A Bowl of Elusive

Every now and then, I have moments where thinking about the present gets overwhelming and I resort to thinking about the past. And since the last several years of my life haven't been particularly pleasant, my mind wanders off to my childhood. If you have followed my blogs, you must have read the bits I have written about certain incidents from my childhood - be it the memories of having sweets with my father, triggered by "balushahi", or the various fragrances of trees and shrubs which take me back to a certain time in my life. While most of the time, I think about certain incidents that highlight my childhood, if I try to remember my childhood in general, I keep landing on visions of the backyard gardens of the several houses I have lived in.  The earliest one I remember was behind this house in Sector 31, Chandigarh. I can barely remember the house itself - it was one of those generic air force quarters, maroon bricks and a grey door and a mix of wall and barbed wires ...

Death has a strange finality about it. It's extra-ordinary. You die and you just cease to exist. You may leave behind a few people to mourn for you if you're lucky. But soon, even they will move on with their lives. You'll just stay behind as a fond memory and a bunch of old pictures. My father died on the 8th of March, 2000. Before his death, he was the only parent I had had for over seven years. But life moved on. I was 10 when my father breathed for the last time. But I couldn't shed a tear. There was just too much crying around me. Amidst all the mourning, I was trying to cope with the fact that my hero was dead. He had literally been the strongest person I knew, both physically and mentally. And he just succumbed to an illness and nobody could do anything about it. Fifteen years later, I don't know whether any of his friends still think about him. I am not even sure whether anyone really knew him during his lifetime. But I did. And today, I...