things i am made of

It takes someone elses work for one to realise that even they had a vibrant childhood....its sad how one is so stuck in one's present, trying to create meaning out of one's everyday events....life almost seems to revolve around this moment that you forget what you are made of....of the dust gathered from old memories....old thoughts....old emotions...i seemed to have forgotten the days when i used to climb the grandfather mango tree with my cousins....this tree was fashioned for our tiny legs.... wasn't one of those erect structures that one thinks of as a archetype of a tree....it crawled metres through the sand before rising and branching out into its various parts....so at every age a person felt capable of marking their highest point of achievement...that's what i did with my cousins...mark our conquests..those were the days when we were pirates, thieves, robin hood..and this old tree was our only recourse...it was our home, our hiding place...a critical part of our warring schema...it patiently bore our laughter, our secrets, our schemes, our torment on sunny afternoons....when post-lunch siestas were the norm..then there were the bedrooms with wooden windows which when closed could let in nothing but a stream of light with particles floating in its path.....those were days when within a span of five minutes we could change from warring tribes to sophisticated spacemen....i guess it depended more on the elders who changed their minds about our physical locations.....the days when pillows were state of the art technology for spaceships...when my excluded-for many-intrusions cousin made rice and curries in the spaceship while her elders maneuvered its movements with at most finesse.....fighting the aliens-who-threatened-the-planet....days when Bruce lee and Jackie Chan fought together on the same field...defying space and time...and above all the norms of Hollywood.....the themes of our games were of at most seriousness and it cut historical perspectives that would have shocked the most observant post modernist....quantum physics was a tool for our little fingers....when we defied the laws of universe and plunged into open space for a battle with evil intruders from another galaxy....what about the mythical creatures that existed in recesses of the pond in the corner of our compound....that could rise any moment from its deep sleep to threaten our lonely existence....the myths created by us to prevent us from getting a better look....or my grandad's cycle that transformed in our hand into a machine that generated flour or sugar or anything our minds fashioned...when anyone who defied our plans were devious enemies....the days when simple intruders turned into bandits......who became pivotal characters that chartered the course of our heroic epics....
I forget them...i forget how they fashioned me as me....the days when boats ferried me between my maternal and paternal home....i don't even know the name of the water body that connected it....i just remember my fear of the lashing water and my excitement of being in water....i still have that....my friends will tell you the amount i screech when they speed on their bikes but what about the days i pretended to be street hawk (a product of dinner time TV) on my dad's yezdi.....the days when trust was so easy to muster...when one didn't think rationally on what could happen if i fell off or how a dog could jump up against the bike....trust!!
I pretend that i am tormented...maybe its just the thyroid that i avoid checking....but what makes it so difficult to go back to those days when everything in the universe was just a thought away....when it took you two minutes to show your younger cousins that you knew how the world works....i remember the time in school...when i was one those first unlucky girls who entered their puberty before time...the knowledge i was capable of imparting from just three sentences that my mother told me or the one weird unclear line in the science text....opened a world of information for my ignorant friends...now its so difficult to make those claims of wisdom...to sit someone down and impart sacred wisdom....to whisper into the ears of the old grandfather tree all about the ruins in the prisons in India....to pile away gifts that were showered upon you only for your innocence....i am still made of them and i need to realise when times are tough that life wasn't always so torrential or bad...i am made of stuff that only i can retell....its unique to my existence....narratives that are built from my memories...dusty and tainted as it may be....but these are things i am made of.......