Talk about memories!
So much to say… And yet, no words ever form. I can only just smile as I gaze at all those papers, my eyes getting all glazed, a thousand memories flooding back, breaking all possible barriers. Time is after all transient. May be time does not exist. Like Einstein said, time is past, present and future. May be it is all one fluid point, where we keep flowing around, but reaching nowhere in particular, starting from no where with destinations all blended and separating, yet non existent.
I was sitting in the middle of heaps of exam papers, questionnaires, letters from friends, slam book sheets that were in the same visual state as of tattered bus tickets, merit cards, report cards (!), loose sheets from notes and texts, not to mention the little hillock of note and text books that were occupying the 4 corners of what is supposed to actually be my room at home.
I was cleaning it up. Bad idea. But it occurred to me as impossible only after I pulled down the whole mess that was dormant inside the cupboards, down onto the floor. And found that the only way I could get out of the room was by clearing at least part of the heap around me. I had to reach the door after all.
And so, there were tons of paper, stationery, confetti from ages ago, broken pencil boxes, rubber that had worn out and stuck all over, old calculators… (I had a whole collection of them, small ones, big ones, scientific, normal…), key chains (This, I pounced on in glee… I love collecting key chains ), old locks, keys, wires (!), and money. The money was like lying around everywhere… coins, notes, even 20 paise and 10 paise ones…. , old bags, new ones, and ones I never remembered possessing. I was struck by awe. Believe me, I really did not imagine that so much stuff was actually there inside those meek cupboards. Even fireworks, 100 walas and mathaapu…. and a single lone bijili vedi.
Funny. I came across chalks, whisked away from school. There were apology notes, most of which were “I had headache/stomach ache/gone to relatives house…… yesterday and hence wasn’t able to attend class” letters to Srimathi ma’am. Seriously, I seemed to have one for each day ever that I had attended her classes. I don’t remember much of ever learning what was supposed to be learned there… mostly I would have been absent, or engaged in more serious time passes (:P), or plain asleep at some back bench at those ungodly hours.
And two mounds began to form around me. One, of the things that I was planning to throw away, and the other, of the ones I wanted to retain. It did not take me long to figure out that the latter was mounting in megalithic proportions. That was when mom entered. With hardly a care for my whines and winces, she threw out what she saw fit. I mean literally threw them into a bag and out the house.
I did manage to sneak out a few “very valuable” things… But I just can’t seem to guarantee them much scope for sustaining within my cupboards. Simply because mom said she isn’t going to trust me further with cleaning stuff. I seemed to her rather puerile, rather I-won’t-part-with-my-stuff kid.
Anyways… it left me wandering through the past, and as they say, now that its past, it seemed a very nostalgic and wonderful place to be in.
The garbage still isn’t cleared, in my mind.
The garbage. yae rite