Memory

It is a nice feeling to go back in time and read your life in the form of papers you used to treasure then. Recently my house was painted and the result was a classy abode with my mothers impeccable colour combination. You can't beat her taste. To get back to the point. With the new feeling which comes with a house newly painted there was a tinge of the past.

We moved into our present house four years back with the same smell of fresh paint as there was now. It brought back a whiff of my efforts and ambitions ( I was preparing for JEE and Board exams then). Some of those ambitions realised, some efforts unrewarded.

And now while we were playing a complex chess game shifting stuff from one room to another, important treasures of the past were unearthed. Some of my poems which I used to write, my childish attempts at literature only makes me smile now. Some paintings I used to draw in a fit of artistic overload, I love them for the inspiration they represent.I would most certainly be offended if people thought them amateurish, which they are anyway.

The whole house was covered with cloth it seemed to me. It looked like a house from the ghost and previous janma movies where the heroine reaches an old house, the seat of the family and finds a potrait of herself wearing ancient clothes. The furniture of the house would be covered with white cloth. The atmosphere too would have a hazy look due to the dust. The reason for the dust in my house was of course the paint. Huge boxes of books lay around: the scholarly books of my professor-grandfather, the literary classics borrowed from my literary-grandfather, the assorted collection that was my father's. Add to this some of my textbooks from yesteryears in school with my scrawly handwriting. It often happened that after promising to help my mother transfer books from one box to another I would end up lost in one of them.

The school we used to attend before we came to Madras had the habit of presenting us with books as prizes. My sister being the stud she was would win half a dozen every year with me to add my modest one or two to the list. The result would be a really wide collection of titles from "Make Joy your target" to "Ramayana Part 8" to even "Animals and babies" a book about what young ones of each species are called with a picture of the same. No. My mother never threw away these things from kindergarten and I guess I wouldnt either. The paper stuck on the first page which proclaimed "This book is presented to R Amritha for securing the first place in poetry recitation is worth much more than the total number words in the rest of the book. I still have the bowl I won when I was in fourth class for a Fancy dress competition. It reminds me that sometimes miracles do happen and you can feel as happy as you like.

It is nice to go through old papers and read your life there. What with storing documents on the computer i dont get to see somethings I have stored precisely for the memories they represent. If I had to search manually for some paper I might chance on these but all I need to do on my comp is to click on search and a cute looking cat comes and meows and purrs at me and finishes the search in two minutes. I find my document no doubt and the cat gets patted for it. Nice arrangement you say, but I would like to go through my life once in a while. For my life is personal to me and a 'personal' assistant is still a third person and a 'personal' computer extremely impersonal.