#39 the taste of a past long gone
nostalgia, puppy love, simple old-school pleasures, one big life decision, etc.
Hey there!
I heard that you were dying to read more of my short stories and I didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer. So here’s a piece that I had been working on for a VERY LONG time. A seriously very long time.
It started out as a short poem back in 2021, that I decided to recycle into a story by the beginning of this year. It grew to the length of 6,000 words in June that bewildered both me and my very close friends. I almost gave up on it. It was never going to finish itself or come to an end, I thought. But even to my very own surprise, I finished the story yesterday and made its final touches today, with exactly 2053 words in it. I’m quite proud of myself at this point and would love to hear what you have to say!
So please, give it a read, which I promise won’t take more than 10 minutes of your time, and kindly let me know what you think!
An Invitation To Look Back
Do you remember the summer afternoons we spent together in my grandmother's garden? I do, with warm nostalgia filling up my insides as though it all happened just yesterday. Sometimes I really do think that it was only yesterday that I watched you spill mango juice onto your brand-new shirt and laugh aloud at your own clumsiness.
I can recall even the minutest details about many things that happened back then, more than a decade ago, much more easily than I can about incidents that happened mere months ago. Your laughter is one among those treasured possessions. It chimes along the corners of my mind like church bells each time I think back to those carefree days of my adolescence.
If I concentrate hard enough, I can still see glimpses and bright flashes of our time together, which to my fully grown-up self, seem almost too surreal to be true. Those glimpses are blurred along the edges like old photographs, yet the essence still remains intact, etched into the centre of my being.
Lying here under the sheets of my cosy bed in my ridiculously overpriced apartment in the middle of a metropolitan city, I reach for those warm memories like a child searching for her mother’s hand in a crowded street. My senses rise, fall and shift until they become the time machine that takes me back by 12 years.
My breathing slows. The four walls of my bedroom fall away, until they are no longer in sight, leaving my bed floating in space. I let go of the cool and smooth texture of my bed in the present and start sinking slowly, until I can feel sunlight on my face, a hard, rough tree trunk against my back and your singsong voice floating toward me like a lullaby. The vague scent of my lime-flavoured room freshener shifts to become the scent of damp grass, mango trees, earth and.. lavenders. The air is not conditioned to be cool by a purring machine anymore, but is warm enough to make anyone drowsy. All of these take me back to a familiar scene where the claws of adulthood and productivity could never reach me.
I’m lying on my back against the gnarled roots of a mango tree that’s almost as old as me. It’s my usual spot after those elaborate and richly flavoured South Indian lunches with my family. The most anticipated moments for me during those lunches itself include the arrival of my paati’s special paayasams and you, and in no particular order. For you, the seat beside mine was always reserved. So was my paati’s lime pickle and my thatha’s funny anecdotes about how naughty your appa and mine used to be as kids.
Once the meal was done and the table was cleared, everyone else retired to the cool interiors to either share gossip, take a blissful nap or watch TV. But, you and I, we always snuck out to the warm exteriors. For some reason, you found it worth spending those lazy summer afternoons with me in our cosy corner of the world, under my, sorry, our mango tree and I was always grateful for that
Behind my closed lids, I can see you lying down next to me against the uneven garden floor, with your head against the gnarled tree roots. You hardly ever cared about keeping your outfits clean, even if it meant that you got scolded by your mother later on. We were both too pure at that age, filled with too much innocence to care about clothes, looks or money, and way too busy being in love with the little, simple things - golden yumminess dangling from tree branches, squirrels hopping and nibbling at those rich fruits and Bhoomi barking at them relentlessly.
Another detail I can envision clearly about those afternoons is the scent. Not just of the nature around me, but of something different. Some foreign to that area, but so, so familiar to my seasoned senses.
In those tender afternoons, amidst the scent of the lush mangoes, dried leaves and earth, your fragrance, or more accurately, the hint of your lavender-scented talcum powder always found its way to me. A sweet smell that, over the years, I have come to associate with happiness, peace, contentment, joy.. and love. And sometimes, even regret.
For two teenage kids off on summer vacation, you and I spoke too little. Or maybe that was just me. In those moments, I was content and quiet, with my tummy and heart filled to the brim. So I let you do most of the talking, since I wasn’t much of a talker and also because you were. I liked to listen to you talk and you liked to tell me all the thoughts that fluttered across your big, squishy, nerd brain.
Besides talking, you also found several new ways of keeping two extremely introverted teenagers entertained in an era before the internet.
You were the reason we learnt to climb trees, fly kites, build forts out of bed sheets, chase butterflies, make up our own constellations, swim in the well, pluck water lilies and catch the fish in the ponds nearby. You were the reason we often adopted the stray puppies, kittens, squirrels, painted chicks, etc. in the neighbourhood and almost became strays ourselves.
I was the reason that we finally got to keep one puppy. You gave him his name though. Bhoomi - the earth that revolved around the two of us as if together, we were the sun.
We used to be so competitive back then. Once a week, we stood in front of the mirror, checking whose tongue had turned the deeper shade of blue, red, purple or orange depending on the ice gola we had just had. In a cardboard box back home, is an old t-shirt of mine that was once white but has since gained too many ice gola streaks, and now remains as a memento of happier times.
I remember how we used to spend hours in your room, listening to songs on cassettes. I don’t think I could ever forget that. It is where my love affair with music started. While my house only had Ilayaraja, MSV, T. M. Soundararajan, SPB and ARR on repeat, your place offered variety when it came to genre, language, era, etc. I fell in love with music during those days, and never got over it. Quite like the love I had and still have, for you.
Somewhere along the way, I started taking music lessons and learnt to play the guitar. The following vacation, you were the first person outside of my music class to watch me play.
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