A vacant Sunday afternoon. You are rummaging through your laptop, organizing folders after an incoherent session of browsing social network sites. Really so much clutter? You wonder. Pictures. Recent ones, such good times, times in between good times, and sometimes right in the middle of a perfect day gone ugly. You cringe at your hair or just how fat your arms look in a particular frame. Seldom satisfied. Wistfully you tiptoe into older pictures, the ones that you haven’t had time to look at recently, the ones that you forgot to put on you digital photo-frame. You make a mental note. Ma and Papa’s Rajasthan trip ’07.
You love the way your mom looks in each and every picture. You close your eyes and see her, younger, luminous and slender, a time when you couldn’t stop gushing about how beautiful she was to your friends. A time when you took the train to school, sat with her and did your homework in a verandah colored golden and red by the gulmohar and slept with your arms around her. A thousand frames of her. Morning madness, both of you rushing for school, she getting ready for a wedding, playing UNO and skipping ropes with you, she haggling with the vendors in the market, you clinging at her elbows on your way back from school, under one umbrella, her feet and yours, amidst the merde and magic. And no matter what the setting she always looked perfect, never a hair out of place, always stylish, always resplendent. Long nails, beautiful mehendi, lipsticks of a hundred shades, piles and piles of her exams to be graded, you at her side, counting points, writing grades with the luscious red ink, intensely aware of the privilege, and the power. The incense at dusk, the uber delicious kada prasad on poornmasi, and the softest rotis that only your mom made.
You come across this picture. Chuckles. Why weren’t my parents so much fun when I was still living with them? You remember their stories vivid in eastman technicolor, falling in love and the 70s hindi movie styled rebellion, peppered with anecdotes of their times at College Street, Outram ghat, the Blue Fox and Flurys, of how like all other things in the cycle of time these places have lost their flavor. You went past these places and wondered, how had life in them changed, what was it that inhabited them, and what had left? In this picture here, they look slightly disconcerted, their years of staidness and practicality weighing down this impromptu moment. And yet here they were, despite that, a carefree couple making a memory. You want to touch this moment, be the one who clicked this picture, see your father sulk as your mom coaxes him into that attire, and watch his face break into laughter after the picture was taken.
Your mind flits about in the space. In places and times you have never lived in, other than in the memories of your parents. There is so much you wish you were a part of. Once again.
Strawberry fields forever 