My Childhood
For everyone, childhood memories are something
to which we return to time and again just like a train traversing the
same route, but coming back to the same station at the end of the day.
These memories are there to make our moorings stronger, so that we
stand on a firmer ground later in life. I would take the time to
confess here that I had a unique childhood. I was the only offspring
of my parents, who were schoolteachers at the time of my birth. My
mother was a teacher, but her school was located quite far from the
city of Calcutta, where we lived. She used to commute by local train.
From the Sealdah station, she used to travel to Agarpara, in the South
24-Parganas district of West Bengal. To reach Sealdah, she had to
take a public transport (bus). And, her school hours were in the morning
session. So she was out of the house by 5 am, in order to catch her
bus to take her to Sealdah station, from whence a local train would
make her arrive on time in her school. She had taught in her school
for thirty-six years at a stretch. Today she is a retired government
employee, enjoying her pension.
When I was a toddler, the task of feeding me in
the mornings fell, quite naturally, on the shoulders of my father. My
father who was an art teacher at a city school, had taken voluntary
retirement (the VRS scheme), probably because I was becoming too much
to handle, single –handed. My mother used to return from her school by
half past noon. Wonder how I remember the exact time! It seems just
like yesterday once more! My father had taken to painting in a big way
and of course, my mother had been his muse. We used to reside at our
earlier rented premises at 160B, Sarat Bose Road, Calcutta 29. When I
was very young, my parents had faced real trouble feeding me. There
used to be a wooden rocking horse, on top of which I used to be
seated, before my meals. The gentle swaying of the toy-horse acted
like a lullaby and I was fed.
We have left behind those premises and have
moved to our posh-new flat at Lansdowne Terrace. The wooden horse had
been there even when we were leaving the house, never to return again.
But of course, it was in a sorry state. I still remember that the
book that I loved most in my childhood had been in the vernacular- ‘Toontunir Boi’
by Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury, the grandfather of the virtuoso film
director, Satyajit Ray. Sukumar Ray’s ‘Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La’ also resided
among my other bric-a-brac. Childhood is the time for some unalloyed
fun. It never returns to one’s life again. Make the most of it and
watch yourself grow into a glorious individual.
No comments:
Post a Comment