Wednesday, July 31, 2013

DRAWER FULL OF MEMORIES

Two years into college and almost 2 decades into life and all of it seemed to fit into one drawer. This drawer is a palpable form of the days and the moments I’ve lived so far. I was just about to place another memory in it when something else caught my eye. That was it, the next hour I spend reliving the last nineteen years.
I found a photograph of the first boy to whom I ever confessed my love. Before your mental horses start running wild I must tell you that it was when I was 8 years old. After the admission of my ardent desire for his company till I died, guess what he did? He told the class teacher. As lady luck has always been graceful towards me, this time too, it sprinkled a little bit of the luck dust on me. My class teacher was best friends with my mother who was incidentally a teacher in the same school. Perfect! As the news of my inappropriate behavior raced through the staff to my mother’s ears I thanked the lord for the wonderful fortune he’d bestowed on me. Amen. The ear twisting and the scolding by class teacher in the staff room and then my mother at home certainly added to the purity of my first ever romantic moment. Call it karma, but the boy is in the same college as me, only, he doesn’t remember and I’d like to keep it that way.

I tried on my old friendship bands, one of them was delivered to me by one of friends at school but was actually from a boy who I had lost touch with after I moved houses to the other end of the city. This was his way of rekindling our past. I laughed because whenever anyone asked me who the boy was, all I said was that “We’re just good friends.” Right! We all know what that sentence means. So much for the clichés!
A little bit of reshuffling and I saw two key rings that looked exactly the same and both of them broken from the same end. My friend broke one key ring and then I made him drive to all the Archies stores in the city to buy the exact same key ring. I didn’t like that key ring but I was mad at him for breaking the first one. After I told him that I didn’t like it at all, he broke the second one too.

I found a couple of my fallen milk teeth in a small jewelry box gifted by my best friend. She would hate it if she knew what I kept in it. Gross. I still haven’t thrown those teeth away.  The sea shells that my brother and I collected from the beach because we thought we could sell them back at home. Mom made us throw most of them away but we managed to save the best ones after a lot of crying. The “ghungroos” used in the two years of Kathak lessons. Sadly, I’ve lost all the grace and poise a classical dancer entails. The front caricature that I cut out from a t-shirt that I wore for seven years and couldn’t part with but had to because the supreme court (mom) had passed a ruling that I had to get rid of it.

Everything that I felt made my smile because it reminded me of the person I was and how I have come miles from that, or not. I am a hoarder. I collect these souvenirs and keep them in the back of my closet so that I can reminiscence my past whenever I want to. Not just think of the memories, but touch them. As for the thing that brought to light the time gone by, my most recent collectable, a pick up postcard from CCD and the hilariously horrible encounter behind it is a secret meant just for me. For now.


-Dinaz Malik, 3rd Year CSE