Childhood Nostalgia
A Proust Madeleine Moment
I grew up in a community where10-20 families lived in cookie-cutter houses placed side by side to one another or in the front and every family was like your own family irrespective of caste, creed or religion. Everyone knew almost everything about the other as everyone shared their joys and sorrows with one another.
I had donned many professions in my childhood — teacher, doctor, police, cook and make-up artist. And the neighborhood kids reprised the role of my students, patients, thief, tasters and guinea pigs respectively. Sometimes we switched roles.
But unfortunately I couldn't achieve the most coveted, sought-after position among the kids in my colony and that was being the leader for I was positioned in the lower rungs of the age ladder. Being younger had its pros and cons, pros being you were allowed to play the swing first and also you might get to swing twice, cons include you become one of the minions of the older kids. You were not allowed to question them but to just follow their orders. Otherwise you would have to face the ire of your play circle and would be treated as a pariah. They would tell you to play alone or worst, to play with the toddlers. Nobody liked that during that time. The toddlers were never welcomed in those groups. They were mostly tricked into believing absurd stories that there was a kidnapper on the loose and that they should remain inside their home. Poor them, always falling for the lies! Also if you happened to make the tots angry, you would probably land with some "teeth marks" on your hands. Even though there was a power hierarchy in our group, bullying was a no-no in our colony because anybody who bullied was bound to receive a good scolding from their respective mother.
Our outdoor games mostly included game of tag, marble games, pebble games, cricket, badminton, hopscotch and sometimes cooking. The cooking session consisted of preparing inedible dishes on miniature utensils with the utterance of the sizzling sound by our mouths and then serving them on miniature plates. The ingredients mostly consisted of grasses or shredded leaves peppered with yellow florets or willow herbs to give the guise of a healthy, wholesome dish. If only we had followed this at our own dining table! The chasing games mostly ended up in chasing the weak ones first.
Although many people know “Tippy Tippy Tap Tap, what colour do you want?” as a paper-origami art game, we made our own version of this game as an outdoor game where a group of players will choose an “it” player by counting-out methods. The “IT” player will stand in front of the other players with his/her back facing them at a close distance from them. The other players will then sing, “Tippy Tippy Tap Tap, what colour do you want?” and the “IT” player will shout a colour and immediately turn around to catch the one who is not able to find that colour in their vicinity. Also there was this rule that no two individuals can touch the same object. This game actually made us visit the deepest corners of our mind to come up with some mind-boggling colours and make the game more difficult and fun.
Some days the adventure bug bit us and we went on an exploration spree around the neighborhood and returned with loads of gooseberries or Indian plums growing in the wild making us feel euphoric and self-satisfied as if we had found a fortune and our collected lot would save the world from impending hunger. We brought small but thought big.
Any spell of rain was never able to dampen our playing spirits. During such times we mostly gathered in a particular kid's house depending on the mood of the mother of the kid. We never wanted to face a mother’s ire. The teacher-student games, police-thief paper games, snake-ladder board game, ludo or assessing the kid's new toys became our indoor activities. The make-up game usually ended up in dolling up ourselves with the mom’s make-up kit. The end result produced could have definitely landed us a job in some horror flicks. Sometimes the younger siblings could be bribed with a “share of chocolates or toys” into becoming a canvas to showcase our make-up skills. In the teacher- student game, most of the kids vied for the teacher's post. Girls mostly drape a sador mekhela or a dupatta around their tiny bodies to get the perfect look of a saree-clad teacher. The introverted ones were happy to lend an ear to the nonsense teachings. The naughty ones used to wait impatiently for the cookies to come. I cherish this the most. We might be berated by the irritated and frazzled moms but they never let us leave the house with an empty stomach. When the rain receded, we used to scurry out to have a game of paper-boat race in the deepest puddle we could come across.
Sometimes the dolls/teddies came in handy to use them as students/patients in our plays whenever we had skirmishes with our friends.
Now whenever I flip through the musty-smelling old photographs of my childhood album, my brain couldn't help but make a trip down memory lane even though the lanes are getting dimmer and dimmer in my memory as I climb up the age ladder.
Credits-Rumi Sonowal
