Piku Mama, A Beautiful Memory

Part VII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

All these years have passed, but Arin still wonders, as though it were the earliest memory of that lost era that had been profoundly entrenched in his mind, as he couldn’t shake the feeling of where his childhood friend Piku Mama went and where all those days had gone. Piku Mama... O Piku Mama...

To this day, Arin often finds himself quietly longing for Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn in 1987 at the Trishul Park residential housing, which has since redefined the course of his life, his personal history, so to speak, redeemed by months of learning how to paint, cycle, or play Cricket in all the best ways imaginable.

The everyday ordinariness of life possessed stirring sublimity that inspired an overwhelming feeling of love and longing for the era gone too soon.

This is a story of a friend whom Arin never forgot and has always remembered ever since, a friend of long ago, really long ago.

--∞--

Piku Mama was an intensely good-looking gentleman with a fine sense of modesty and humility that few of us possess.

Fascinatingly patient, thoughtful, and gentle to a fault, this Kolkata artist was quite the painting virtuoso with a God-gifted natural genius woven deep into his DNA: the double helix bound together by his master-level technical finesse he achieved in creative painting—be it landscapes, oil, etching-style drawings, murals, or even portraits—motivated by endless hours of intense practice and early abortive attempts at creating something fruitful, useful and delightful — a feeling that had then been long adrift, since his childhood days perhaps, in his mind when he worked night and day to create great-looking oil artworks like legendary old masters of yore for home or gifting. An air of quiet charm about him made Arin admire him as a friend, soft-spoken and impeccably polite.

A graduate in fine arts from Kolkata (then known as Calcutta), he rarely had a three-day stubble beard because he liked shaving regularly but every alternate day. Or liked to ‘harvest the ripening home-grown crops’ ‘gharer chaash’ home cultivation, as he’d say, every other day, with a single-blade 9 o’clock steel razor and his staple white-lathered green-and-yellow lime fresh Godrej shaving cream that went for months, and still be good for another two months.

Piku Mama’s personality comes through naturally; no put-ons or making fashionably contorted faces to display an unnecessary emotion while having a conversation. He enjoyed articulating funny Bengali stock phrases whenever the situation demanded, such as “Bekhappa,” “Jaak babba!” “Heavvy,” “Oo babaa!” to give a distinctive cadence to the context surrounding the conversation while he played cards or lay on his back on the cool cement floor listening to music or reflecting on a past happy memory, with Arin and Raja in tow, hanging on to every word, look, or a smile he sent their way. There’s a sense of quiet peacefulness surrounding him that permeates everything he discusses or conveys a perspective, whether it is music being played on the newly bought stereo system, new original oil paintings currently being made, or anything that comes up in their regular long conversations from morning to afternoon, especially on a holiday or during Sundays. He was a congenial artist who painted a variety of aesthetically luminous pictures—in oil, acrylic, watercolour, or pastel colours—during his entire sojourn at his jamai babu’s (sister's husband) Trishul Park dormitory, where Arin frequented long enough to know that it was going to change his life, yes, forever. Piku Mama didn’t leave any space for his painting to flourish, his imagination writ large everywhere in the house: Old kerosene drums, wine bottles turning into flower vases, small portions of drawing or bedroom walls painted with urban-style geometric accents illustrating garden flowers with long blades of grass sprouting among them, and even painted on the portable wooden box in which that yappy little barker, Roxy, one of their three house pets, resided.

Sometimes Mithu Pakhi would holler from above in the veranda, “Aije, ki hochche?” Hello, what’s happening?

Piku Mama would glance overhead and say, “Painting korchi, Mithu” I am painting, Mithu.

The parrot would respond again in a light-hearted banter, "Aaahaha... haahaa... Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!” “Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!”

And then again, “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…”

Raja, his little nephew of 6 or 7 years of age, also learned how to paint, as did Arin, a few years older than him, in their spare time after school hours, which was nearly plenty. Piku Mama became their mentor friend, attempting to teach these two youngsters, showing active eagerness to paint, cycle, and play taash—cards. Days went by so fast.

During the school holidays and often on Sundays, Arin, Piku Mama, and Raja (Piku Mama’s nephew) would indulge in playing cards (taash) relaxingly, as they listened to music on their new Philips stereo recorder. Piku Mama taught them how to play cards and to paint as well. Arin painted (or smeared!) only watercolours and acrylics; not most, but all of which turned out to be scandalous eyesores, prompting hearty laughter out of everyone who happened to even as much as dart a look at his senseless horror-house madness that had been going on with Arin and Raja since the last few days of learning how to paint landscape pictures on white bond paper. When Arin hung them on the wall of his dorm’s drawing room, they post-haste wilted from the corners, and the watercolour paints faded in the shortest amount of time imaginable. When the strings attached to these sheets of paper slackened, they plunged behind the chairs, vanishing under them in urgent shame. Thankfully, no one was discoloured!

--∞--

One time, when Piku Mama was wearing a shirt to go out cycling with Arin, Arin couldn’t help but notice how much body hair he had on his chest, shoulders, and back, exactly like the Hindi film star Anil Kapoor in the movie Woh Saat Din. Piku Mama explained, merely out of polite habit, that his body hair pattern was a natural trait: a genetic characteristic that he likes the way it has always been since his childhood days. He sure looked nicely groomed, manly, and was elegance personified.

Like everything else during those days in Trishul Park, Piku Mama, who was several years senior to Arin, was lost to the past, too. Like all good things, it must come to an end. After 1987, Arin never saw his beloved, soul-brother-like mama again. With the heartfelt, innocent idealism of his youth, Arin exchanged postal addresses with him, but he never received a reply to his letters, more like epistles, written in a smattering of piecemeal Bengali and innocent school-level English embroidered with loads of grammatical corrections his handwritten letters could make room for, which was all he could manage. Two full letters were sent by postal service, but no reply ever came. Maybe they never reached him in the first place. Slowly, that old hope for long-lasting friendship had extinguished. Raja was just a school-going lad, but Piku Mama, oh so dear he was to Arin, was never coming back to Alwal.

Piku Mama went back to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), likely establishing a full-fledged painting and sketching art school there, for he was, at that point, in Alwal, more than a budding artist. His oil paintings of Austrian and Russian landscapes from one of Arin’s many Embassy of Austria and USSR books had received well-regarded compliments from family, friends, and other discerning kinsfolk who saw them whenever they came over to the Saha household for the pleasure of having tea over a pleasant chit-chat.

Life’s memories are not life’s history, but the original work of an unseen artist – Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

Calcutta for him was not just a city where he was born and brought up in but an emotional ache of nostalgic longing tied to the charming attachments he has in that historic ‘city of joy’—that’s how he related to Arin in that long afternoon when he was readying to pack up his luggage with thick paint brushes, bottled oil paints properly sealed air-tight, a foldable easel stand that was difficult to fold, three to four blank canvas boards packed in a longish faux leather cloth bag, clothes among which were his prized multi-coloured batik-printed and checked Calcutta lungis, Sando banians, shirts and pants. He started missing home, being away for a year from his painter’s alcove back in his Kolkata residence a little distant from the eastern banks of the river Ganga serenely flowing past the city was enough, as he had become homesick when he moved out of town, pining to embrace the familiar sights and sounds of this part of Calcutta: the aroma of matir bharer cha (tea in an earthen clay cup), adda (hangout), thoughtful conversations with family and friends, the smell of painted canvasses, among many other things. Time stands timeless still in Calcutta.

Shortly after his one-year sojourn at Trishul Park ended, he probably got married as he moved back to Calcutta, a city Arin loved spending time in. His leaving was sad enough for Arin, though not for the first time had he to embrace the grieving curve his boyhood life had dealt him.

Just when he thought his warm, close friendship with Piku Mama—who had, as Arin reflected on reaching the end of his memorable days with Piku Mama, good enough emotional intelligence, humility, and maturity for a man in his mid-20s—had started to strengthen and go on lifelong, Piku Mama had to leave Trishul Park permanently before handing out his Calcutta address to Arin, and saying, “Do write.” Arin stood there, unmoving as he took the address from him, already feeling overwhelmed by the impact of his absence; getting used to this change would definitely make him terribly anxious.

It meant that the days of their playing cricket in front of the Saha dormitory with Raja, Piku Mama’s school-goer nephew, joining them, Piku Mama and Arin, with childlike glee that was only young children’s prerogative, came to a close. The cricket bat, when he (Raja) held it, appeared in size bigger than him, and the ball, no doubt, must have seemed the size of a football in his eyes! The little dynamo, akin to an Energizer bunny power-packed, played valiantly and hit a couple of fours and sixes to apparently slow spin bowling: The ball ran on the downward slope of the meadow ground, went across the road in a jiffy, and hit the lower dormitory wall on the opposite flank and came to rest there for them to pick it up. That’s how hard-hitting batsman Raja had become, my God, over the past few months! The three of them also played cards incessantly, often until mid-afternoon, the hour of lunchtime, when Arin had to tear himself away from their infectious camaraderie and go home to get ready to complete his homework and study while also waving a ‘hello’ to his beloved friend Rajveer (Raju) if he happened to be on the balcony of his first-floor dormitory.

Cycling in the Sub-Area; listening to film songs; or generally lazing around the Saha household on Sundays while Piku Mama sometimes cooked Drumsticks (Moringa) Curry (Sojne Datar Chorchori in home-made Bengali style), in a rich mustard-coconut gravy and poppy seeds ground to a paste; with him chatting about his memorable experiences that old Calcutta accorded him during his school and college years; his mostly self-taught painting beaux-arts. Life in the ‘nillionaire’ slow lane, as it were, of 1980s-era Calcutta was uniquely different, nothing exactly like it anywhere in the country.

His passion for painting was obviously a high point of their conversation; it was his lifeblood. When Arin and Raja got hooked on painting, mostly doing watercolours, thanks to Piku Mama’s enjoyable method of facilitating gentle learning about shading and blending techniques, they often changed course to discuss Rabindra Sangeet that Piku Mama played when he rendered an exquisite Russian or Austrian landscape or a deeply impressive picture of Indian village life, Hindi film songs, and new Bengali songs, such as from the 1987 musical romantic drama film, the songs of which are still etched in Arin’s heart, Guru Dakkhina. Or the lovely songs of the 1987 Hindi film Khudgarz, especially “Zindagi Ka Naam Dosti,” “Log Kehate Hain Ke, Pila Chand Hai Sabse Hasin…,” alongside “Aap Ke Aa Jane Se” and “Yahin Kahin Jiyara Hamaar.” That was how they spent most of their days, back in the day. Raja, Piku Mama, and Arin would prefer to sit on the cool morning floor, and as they sipped slowly, taking small, delicate mouthfuls from tall glasses of lemonade, they enjoyed listening to these romantic songs playing on their precious Philips stereo.

When Piku Mama’s year-long sojourn at Trishul Park came to an end in 1987, Arin’s emotional state became one of existential despair. Feelings of dispiriting sadness crept in. There was something life-altering about Piku Mama’s looming departure. He remembered philosophizing as his teenage mind could muster, as if someone from his own family had gone away and his days of happiness would all be over. Sitting in the easy chair at home, he read the first page of the novel The Guide (by RK Narayan), which he bought for ten rupees from his pocket money; he began to weep, as tears welled up in his eyes for some time. He was a teenager who wept easily. And tears came frequently those days. He understood that Piku Mama would be gone to a place that would become permanently unreachable. After Piku Mama’s departure that day, he took a deep breath and somehow made up his mind to accept the fact that Piku Mama and the Saha family would have to move on, and gradually over the long afternoons after coming back from school he turned reluctantly to the immediate purpose of life that as a school student it was time now to look at it with a renewed consideration. Perhaps his days of fun and frolic were over, and now was the time to get back to studies and other things that needed his undivided attention.

Going back to things felt self-consoling to figure out, even as he faintly understood that Time would, if at all, heal the loss of Piku Mama not coming back, nor the Saha family. Still, Arin found it tough to stay focused on a life that now seemed, after Piku Mama’s going, to have taken a pivot—for better or worse. So, in view of the stark shift in his circumstances, he listened to his inner voice and mentally relived those wonderful moments for long years. Retrospectively, it wasn’t easy to let go of his prodigious days with Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha. Only a mortified consolation remained: people may go, memories don’t. Maybe, at the end of the day, memories were supposed to be enough for him to move forward in what suddenly seemed the iffy terrain on which he must now begin to tread. What else is there in the trick of this human life? None that he could think of.

Feeling isolated and even more demoralized—despite his dearest friend Rajveer M. (Raju) being there with him (for another year or so) before he too went away, if memory serves, to Baroda (Vadodara)—while also surrendering ultimately to the, in effect, rocketing new changes of the 1990s, the bringer of a small circle of new friends in the town, scilicet Subramanium Strong, Satish Gupta, Bhale, and himself, who were a part of the whole new generational shift that had replaced the unforgettable ‘80s decade immediately after with a cultural mix of post-liberalized sociological and economic landscape, Arin knew he had irreparably lost a truly wonderful person, lovingly nicknamed as Piku Mama, whom he regarded with special affection as a younger brother would. Wish Arin and Piku Mama had somehow been in touch with each other, but it was not agreeable to fate that they do; it didn’t allow it. And Raju, too, was lost in the new decade that was inbound soon after. Friendship and change don’t go together.

Piku Mama never returned to Trishul Park, not for another sojourn that not just Arin, but everybody in the Saha family would have rejoiced with great joy, as it was already time for Mr. and Mrs. Saha and their son Raja, their distinguished pets: Roxy, the yapper Dog; Binky, the carrot nibbler Rabbit; and Mithu Pakhi, the talkative teaser Parrot, to give up possession of their dormitory of a few years, following their posting to Gwalior. Possibly it was after the first quarter of 1988, Arin can’t recall when exactly, after Raja, their only son studying at a Kendriya Vidyalaya school, had written his final exams for the current academic year, the year after Piku Mama left, when the Saha family finally moved.

After 1988, and a few years into the 1990s, Piku Mama slowly became a distant memory. Far removed he may be from the present, he was never forgotten, and Arin, for goodness' sake, could never make that long-pending yet long-forgotten journey after he grew up and pursued a career, to his residence in Greater Kolkata, despite having saved his address to this day. He was thinking about the letters he posted to him, all of which went unacknowledged; maybe he (Piku Mama) never received them in the first place because of the faulty postal address or something. On second thought, would it be right on Arin’s part to just arrive at his doorstep without informing him ahead? What would’ve happened had he done so? At the very most, Piku Mama in his trademark lungi and banian would’ve welcomed him with a big hug; his paintbrushes stuck in his fine fingers. Such quiet contemplations led him to relinquish that important journey that he somehow could not take.

Not even once could Arin meet him... Oh! Not even once. Sigh. He now understands what the word ‘life-altering’ means. God bless you, Piku Mama, wherever you are in life. Arin still misses you and those beautiful days of Trishul Park.

(To be continued…)

(End of part VII)

By Arindam Moulick

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