I have never been given to nostalgia, but it has taken me overwhelmingly in the last few hours...like a broken dam of memories...so a thread about the girl that was, that never will be. 
My earliest memory is of my great grandmother dying. I am told I was 2.5 yrs old. I do not remember her at all but I distinctly remember the shrivelled body in white in the courtyard n all the women crying. I recall the men leaving with the body and the women bidding goodbye
I recall my other great grandmother dying, but I have been told I was never there, so that is possibly where the confusion between dreams and memory started. I recall treks to tiny hills, digging 6 inches of sand to get clear water, the river swelling every monsoon,
Forests of kaas (Papa quoting Tulsi Das-“as tho’ the earth has greyed with old age”), running around wild dandelions which flew at the touch, caring for hurt birds, waking up to a newborn calf, frogs that croaked loud n went silent suddenly. We knew the snake had got them!
I remember the first time I saw torchlight. It was the most wondrous moment. We stole it outside and pointed the light at the ghost trees in the distance and at stars... the light went all the way. The stars were anyway so close. You saw them every night through ur mosquito net
in summer and frm the window in winter. We knew how to read time with the shadow of the guava tree but I was always late to school anyway. My mother’s terrace garden with huge dahlias, chrysanthemums and roses that cld be seen frm the rickshaw bringing me home frm station.
This photo is from that time. From my room in the hostel, the seasons changing; the gulmohar and Jacaranda blossoms in the fiery heat, the fish ponds glistening with restless fish and me packing up for summer vacation. That is the day today, that is the season. But there is a
Stabbing pain all the way from my toes to my heart, at the loss of nature in the years in between. Even when I lived in Vasant Vihar with hundreds of parrots on the gulmohar tree! I walked over chestnut flowers to reach a destination. Life changed with finding ‘purpose’
The destination, the purpose, created the urgency to reach, to achieve, to complete, to accomplish. Maybe that stabbing pain is for losing the purpose and finding nature again...confessing the hard truth that maybe, there is no such thing as balance. It is indeed choice.
@buzshilpi I also wrote this in response to ur proposal for all young ppl to spend time at a farm! Just to add, it works if you work with ur hands...too many exploitative practices otherwise. V grew up in a Gandhian family, but v also saw sad side. Luckily i had eccentric folks
around which helped. We made paan for Baba, hukka for grand aunts, picked chillies/tomatoes, boiled honeycomb, picked dates fallen in storm, milked goats for fun, made poultice of lime haldi for injuries, saved bulbs to replant next season, replanted paddy, cut up earthworms;
