Chotobela / Childhood

Chotobela / Childhood

(Written during my stay in Kolkata for my Bachelor studies at Jadavpur University)

The memories of my childhood haunt me in the light of the late afternoon sun – its dying glare and the golden mist, behind which perhaps the by-gone days have gone. I remember my childhood with fear — deeply afraid of the innocence which once was but no longer is present in my every day. I think of the time when I was small — physically, not as tall. Everything around me was a task, yet it didn’t tire me to keep trying. Like that time my mother had gone to drop my sister to school and I wanted to watch TV but the main switch was off and too high for me to reach.

I remember my childhood with a hopelessness that I cannot explain – not in a morbid way though. It is more of yearning (to go back) that is on the brink of a final mellow acceptance of a unidirectional life. I remember how those years smelt, my soul and the air around me. Sometimes I think it is nostalgia. Sometimes I think it is just climate change. I used to sit in front of my computer for an hour or so every day after coming back from school. I ate in front of the computer too. For long, my lunch was rice with milk and a couple of roshogollas.

I sit in front of my ‘laptop’ now, for more than a couple of hours each day after coming back from college. There is no bar, no restrictions on how long I can sit in front of my laptop, for I live alone. But this freedom isn’t freedom at all in its essence. It feels less like choice, more like drift — shapeless and quietly consuming. Maybe freedom is less discrete than we tend to imagine.

The world doesn’t objectively stop you from doing something, it creates conditions in which you just won’t want to anymore. I remember how I used to play the games on my computer as though I was in them. Road Rash, Winning Eleven 9, Delta Force, Cricket 2004 — they were a part of my childhood I cannot forget. But if you ask me what I miss the most I would perhaps surprise you.

My wallpapers. The wallpapers on my old off-white CRT Monitor in its glorious 800×600, if you still can imagine. I don’t know what it was but they fascinated me, so much. Seeing the world beyond my little city, if you so will, for the first time — I had a feeling that the world was beautiful. Today, even if I do not yet know for sure how the world is, I remember that feeling that a little bespectacled boy once had, sitting in front of his desktop computer clicking large, fascinating pixels on the screen while Ma fed him Dudh-bhaat (milk and rice).