Photographic Memories

Last night I was going through our old family photos after a long time. It was obvious which photos I liked to go back to most. Not the recent ones. Not the ones in the nineties. But the pictures of the 80's. My father always loved taking photographs, he still has one of those polaroid cameras, and we have pictures of him and our home in the 70's too. They look very weird I must admit, guys then seemed to be all thin lanky with long hippy hair and bellbottomed pants.

Of all the places we ever lived in, I think our stay in Riyadh was the best in terms of overall happiness. Cos in Malaysia he started smoking and thats when everything started going wrong for him. And Qatar was were my life started going awefully bad, and I just decided to become invisible. I don't remember anything about Karachi, cos when they left Karachi I was not even 2. But we have lots of photographs of our stay there, and looking back at them makes me wish I could just go back there.





Thats one of the most favourite picture of my parents. I wasn't even born then. The story goes that my parents had gone to the market for some shopping and when they come back they found Vikki, my brother, sleeping in the window. And my father took out the camera and took his pictures. Vikki was always the brat, breaking stuff, breaking rules, hurting himself, and all kinda experimental stuff.




Thats him and me in Karachi. We even had a tape recording of our voices from there, but we were stupid enough to record something over it.

I was only 4-5 when we went to riyadh and around 8 when we came back. So, I have trouble remembering a lot of things there. But a lot of it as clear as crystal. We lived in a 2 floor building, which had six apartments. Ours was on the ground floor. Next doors was another embassy family, and they had two kids, both of our age, the elder one was Nitin and the younger Nikhil. I didn't get along with Nikhil cos he was quite a brat. While Nitin was much more like me. So when we used to play football outside on the road, I always teamed up with Nitin, and Nikhil with Vikki. In the summer vacations we wud have a unsaid competition of whose TV was louder. And then all four of us would get on the bikes, and gather berries from nearby areas. Once, outside some Sheikh's house, Vikki and Nitin were on top of his car, plucking berries handing them down to me and Nikhil, and suddenly the owner of the car came out, and started screaming. So, I just ran on my cycle home with all the berries. And the three of them came back home half an hour later, and I can't really remember what happened after that, but guess they got mad at me.




Thats outside our house, it was a very big road, with hardly any traffic. And thats me, when my brother was teaching me how to ride a bicycle.

The school was there was good too. My best friend in school was Piyush. His mom was our class teacher. We used to talk a lot and she used to make us sit far away. I tried searching him out on orkut, but there are more than a thousand Piyush Sharma's. And I don't really know where he would have gone in life. He was my first best friend I suppose. There was this water tower in the school and had stairs to go to the top. And it was all open kind of. And since I was really scared of heights, I crawled my way up once, after being taunted by my brother and his friends. And it was so scary and then I crawled my way down!!




Thats piyush and me, and the lower picture is me and my bro trying to dig up some treasure I guess.


People tell me that I was a very chirpy and happy kid back then. I could get along with anybody, and I was always laughing and making others laughing. And that I could make a crying person laugh with the things I said. And now I could make a laughing person cry. "And we wake up in the breakdown Of the things we never thought we could be." I don't really know what happened. Seeing those pictures I can see a very happy kid who thought life was a cake walk and he was destined for greatness.




Oh thats me, doing a Bionic Six!! That was one of my favourite cartoons back then.

There was a time when we were having a party at our home, maybe Vikki's birthday party infact. And that night some of the boys were playing football outside, and suddenly someone screamed and called out. Someone had kicked Vikki's hand instead of the ball and he broke his hand!! So party cancelled right in the middle and he rushed to the hospital. He was always running into troubles it seems. But then he had more courage than I had. Like, when our parents would lock us in the house when they went to the market, and we discovered the spare key, so despite me telling him not to, he went outside and actually ran into our parents!! And like how we had this sticker book to fill up, and the stickers came on the side of a juice tetrapack. And he would make us go into the shop and sneak out with the stickers. He actually got caught doing it too, and I think they shopkeeper called our parents. But it wasn't serious or anything then. But maybe that was the start of all further things that happened in years to come, like when he was caught shoplifting in Malaysia, cos he didn't have money to smoke. I wonder if our lives would have been different if all that hadn't happened, and he had never smoked.

As for me I just look at those pictures and wish I had lived up to the expectations of that little kid. And when I or someone else disappoints him, he just behaves so bad that its hard to understand, and it just gets so messed up.




Tonight,
When sorrow becomes my shadow
And grief makes it hard to swallow
A walk down the line,
Of a life left so far behind
Feels like heavenly dew

--Kasturi Rangan (a fellow blogist)