A room from the past

Today, for the first time in nearly 15 years, I stood in the room where I spent my earliest days. Childhood bedroom. Not relating any background details here but it felt so strange, so spooky. If it’s true that we leave a part of ourselves, a ghost, in every place we ever visit or pass through, how many different ghosts might dwell in that 14 ft by 14 ft physical space where one spent one’s childhood? There’s me, getting up in the morning, sullen and bleary-eyed, making excuses for not going to school; there I am hurriedly eating a gooey, half-boiled egg in a little bowl before rushing for the school van; reading about the Gingerbread Man in a Ladybird edition (reading level four), or the Jataka tales in an Amar Chitra Katha; putting my audio cassettes in a neat little row (with my prize acquisition, Amar Akbar Anthony on side A and Naseeb on side B, right on top). And so many less-than-happy memories too…



I hadn’t seen the room in over a decade and I hadn’t even thought about it (save for fleeting little memories where the setting was a given) all these years; but when I stood in it today it felt like nothing had changed at all. Which is whimsical and sentimental, I know, for everything’s changed.