DOWN THE MEMORY LANE

DOWN THE MEMORY LANE

The mind is very fickle. You cannot just keep thoughts out of your mind. They keep appearing and disappearing. The older you are the more the onslaught of memories - the more the time-travel into the past. One moment you are a KG student occupying a tiny chair in the class room of the pretty miss Rachael in St. Mary's Convent school

and the next moment you recall your retirement party in the last office - garland and all. You have a group- photo too.

Many a time I have  found myself sitting in the verandah of my cousin's house in Allahabad. For whatever reason, the scene keeps coming back. He phoned me that his dad had come from Moradabad. I hopped into a cycle-rikshaw and came rushing to meet him. And there he was, sitting in the verandah with that relaxed reassurance, with that inimitable disarming smile.

He was a professor - knowledge, character,discipline,compassion and quite a few other attributes all rolled into one. Rare to find men of his calibre now. He was in England when Queen Elizabeth's coronation took place in early fifties and as a kid I had avidly read his letters to my father from England on pale blue onion paper. The handwriting reflected his character. My father maintained that nobody had a more beautiful handwriting and he was right. I am still to see a better one. Both the father and the son had removed the word FEAR from their dictionaries. Fearlessness and honesty make a dangerous cocktail. It invites trouble. And he had ample measures of it all his life.

And then the scene changes. A huge railway engine comes rushing noisily towards me

as I stand on platform no.1 holding my father's finger and it rattles me completely. But, then, I was only a kid - four year old.

Khalkhalji was not a kid !! He was twenty three when the railway engine drove daylight out of him. He had never seen a railway engine all his life up there in khantoli village in the kumaon hills and was for the first time ever on a railway platform.. And the irony is that he would find a job in the railways one week after that engine-fright.

The scene changes again. A stately elderly gentleman, our guest, is eating breakfast in our dining room. He has a  white towel tied to his neck covering his shirt-front and the lap. With each movement of his jaws a bit of water drips from somewhere under his chin - a  medical condition. He is A.D.P.  the cane commissioner - a master of riddles and playing-card tricks. He taught me to make stunning designs with a deck of playing cards with just some flicks of the wrists.

The kaledscope of memory flits to the FIRSTS - the first time I burnt a hole in a paper with a magnifying glass, the first time I had found continued balance while learning Cycling, the first time I made soap bubbles with the help of my mother, the first time I made a pinhole camera in the company of Teemal, our mali's(gardener's) son, the first time I made a matchbox telephone with fifty feet cord and talked to my sister.

And then I see the finality of it all - that last scene in the film ROMAN HOLIDAY where Gregory Peck is standing all alone in the empty Palace Hall , princess Anne (Audrey Hepburn) having gone back into the Palace after the press conference.

That more or less sums up life !!

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