Crumpled pages from the past

Men women and children walk in and out of our lives just like we do in theirs. When that life-long ritual is done with, what remains is a bag full of memories, for the ones who are left behind. This bag of memories is an un-compartmentalized jhhola in which when you put your hand, the proverbial- "you never know what you will get" rule applies. Chances of your coming across a good memory (as opposed to a bad one) are the same as picking a favoured kaaju barfi from a box of assorted sweetmeats. But memories differ slightly from sweetmeats in their re-usability and longevity. One cannot re-eat a rasogolla or a barfi as one can chew the cud of a fond memory.

So, when a man wakes up to hear about the death of a dear old friend, he reaches out for his jhhola and grapples for a few crumpled pages from the past. The pages are few and far between. There are lines in them that he can read and those that take him to the very moment in the past. And then there are writings that are scribbled, almost ineligible and worse; the dead ends and missing pages. So he sits by the writing table looking out of the window in despair trying to recreate the past. He knows that today there can be no co-author to re-weave the frayed memories.

The boy was going through his adolescent years then. He despised the food he ate, the people he met, the channels he watched (in the pre-cableTV era), and the opinions he heard. This general abhorrence typical of the adolescent years rendered him a loner; something that he did not fully regret. The only place he found a panacea for his churning thoughts was in the old man's company. The old man was not a relation. He was not even an old acquaintance. He was just one of a hundred faces that the boy met every day as he trudged to school. He just happened to like the smile on this one. The face had a calmness about it, almost as if it knew what the boy was looking for. It had two twinkling hazel eyes set on either sides of an aquiline nose that was inquiring, yet not in an inquisitive way. The ears were long and elf-like. If those ears could speak they would say, "I am all ears boy, tell me your worries!". His was a face of a friend.

After school, the boy would visit the old man often. For hours they would sit in silence in front of the old ONIDA television set watching the test matches held in those yonder lands and bouncy pitches, where the India batsmen performed like Kuchipudi dancers in an ice skating rink. The two did converse though. Their topics ranged from Sourav Ganguly's fear of facing Allan Donald, to his bravado in infusing a fighting spirit in a demoralized team. The boy would often relate these conversations to the ones between another better known pair of an old man and a boy from The Old Man and The Sea. In that book the two talk about Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star in much the same way. Sometimes the old man would fall asleep, only to wake up at the opportune moment when a previous incident (like a "wicket") was being shown in real-time. He would yell with joy if it was an opposition wicket, only to be calmed by the boy and told that it was a replay and not live action.

The old man liked the boy. Perhaps in him he saw a modicum of innocence that he knew was bound to get trampled in the race of time. And perhaps that is why he kept silent and cherished the present. What he felt and why he did so are those lost pages and ineligible writings that are forever lost or will remain un-deciphered. With time the adolescent years passed. Goals were set and plans were chalked and the fragile uncertain irritable senses took a back seat to make way for more well-formed pragmatic thoughts. The cricket matches continued and the Indian batsmen kept doing the pirouette and getting yelled at by the old man. But the boy wasn't there anymore to tell him which one was an action-replay of a wicket and which one wasn't.

The man walks to the window and sees the brown leaves clinging on to the dried branches. The winter is almost over, but the chill will linger for a while. He arranges the crumpled pages carefully and places them back in the jhhola. As precious as they always were, today they have become priceless. He wishes his old friend bon voyage and hopes to sit some other time with him in some other world and become the little boy that he once was.