Good mornings !

Its winter again.Time has flown by quite unknowingly for the past couple of months. Just didnt even realise when i flapped over the September and October pages of my table top. Like the frozen mornings outside, i am finding it difficult to resume writing.





Winter.A strange beautiful season.You can't trust the sun this time of the year;it's bright light outside but holds a bitter cold within. Perhaps when i still think of this season the first image that comes to my mind is of a furry white sweater which my aunt gifted to me in the winter of 1989. No clothing i ever had later could ever match the magic that that piece of woollen had on me.I used it year after year, in the most special of occasions. Catch any photograph of any wintry birthday or marriage in the early nineties and you would catch the tiny nawaab in his same white sweater, a little less fury with every passing winter.One year finally, when my Mom opened up the suitcases on the onset of winter and took out the sweater, i found that it would no longer fit me. I had grown up.




Those days we lived in a very beautiful setting in Tezpur where there were huge ponds in front of our house and migratory birds would fly in every morning from the Himalayan foothills.My Mom , sister and me used to go morning walk besides the ponds everyday. My mom would mark the calendar day every year when she saw the first migratory bird in the pond. I would generally not bother myself with such observations. I would rather play by smoking my breath into the window panes and write my name on it. Or chase aimlessly some already lost puppy and give him a good morning run for nothing.




Morning walks were soon replaced by bicycle learning sessions. That would be around winter vacation 1992. It was a chic read Hero Hansa , a few inches taller than i could stand. A ladies model. My sister was my cycle coach. She would hold me from behind and poor thing would run the whole field teaching me how to balance. I fell on wild flowers and conrete roads. Bruises piled up.Many days elasped till one morning, after a few minutes of ride i heard my sister cry out from far away ..."Hey look back once"..and i saw that i was on my own.It was such a nice feeling of independance i cant describe. Its a different thing that while looking back and jubilantly waving to my sister i fell down once again on a roadside gutter. It hurt a lot but who cares by then? I learnt cycling.




I got my first bicycle on my seventh standard birthday .It was a BSA Photon which my dad gifted me. It was another possesion which had kept my company for a long long distance in life. I remember going to six o clock tuitions in the morning through the empty streets of tezpur, not missing a single day of it for the sheer joy or riding.Morning tuitions in winters used to be fun again.We use to reach ten minutes earlier or the teacher started ten minutes late i dont remember, but we always managed some time for gossiping. We had an all girls batch before ours and Tezpur's whos who were in that batch.Oh now i remember who created that ten minutes of cushion time:) We were a batch of funny things, half of the batch was latoo on the teacher's wife and other half on the daughter.No wonder my excellent marks in CAT quants has some significant historic background too:)




When i returned home during my first semester engineering holidays for my sister's marriage, my dad told me he had given my bicycle to a neighbours son beacuse it was eating up unnecessary space in our house. A couple of days later i saw my neighbours son breezing past our house in MY bicycle. My mom told me, Look thats your bicycle. A not very happy feeling passed though heart.



And today its the middle of winter 2007 that i realise its winter and i havent smoked my breath into a mirror and written my name on it, or taken a bicycle ride, or sipped morning tea at road side stalls, or even chased behind a cow.



The simplest joys in life sometimes hang so high. Really, lifes funny.






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The Photographs: I ve clicked the first pic near Mulshi Lake,Pune.The second one is in the lobby of a building during Diwali time.

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