kept traveling back while laughing off the unpleasant ones and rejoicing in the sweet ones that remained.

(A notion to put forth: What seems to be a therapeutic tool for the elderly, recalling positive life events to help keep them lucid and mentally tidy, he sure liked doing what he, though of young age not yet elderly, did best in his quiet times.) Aside from that, this short/long story of sorts is about four friends whose faces, smiles, voices, and the warmth of their friendship and shared adventures have always been vivid in his mind. When it was time for him to leave his beloved Trishul Park in the mid-nineteen nineties, he wept bitterly, knowing that his childhood and then college eras had finally come to an end. First, it was Arin who shifted to the “civil area”; then, two years later, his close pal Subramanium Strong followed before residing, possibly for a year or so, at one of the Lake Park dormitories, which lay far beyond the dale of the numerous golf ranges of the Sub-Area. Reminiscing has always been Arin’s foremost prerogative.

In those early years, Arin’s neighbourhood buddies were everything wonderful and precious, great and valuable, in this part of small-town India. Peacefully remote, the town was some six and a half to seven kilometres north of the main city centre. But that no longer seems to be the case; it's no longer remotely located, which was once its reprieve from the hard dazzle of the big-town experience. Today, the city razzmatazz is nearer home and in your face, like it or not. Everything is changed beyond recognition. No longer relatable. Alwal and its surrounding vicinities fell to the curse of ‘development.’ As its biryani-scented IT card is issued forth, the city's famed laid-back urbanity has vanished since the late ‘90s, its tech hub taking over everything urbane and natural, empowering us in a weird kind of economic entrapment, promising but more menacing too. Time marches on determinedly, and Alwal too has lost its premium ease of living and its sweet, serene simplicity, just as nature had once ordained it. Everything has been made to fall from grace.

Every friend of his was close to him, with whom he had spent most of his life in and around the amazing valley of Eden, their very own close and intimate commune: Trishul Park, began to drift away, one by one, to far-off distant places somewhere up north in Delhi and Jammu, west in Baroda, north-east in Shillong and Guwahati, and down south in Chennai, Bangalore, and Kochi, never meaning to return. Sayonara, forever. Everybody faded into the coming new millennial age of aspiration and responsibility that the globalized 21st-century world had offered.

Only Satish K. Gupta, alias Demello, remained, for this place, where he and Arin grew up, had become his permanent home—not by birth, but because of his fond childhood memories and all the years spent from kindergarten through high school, all the way to college, and beyond. Where else could he go outside this classic urban-dwelling, albeit non-Tuscan existence, where Subramaniam Strong and Bhale had joined them precisely at that point in life when they all began attending college? Nowhere else in this era-shifting triptych of a place reduced, like any other town or city in our vast country, given over to absolute commercial decadence of endless economic development taking place at a breakneck speed that none of us had surmised, did his happy, largely uneventful life settle and develop domestically as he became a dedicated family man blessed with two yuppie giggling children, a girl and a boy. Eluru, his beloved hometown, had slowly receded into the distant, hazy memory of the simpler times back in the day of the relationships and family identities that mattered more than anything euphemistically called modern, only to be visited, if at all, during vacations or some marriage or housewarming functions. But Satish Gupta, his younger sibling Sailes, and their widowed mother Vijaya Lakshmi had always nursed broken hearts ever since their father passed away here in suburban Alwal when the brothers were little. The house their father built for them and their extended family was the saving grace that kept them going, knowing they had a permanent sanctuary to call home. Life was more or less happy and tidy, but just about when the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, a fatal rift began to stretch like a rubber band, going back and forth for quite some time unabated, until it snapped back—gaslighting everyone in the family! A villain emerged, and that was none other than their own—“Gumbad Queen,” Chachi (paternal aunt), a char sou bees (420), lady Frankenstein, living in the same house.

Misunderstandings and mutinous mutterings were common. Satish often recounted to Arin, on his bicycle visits, his Chachi’s fine art of grunting like a wild bison! Her everyday evil grunting, too bitchy to handle, was so atrocious that the children would flee from her line of sight to play outdoors, unwilling to return until a little after their usual study hour. This unjustifiable routine on the part of their Chachi 420 invariably tore a rift in their nice little joint family—first among the equals: the adults, and soon enough, the younger ones sensed that something unusually awful was brewing within the household, and that Chachi’s henpecked husband was also hand in glove, in shady collaboration, with his own wife to evict Satish, Sailes and their widowed mother from the house.

With Satish’s father no longer being alive, the once close-knit family split into two halves: one side strong-armed into dark oppression, the other side forceful with a glow of undeserving empowerment, living in two separate portions of the modest one-story house. Two decades later, in the early 2010s, an unsympathetic, bossy, hulk-like Chachi 420 and her suitably henpecked husband upended the apple cart by driving Satish, his sibling, and their mother out of the house. Proper sale deeds and legal rights could have come to their rescue, but there weren’t any to assert their rightful claim on the house Satish’s father had built with his own finances. Petrified of being shouted at, being on the verge of a tumultuous mental collapse, and having no guts to withstand their irascible Chachi’s contentiously filthy language that was employed day-to-day or whenever opportunity for that heartless Chachi arose, they demurred and quietly moved out renting a place in the vicinity of the area where they thought they will have to reside almost all their lives, before putting up a court case, a contentious dispute, for this bossy Chachi and her family to deal with.

Financially, a humongous weight had descended on Satish’s mother’s shoulders; fortunately, she worked in a minor government department, earning a modest salary that she could use to support her family. Missing their former home, they ensured that their rental apartment offered a view of the childhood cottage right opposite, where they grew up: a house built entirely by Satish’s father long ago... but now gone. Destiny was kind to them eventually, but at one point, it seemed as if their future would be at stake, as though it belonged only in the past.

Awakened by the desire to leave the former world a better place than they had lately found it, they lived to tell the tale. Raged against the dying of the light, as somebody has said. Sayonara.

(To be continued…)

(End of Part I)

By Arindam Moulick

Reminiscing with Nostalgia

Final part

The grace and elegance of those beautiful moments, our friendships that have endured, the fragrance of treasured memories of our coming-of-age years, our homes, schools, playgrounds, and all of our childhood adventures, the giggles and laughter, and the faint echoes of timeless Hindi melodies emanating from the audio stall across the Alwal main road will invariably occupy a special place in my yearning heart.

These precious things that, as someone deeply rooted in the past, perhaps may never again come into my life. Alas.

*“Dil dhoondhtaa hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din …/

Jaadon ki narm dhoop, aur aangan me letkar…/

Aankhon mein bheege bheege se lamhe liye huye …/

Dil dhoondhtaa hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din…”

Nostalgic memories take me back in time—it is not the ubiquity of technological interconnectedness of today's times that helps ease the elegiac pain of longing, but rather some kind of, dare I mention, spiritual connection with antiquity or times gone by—a step towards the back, rearwards in time, if you will, certainly not an escapist substitute that brings pure happiness to my soul which keeps longing for the olden times to come back. While the temptations of a bunch of techno devices we use today can make your heart grow fonder when you catch a glimpse of old pictures or read about the past days in your palmtop, it is not even considerably solacing, to put it that way, in a world where the future is not only inherently uncertain but does not exist (doomsayers say: the end is near. Really?), the present is a complex perversity already. Therefore, it is only natural that looking back on the past can give us the necessary solace and a solid reason to live on—possibly a far greater sense of purpose in life than what your destiny could offer.

Rather than concerning myself with a utopian futurist techno-fantasy of something that never was, what makes it worth reflecting on is the nostalgia of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s I have in every moment of my life. My long-time dreams are about the past rather than the unpredictable future. I am grateful I have been entrusted with a remarkable legacy of the bygone eras, offering me a classic piece of history that my heart constantly feels affection for. Forsaking the past is unthinkable for this nostalgic soul because it worships it too much to surrender it to insensible oblivion. Looking to the future is difficult if I have not recalled the past in the present time. Looking back gives me pause and adequately prepares me for the future, which is no more uncertain than the present. The past is my saving grace, providing me with the emotional fortitude I need to move forward with my life, one day at a time.

Still, consider that anything good that can brighten your day, whether you want to mine the legacy of the Past or think about the Future, whatever it promises, scientifically or even spiritually, it is up to the individual concerned to learn how to be happy with himself doing his best in the everyday human struggle mixing the mundane with the extraordinary, and the mystical?

Consider drawing valuable lessons from the past and applying those to make the present more manageable. As for the Future, are you still pondering over it? I'm not. Because, as things of the world currently stand, the future will be formidably challenging, even disappointing, and far from green. Environmentally unfriendly, precisely. Though the future cannot be greater than the past, let's hope for a better tomorrow. Hope seems to float.

While I may lose my fictitious 'knighthood' for saying this so bluntly, I believe—regardless of physicists or what other die-hard optimists might wisely say to the direct contrary—the recent past represents a better place to divine ultimate peace than the indifferent and unconcerned present, and though the future—which is still unknown and does not yet exist—will increasingly be one of continual state of flux, with constantly shifting goal posts too, as it were, to strive for as Artificial Intelligence (AI) usurps human intelligence and brings about our impending doom by "allowing robots to think and act like humans."

Oops, there goes my knighthood! He he...

(The End.)

By Arindam Moulick

*“Dil dhoondhtaa hai” - a song from the Hindi film Mausam

Article originally published 0n Medium in Feb. '24

Savouring Nostalgia

Second part

Nostalgia is a mystifying emotional experience, a profound inclination to lose oneself in reflection, rumination, and sometimes even introspective brooding.

It takes me back to times in the past that I have always held close to my heart, never letting go of those long-gone moments I've committed to memory throughout the years of my childhood and adolescence. Selective memory or something else entirely, I don't need to know; it's unimportant. But they have given me the vital emotional energy to try and live a life devoid of disquieting emotions or thoughts, rather something of the great value of sincere facts to go on loving, adoring, and treasuring for a lifetime.

Often, because of my strong urge to go to the place where I ache to go again and again, I like taking a trip down memory lane to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, bringing up fond remembrances that make my heart sing. I confess I am a nostalgia-prone person. Or better still, nostalgically inclined, easily overcome by nostalgia for beloved old things I miss dearly.

These golden years are especially dear to me, harbouring a special place in my longing heart as they evoke nostalgic memories of a time gone by that I never got over with. Came what may, I persevered through thick and thin, good times and bad, and I will never be able to let go of my special bond with those incredible summers of my life.

So, come hell or high water or caught between a typical rock and a hard place, finding a path forward is well neigh. There will always be a close-knit sense of the good old days, an eternal heartbeat, and a beautiful melody of long ago that fulfils all my days with accustomed pleasure and longing. I've not chosen this path of nostalgia; it just came to me, and that's how I am. The memories of yesteryears serve as fawning inspiration and motivation, an intimate testament to my love of things past and gone long ago, and, shall I say, a continual reminder to face the future.

These formative decades are of great importance to me as they awaken a sense of joy and contentment, so much so that they constitute an essential component of my nostalgic existence—an integral part of my life that I cannot live without while relishing every familiar moment that touches my heart.

Among the most treasured memories in our lives are the fond remembrances of our early childhood friendships. From Poonam's tender moments of closeness to Raju's calm and unwavering friendship, from Ruby's brilliant camaraderie to Sushila's delightful companionship while playing fun games like tikkar billa, langri taang, and eyes-spies, and Meena's sweetly quiet company among us lifelong friends. We lost touch decades ago, but these precious memories have come safely through time as they bind us all, embracing a special place in our hearts.

Nostalgia has moulded my identity and continues gaily to influence my choices and perspectives to the present day. Yes, the music, social identities, and cultural directions of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s have left an indelible mark on me. Reflecting on these decades allows me to bask in the comforting warmth of moments that have defined who I am today and provides a deep sense of comfort and happiness for the beautiful journey I've had thus far.

To a large extent, I consider myself fortunate to be deeply rooted in the yesteryears, as I remain a nostalgically inclined person who feels blessed to possess that, I presume, salubrious subconscious Indian trait still throbbing within my being that loves to mythologize and romanticize through lasting memories and retrospections of the good times that will never come again. This silent brooding, if you will, through this ruminative agency is central to experiencing the ordinary experience of life more contemplatively while looking—with a cautiously optimistic or pessimistic optimist eye—to whatever the future has in its humour.

(To be continued…)

By Arindam Moulick

Article originally published on Medium in Jan. '24.

To read the first part, "In Every Moment of My Life," published in the earlier post, click on the title. The third and final part of the series will be up very soon.