This Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Look at Childhood Pictures
Tags: Future, Children, Memories, Travel, Journal

What if there was a way to travel in time and see what we would become, would you try?

Take a moment, a moment to look at this house on the right side of the picture, there are two windows, one intact and another one still holding on the broken wall, waiting for the moment to say goodbye. The intact window was my favourite window when I visited my nana every summer from Mumbai.

My parents would take an evening train from Mumbai central with all of us, we would pack ‘thepla’ (a Gujarati must-have travel food), which my mom would prepare in the noon and ‘batata’ potato mix to eat along. The 22-hour journey was full of watching the cities go by the window, well I will write about the train journey some other time. I was shorter than an average kid of my age, I used to stand at the window and look at the people and cows below walking by, occasionally when I felt naughty I screamed and hid away from the window, the people looked up, maybe waited for few seconds before moving along, I observed the cows never looked up so I never screamed at them. I made friends with a few men across the street who used to sit at the shop, they were also friends with my uncle (my mother’s brother). Somedays they launched a 5-star, it is a brand of chocolate bars, at me. I loved it. My mother was scared that I might fall out of the window while catching the 5-star.

And the above Preset view from inside. I was as tall as the aluminium barrel in the picture, so you can imagine why my mother was scared and that’s why she used to sit next to the window holding my shirt with her hand. The interior of the house was different than what you see in the picture, there were a sofa, 2 big chairs and a table on which radio was placed but now it looks like a warzone chemical weapon storage room. My nana used to sit the sofa with his bags full of work paper kept next to him, he always dressed in white shirt and pant, with a Gandhi topi to cover his bald head, I have no memory of seeing him in hair, maybe lost his hair before I was born, we didn’t have a digital camera and taking a picture was a project in itself, it required a going to a studio, posing, getting light flashed in your eyes without warning and then in a couple of days we would get the printed photos, so my nana probably had the only handful of pictures in his lifetime, but now times are different, my niece has more photos taken in an hour than my Nana every had of him in his life. My Nani sat on the chair or on the floor in front of the sofa, she came prepared with a glass of water and a cup of tea whenever my nana came home in the evening. My mom would then pull me down from the window while she went to the kitchen to get snacks for everyone.

One of the bags my nana always carried was filled with snacks for his children and grandchildren, and you must be guessed it’s colour by now, it was white as well. The shelf that you see in the picture, I remember my Nani stored pickles, dried chillies, dried mangoes and seasonal spices which she should need in future.

I don’t remember the color of the walls, i think they were a shade of cream or white, I later learnt that a shade of color which was very popular was called off-white, I still never understood the purpose of coloring the house off-white and not just white.

Come let me take you the room next to it.

This is the hall way, we just exited the my Nana’s room on the left of the picture and the close door you see is my uncle’s room, where he lived with his small family, he was married and had 3 children who lived there. This hallway was my playground sometimes, it wasn’t empty like in the picture above, me along with my cousins played in this space as it was the only open place for us to hop around. Well now after the furniture has been moved, it has a bigger space but no children to play there.

Come lets go into the room,

This room was a fully equipped for a family for 5 to live happily, it has a small TV which I never saw working. I used to play with my sister and cousins when my uncle was away at work. Sometimes, I took a nap with my cousins after lunch till my mother came and woke me up to go out with my another uncle for a evening drive on his motorbike. We went to the somnath temple on Mondays, then goto a cricket playground where local tournament was a spectacle, the teams played under the floodlights, it gave a stadium ambience, the spectators were watching along the boundary rope standing, sitting on the ground, sitting on a parked bike or car. Right behind the spectators were the street food vendors, flavoured icicle vendors, spicy snack vendors, and the most popular of them all were the paan shops which sold tobbaco and betel leaves stuffed with Arcea Nut’ or something which give a happy high. I always looked forward to going to watch the cricket matches and get pampered with icicle.

Come, Let me take you the kitchen, where the food for almost over 20 people was cooked by my Nani and my aunts.

Do you see those ceramic pots placed upside down on the floor? those were treasure pots for me, I was a disinterested eater as a child, but those pots had something which made my plain rice palatable, one of them had a sun dried mango pickle which infused over time with oil, chilies, carrots and many other ingredients. I loved mixing it with my rice and eat it, I would ignore every other dishes cooked in the kitchen. My sisters and cousins loved the pickle as well. It is called ‘Raiti’. Last 10 years, I have been cooking on a electric cooking equipment, when our ancestors discovered fire and used it to cook, it was species evolving moment, the cooked food brought many physical and life style changes in homo sapiens. But for last hundreds of years, we people, especially women who ran the kitchen, cooked food in a clay stove by burning dry wood or coal. The food may taste authentic and rich but the cooking experience isn’t, mainly when the kitchen is indoors. The fumes from the burning wood or coal were damaging their lungs at a slow and consistent pace and that was one reason i didn’t like going to the kitchen, as I would cough my lungs out.

The subtle mass transition from wooden to natural gas went unnoticed in last 6 years.

My Nani, my mum and aunts would make tea, breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, snacks, tea, dinner for everyone, this was their daily schedule, they would have to work extra long on weekends, when the men of the house or visitors were visiting on weekends. I don’t think they got weekends off, it was assumed a holiday for the men of the house but my Nani, mum and aunts were never given a holiday in their daily tasks.

The utensils, glasses, pans, pots lying in chaos on the floor depicts the picture of the how the big family was sent in to a spiral chaos.

Lets go to the next room, where I never went or was allowed to go. It is the storage room.

Rice, wheat, grains and oil were stored in this room in those big barrels. I noticed, we would have 3–4 months supply every time I visited the house, as I grew older I realized it was a normal practise in the community to store food supply. My generation would never understand why someone would need to store so much food, when one can basically get the food delivered in 24 hours- I have to point out that 2020 pandemic threw a glass of water on our faces to wake up and reconsider this practise and got me thinking that every practise we see our parents, grand parents or elders follow is because they had experienced a situation which led them to adopt that practice or tradition, whether it should evolve or change with time is the debate for the wise but traditions built over time should not be broken in a flash.

At this point you must be wondering how big is the house? well let me show you a perspective of it. The picture below give one view of the house from the terrace.

The we are standing right about the Nana’s room and right on the bottom left you can see the kitchen door. The rooms visible in the centre was occupied by one of my uncles and aunts, they were unmarried at that time. The room on the top left was empty, I don’t know why it was empty and the room which is partially visible on the top center is where one of uncle and his wife were staying who I always saw arguing with everyone else in the house. I didn’t like going there even when we were playing hide and seek. If someone asked my opinion on why the house is abandoned, I would point towards them as the initiators of the end, but no one would ask me. so that’s that.

I along with my sisters and cousins would run around the small open area right outside the kitchen door, it was favorite space and it had natural light and place to jump around. I was small so this space looked like a park to me, compared to my house in Mumbai, where we shared open space with my fathers family.

and the last picture for this story, the rubble of memories lies to be collected and throw away. If you ask any of the family members about one super wish, I would bet each one of them would say “I want old our times back”.