Trishul Park is the song of my heart.
After Raju left Trishul Park, during those long and lonely afternoons, I'd often find myself searching for memories of our childhood: The roads we used to cycle on and the cricket grounds where we used to play under an enormous bowl of blue sky hung overhead, the songs we'd listen to that came drifting upon the wonderful cosmos of our neighbourhood from across the main road, would flood my heart with a feeling of the unexpected surge of nostalgia.
Wave after wave of memories would overwhelm me and sometimes even lift me off my feet in deep feeling, my heart achy for a bygone time I knew would never come again, but go on yearning. Tears of melancholy would blur my eyes as I silently longed to relive those lost days, longing to relive the memories again, remembering all the times of the golden age of our childhood. Dil dhoonta hai fir wahi fursat ke raat din…
**
Meena's beauty was truly remarkable, and my pre-teen self couldn't believe that such great beauty is not something anyone can possess; perhaps only someone exceptional in destiny, time, and place could, and Meena had all of those fine God-gifted elements in full measure. That someone could be that mesmerizingly attractive and draw attention to herself astounds me, and you can't look away from her. It amazes me even today to think about Raju's cousin, a radiant beauty from the majestic mountains of Jammu. Her breathtakingly beautiful looks with fair complexion and liquid black eyes, crowned with perfect lines of her eyebrows and finely aquiline roman nose, left a lasting impression on everyone who saw her, and her bottle-green Kashmiri gown only heightened her undeniable charisma as a young girl of extraordinary beauty. Meena was a sight to behold. When we played cricket outside, she'd come to the window of her first-floor dormitory, framing it like a perfect work of art with her elegance and grace; her spellbinding beauty lent a touch of magic to every moment that came into existence at No. 6 Trishul Park. Her looks were truly beyond words.**
Great friendships enrich your life forever. Meena returned to her native sometime in the mid-'80s after graduating from St. John's school—if memory serves—in the seventh grade. Around that time, Murari and his sister Anita came into our midst. However, with Meena's departure, which we didn't expect she would until at least in the year she finished her school final examination, which was still three years away, an old chapter was abruptly closed.Certain friendships last a lifetime. Growing up, Meena, Sunita (also called Choti), Raju, Mintu, and I (along with my sibling) shaped our relationship into a foster brother-sister dynamic. Since we all grew up in comparable environments of similar experiences and shared history, developing that relationship was subconsciously more valuable than everything else. Even after they went away, Meena and Choti continued to send us exquisite Rakhis by mail for many years, and we'd be delighted to wear them on Rakhi Day without fail. But alas, that heartfelt tradition had stopped in the mid-'90s before giving us great memories of our formative years of the unforgettable No. 6 Trishul Park. Meena, Choti, Raju, and Mintu were a blessing — friends for life.
Murari, a teenager with an adventurous spirit, knew how to spend his papa's money to live life to the fullest, often going AWOL by taking off on his father's bicycle to Sagar Hotel situated at Loth Lake, a good kilometre away from Alwal, for a sumptuous lunch of steamed rice and chicken curry. After satiating his craving for dining alfresco, he'd play some enjoyable cricket matches with us waiting for him on the ample playground facing our dormitories, using a yellow Tennis ball which he already would have bought on his own from Nagender Stores, and a free-size, makeshift wooden bat, used originally for traditional hand-washing clothes on the floor of his slippery bathroom or in the much-bleached white courtyard of his ground-floor dormitory where he famously lived with his gentle sister, polite mother, and virtuous father, who was a very decent Army man.
Murari, a fun-loving person, loved to have a good time. As a team, he, Raju, and I would play cricket nonstop on Sundays and holidays, stopping only for lunch. He once hid in the “slippery bathroom” where none of us could dare to approach to call him out when we played hide and seek in his spacious ground floor dormitory. You are supposed to have a required amount of balancing skill to tread on the floor and look-see in the bathroom if anyone went there to hide. The floor leading to it was so slippery that anyone would surely fall with a thud if not stepped on it slowly and carefully. Murari used to scrub the grease off with an avidity that has to be seen to be believed, but funnily, the slipperiness came back quickly on the toilet floor like it never really went off in the first place. Our hide-and-seek game that we routinely played within Murari's home with the lights switched off was such a spectacular frivolity that it is hard to believe the things we used to do to hide from one another when the game was in full swing. Our sense of contest was delightfully amusing as we laughed and hooted and cat-called to one another while safely hidden away in the bedrooms, drawing room, bathrooms, behind the doors, curtains, in the kitchen, and behind the bicycle covered with a canvas in the veranda: One of us even went so far as to hide within the dark recesses of the wardrobe in the family bedroom! I, on the other hand, almost always hid under one of their long charpoy beds—(where, surprisingly, I’d run into Raju chuckling loudly on seeing me joining him there, pushing ourselves deeper and deeper against the side wall so that no one could see us and call us out!)—that we fearfully assumed was teeming with a ravenous army of reddish-brown bed bugs (khatmal), ever ready to bite, roving around the rectangular shape of the longish cot tightly webbed with scruffy jute cords, under which we hid like frightened bunnies. Yet, it was only a temporary inconvenience... haha... to get unduly worried about while we were in the thick of the game, trying to deflect undue attention.
**
1988 marked a turning point in my life, a watershed year. I lost a dear friend and his good friendship. Now and then, ever since Raju's family moved out of Trishul Park, memories of our years together as friends would come haunting back. Before another family used his dorm on the first floor for their stay, it had been vacant for a long time, and it brought tears to my eyes when I saw that they weren't Raju; they were some other people.
Trishul Park no longer felt the same; it became bereft of liveliness and seemed anguished. Since those days, heaven knows, the surge of tears has emptied my days, tears of melancholy.
(To be continued…)
By Arindam Moulick