A little bit of background on the write up....
My dad being a bank employee, had to have a transfer every 3 to 4 years...and so along with him, our family moved on too.....thanks to the transfer, I could see different places and have friends from different places. On one such transfer, we were in shamshabad, then a small town near hyderabad. I was there in that city during 1988-1991. Very recently, I had a chance to go to that place again. The things that went on in my mind during my visit is what is being written about......
Around 20 kms from Hyderabad, there was this small town called Shamshabad which today is almost a big city!
When I reached this city, I could recognize nothing except a very faint memory of the bus stand, which stood well painted now. Enquired a person in a shop in the main road about the post office of the town and he showed us the way (Asked for the post office, because my old home there was above the post office). I saw the railway over bridge on the way, it looked almost the same. This was the same route I used to take with my friends from bus stand to home, every single day after I got down from my school bus. Almost a km stretch of this walk from bus stand to home flashed in my mind, when our taxi ran through this street. The driver stopped many times in between and my husband got down to confirm the route.....but I don’t think I was listening anything....I could feel the things happening around me, but with the thinking going on in my mind, I was just not in a position to respond to anything. 15 years back this road was never crowded; there wasn’t even a small house or shop till we reached the railway bridge. It was this part of the road where I and my friends would imagine being attacked by a robber, or getting kidnapped..... No doubt the movies had corrupted us. With just less than 50 paise in our pocket, we would imagine being robbed. I smiled, and a honk of our taxi got me back. I looked around and saw some apartments on the either side of the road...some huge shops of sarees, jewellery...... I guess robbers have a better chance these days.
Unlike the street I used to walk almost more than 15years back, the streets of shamshabad are so crowded....with so many vehicles and pedestrian traffic, our taxi was almost moving at the pace of a snail...ok...may be a bit more than that! With every thing I used to see on the street, I was getting nostalgic....traveling back in time and getting back to the present every now and then.
A board written on a closed shop that I saw made me giggle....it’s a very embarassing thing....but let me just put it down. As a kid, me and my friend on our way to school once saw this board which read 'TO-LET'. I think we were in the first standard then. We both wondered what it meant....and we went on to think what it would mean for quite sometime, and had finally come to the conclusion that the owner of the place was just being decent by writing TOILET as TO-LET :-) Imaginations....oh....
Our taxi had now moved some distance from the railway bridge. I saw a double storied building on my right and felt I was back.... With all smiles I told my husband that dad had a colleague who used to live there and that his daughters were my friend too....and with that needless to say, my mind went on to think about them. Me and his daughters, one a year elder to me and the other a year younger to me used to play a lot....but one thing that I still distinctly remember is our quest to find new colors....sounds strange? Well it was fun then, it used to be a fierce competition between all three of us.... Got confused? I am talking about the colors only...red, blue, black etc etc....we would mostly get new color names from the syrup bottles, and some times from the tablets, and sometimes through some colors mentioned in the clothing brands. The colors we used to discover were of course the variants of the basic colors, but then challenge was a challenge....Sunset yellow, Aaron orange, Carmoisine, liquid blue, bond grey, maine pyaar kiya ka pink and many many more.
Just as our taxi was about to take a left turn, I spotted a durgah which is standing strong even till this date. My right hand automatically went on to touch my forehead, the same act which me and my friends used to do as kids as a respect to the god inside the durgah. Just after some 100 metres from the left turn taken, our taxi stopped and he said - 'Jee memsaab, this is the post office on your right'. I was reluctant to get down. I knew this was not the place where my home was.....but then the board was reading loud 'Post Office'. I was still sure that this was not the place where I lived many years ago. But then I had to get down. I called up a dear friend of my dad, who still is in touch. He came down to the post office to greet us and take us to his home. I was just not able to control my curiosity and I confirmed from him that this post office was not the one over which our house was. He smiled and said if I still expected everything to be at the same place as it was years ago! Yes he was right, how did I think that the post office would still be in the same place even today! But thanks to him that he took us to my old home also. I met our old house owners and when I was trying to talk to them, I realized that I still can talk in Telugu. I felt as if these telugu words were hidden somewhere all these years and all of them were suddenly flowing out. With some grammar mistakes here and there, I was very well able to tell them where my parents were now, what my sister was doing and all those stuff. Got to know from them, that one of my friends had ran away with a north Indian guy (their local way of saying she had a love marriage), and that another friend of mine was now very active in politics, one more working in the US as a scientist, a small girlie who was a small baby then is an aspiring model today and most of my classmates like me had taken refuge in the growing software industries. Life has changed for all...it has taken everyone to places and none of them stayed there anymore........
After having some yummy puri sabzi made by dad's friend's wife, we thanked them for the hospitality and bid them bye and started off our journey back to Hyderabad. All the way again, till we left this small city, I was looking out of the taxi window like a small kid and awing at every single point and telling my husband, to be frank I don’t think he heard all of them!
"There used to be a xerox shop here"
" You know there was a biiiig grapes garden on this side of the road"
"Aaah this was a tonga stand, and look now its a garage"
" I was coming here to learn Harmonium classes, and you know my sir was blind but his fingers worked like magic on the harmonium"
"Oh my god, this doctor is still here, he used to give me chocolates to stop me from shouting when he gave me injections"
"Hee hee this studio, the photographer here once had a very tough time as I just refused to smile for a photograph"
" This...this playground, I have fallen countless times here while I was learning to ride a bicycle"
