Going down memory lane..

Every trip to India is incomplete without an extremely nostalgic trip down memory lane and usually this is jump-started when I tend to clear down one of my many "shelves" back at home. Last evening was no different. In an innocuous corner of the house where I expected to unearth nothing, I found a pile of some of my oldest books instead. Apparently reading was a very early hobby for my brother and me. And we had had the foresight to sit and record our names and the dates of purchase of the books on the front pages of all the books we'd bought. And so many of them were in the early 90s. And so many of them were the downsized "S Chand & Co Publications" which gave young minds a first exposure of many precious stories like "Jane Eyre" and "Vanity Fair". Indeed I found a tonne of these books which I set aside immediately to hand down to other kids in the family so that the reading habit was at least one thing I could inculcate in them early. And then there were the Sidney Sheldon novels... a craze that struck me in high school, alongside the Sweet Valley Twins series and the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys... Each book had a story behind it. Either they were picked up by my brother and me at a yearly trade fair in Chennai, an event we waited fervently for to visit the fair grounds and pick up a good deal on these books year after year with none spared... or they were picked up full price at Higginbothams or the roadside bookstores of Besant Nagar and Adyar.

What was most fascinating however was unearthing some of our first self-written works which we had entitled "BP Arts Creations". We even had a logo and each story was painstakingly handwritten. Now with a shrewd eye that has read some of the best authors in the world, as 8-12 year olds I still think we had a pretty good grasp of a "story line" and tried to lend an air of mystery and suspense to our stories. Ah those days.. when my brother and I would sit nights and take turns to use ink pens to fill sheet after sheet of the inside of a discarded diary of some previous year with our creative juices. And then I found some of my individual work too... things I wrote after my brother moved to the US and was no longer co-author with me. True golden years. Where all we cared about was scoring some good marks on lousy tests in school... on sneaking to the movies on the pretext of a British council visit (I'll never forget our tryst with Aladdin) and how we'd painted yesteryear's Chennai red with our exploits.

And so not surprisingly... after all the years gone, the mere sight of those books we bought together is capable of reminding me of the extreme fun I've had with my brother. And how I miss those days even now.. even with a changed viewpoint of fun.. with more things to entertain us.. and I think I now the reason why. India isn't where we live anymore. Its merely a vacation. A vacation that's busier than daily life elsewhere. A vacation without the main elements of the past. But a cherished vacation nonetheless. Here's to discovering more memories and more walks down memory lanes!