Memories

I still can smell the raw paints on the walls of my favourite hiding, a cupboard, of the house we lived for eight long years at Belur, a kilometer away from Belurmath itself. In it I used to spin all my dreams, cry, laugh and frown at my parents who did all the things they wanted to and restricted me from doing all the things I wanted.

I really don't know if the first rhyme, I had written on my own on the walls of it, is still there or not. I had foolishly imagined, after my first return from Konark, Orissa, that someday my creations would be discovered thus. So to lessen the burden of the archeologists I had written my own name there too.

Memory still lingers in my mind of my first sight of the deep blue sea at Puri, and how scared I was when the sand passed from under my feet with the waves dying down back to the sea. I felt like Sita, in The Ramayana, being gorged down to Mother Earth.

If a human being treasures something in him, it is his memories and only memories. Bigger memories with greater and wider significance are called History. To an individual his own history, however big or small, makes a man of him when he grows up.

I have grown up with memories, good, bad and ugly and references to them still help me finding the right ways at the complicated cross-roads.