On one lazy Sunday evening, i was peeping out through the window of my room after our usual tea time watching the blues of the sky dim down to grey, greys dim down to a huge downpour with quite specks of flickering of the street lights.. Along with the muddy earthy smell when the first shower of the season hit the ground, came back a rush of old memories.!
It was quite hard for me to grasp those massive changes my quaint town had gone through over the years. I wanted to pen those memories down before it fades away into oblivion.
On the whole, it was so distinct back then, both in terms of the people it housed and the outlook of it. I vividly remember this place being a such lush greenery - little bangalore as my sister and I would fondly call it. For every household having a minimum of seven to eight trees along the sides of their houses and the backyard filled with medicinal herbs to flowering shrubs that bloomed with jasmine, kanagambarams and chrysthamems, every house had atleast one plantain. Vibtant tubular yellow flowers and melange of fiery orange and red gulmohars, pillowy light pink flowers, those mauvy whitish flowers that had long stalks that bloomed only during the monsoons had their own specific aroma had carpeted the streets. What protected people who walked through the streets from the extremes of temperatures ( be it the scorching sun or a downpour) were those luxuriant growth of enormous, bendy branches of Albizia saman, or what's locally known as the thoongu moonji maram, Indian beech and neem that enclosed like a huge green umbrella.
A typical day started with a perumal chant that was being played on Jaya tv in the wee hours of the morning, At five what made its way was the dring - dring along with the thud which indicated newspaper waala in his bicycle, crossing past the house.. It was cacophonous, the pomping of horns made by the milk men, vendors bringing out freshly plucked seasonal veggies and greens with their distinct earthy smell intact, from their farms in a thallu vandi around 6.30 - 7ish every morning. What would follow was an old grandma in her late 60s, with her basket full of diary like home made ghee and butter and curd.
4. 30 pm was for the pori uncle in his mid forties, who came pushing his thallu vandi displaying his home made pori (rice puffs) and the accompaniments that's added to it, snacks like wheel chips, pori urundai, kadala mittai, pattani and so on. There hadn't been a day where sister and i missed buying his snacks. Then would come a retired security guard thatha in his bicycle who's now a flower vendor, with strings of malli and mullai and samanthi flowers made into balls, calling out 'maa' when he was about to reach the houses of ladies who bought flowers from him everyday.
Street used to be full of people anytime time of the day! For i got familiarised with people on their way during their morning walk just by a grin through my sleepy face as i hastily finish up my math homework.
Everyone in our street knew everyone else of respective households. People entered each others houses without a bit of hesitancy, people took care of neighbours kids and fed their pets like their own if they had to return home late for a day or two! Insta hearts, facbook thumbs ups or digital balloons, that wasn't how wishes were conveyed.
Three of our neighbours were very close to us.
The first one was an elderly couple who were nothing short of adorable and are here since the time my parents bought our house. The thatha was a retired police officer while the paati was an extremely active home maker. The elderly couple spends the time playing snakes and ladders for we could hear them roll the dices in between their giggles. She was the one mum trusts completely and to whom she'd have given the house keys in case it was a long day at work.
The second one was a my sister's then best friend's house, who always stays at our house past the play time, finishes homework along with us, sits and chats afterwards and never leaves until his mom finds our way to ours at dinner time calling out his name loud.
The third one were my mum's students family that consisted of six people, who would never fail to call us and wave a bye or hi when they walked past our house and the ones who always drops us Christmas goodies at our doorstep..
They were cheerful people who talked and laughed their heart out. When i go for my usual fifteen minutes walk after dinner, the old uncle and their daughters would engage in conversations with me. Uncle who lived his youth in Bombay, now Mumbai used to tell how things were back then in 50s and 60s.
I candidly remember him mentioning that a cup of coffee at Taj costed over 100 bucks even back then! After all those wise cracking discussions about life, politics, and etc, what one would finally hear before calling it a day half past 11 pm was a black and white bollywood, mostly of kishore kumar's or mohammed rafi's number sung loudly by the Bihari bhaiya who sells finger licking panipuris, aalo samosas and bhel puris at the entrance of our local community bus stop.
The locality is topsy turvy now. There are no more trees the cover up the pavement from the sun and the rain, people do not know who lives the next door, the houses that had people who used to bring instant smiles from my face were demolished and rebuilt into modern houses, the house where the elderly couple lived is now abandoned and locked, the paati now stays with her daughter and grandkids after the demise of her husband. My sister's friends parents had gotten separated due to familial issues and the kids have now fled to different countries for a better fortune. The appearance of the newspaper waala gradually stopped over time because reading newspapers is hardly a habit now, everything in is readily available at the touch of our phonescreen, neither does the vegetable vendors, insta swiggymart and big basket has replaced them all.
And its the same with every other person, either they've left the town or the world. I had no answer to the ‘why’ I kept asking myself time and again, that's when i realised that life moves on no matter what and time keeps changing things every now and then!!
