When I was younger, I used to be amazed by the way time flowed. I would scale my height on the door and calculate how many inches I grew through the year on every New Years Day. This year, however, 1st Jan is nothing special. Just a day when the maximum number of SMSs I sent went astray.
The year of 2008 was in all respects a revolutionary whirlwind. If the Raktima Roy of 2007 met the one of 2009, they would smile two mysterious smiles that can run parallelly but never coincide. It's surprising how the tiniest of events, deeds or words can cause upheavals in your world of thought, how a small and apparently insignificant quirk of destiny can reveal new dimensions of thought that move mountains, uproot trees, heave up ocean waves and, in short, ensure that your world will never ever be the same...
As Rohan said, there's no knowing what you'll remember when you look back. A look, a touch, a word, a smell...anything. Years hence, all that I'd remember of our beautiful garden on the roof might not be the sight of it in all its glory, but the smell of some nondescript flower in one corner of it. All that I'd remember of my cherised synthesizer might be the sight of myself spraying insecticide on its sides, or perhaps the holes on its speaker through which I try peering quite often with the illogical curiosity of six-year-old. All that I'd remember of the Pathfinder seminar that I attended last week might be the banyan-root-house that stunned me on my return journey. I don't know whether to call it a tree or a house— that marvellous symphony of bricks and roots. A banyan tree that had grown all over a house had spread its roots through the gap between every two bricks such that roots cemented the house, and formed a curtain that covered up the lack of paint over its walls. I cannot tell why that split second glimpse of it affected me so deeply, why the primitiveness and rawness of life burst upon me at the sight, along with a sense of wonder at so unique at sight.
There, I went off the track once again. Well, as I was saying, there's no knowing which of the scores of incidents that took place in 2008 will have the greatest effect on me in the long run. I learnt a whole lot of things that were worth it simply because they were new, met a whole lot of people who sprung tiny revolutions in my world. I had a strange love life throughout the year, heard some strangely beautiful songs, played "My Heart Will Go On", watched Titanic. I got a mobile, a synthesizer, a room of my own. A guy told me one fine afternoon that I was looking great; Chandralekha Aunty smiled at me on a finer afternoon and told us that we had made her happy. Friendship was redefined for me with the formation of Penta. I tasted "real pizza" for the first time in my life, went out in the rain with friends, attended farewells and get-togethers galore.
I traced the flight patterns of pigeons and blackbirds, traced sceneries and love scenes in the clouds, drew circles in the mud with my boot, watched for the solitary brown bird that cries its way across the sky at night, digged out Dahlia roots, climbed Guava trees, learnt to live without my Debdaru, and discovered no less than five varieties of birds.
In the worn out pages of an old diary, I found a loveletter of mum's addressed to dad when she was pregnant with me. The letter, which had been torn up by herself later, made me realise, for the first time, that the mother-daughter bonding is not the only one that exists between us. There's another bond as well. We're both women.
And in the last week of this revolutionary year, for the first time in my life, I touched my Grandmothers hands and found them cold, without the warm pressure of her fingers closing on mine. For the first time, I kissed her once, she didn't kiss back twice. She smelt of chemicals, rajanigandhas and dhoopkathis, and not of tiler naru, murir mowa, kochi daab, akher gur, puli pithey, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, winter sunshine and mustard oil (shorsher tyal in her words).
At the end of the day, I have no idea which of these memories will count. I don't even know which I'll remember, except perhaps the sight of NRS taking my sleeping didun away and closing the door on us, the smell of chemicals, the glare of yellow lights, the beads of moisture on her face. And the whiteness and coldness of every inch of her skin.
I love you, didun. Here's a long, long kiss for you. A tribute to all that you ever said, and all that you never did.
I love you.
