As a growing up kid I wanted to be an old man so that nobody should stop me going to where I wanted to go. My mother won’t let me go very often out of the home. There was strict control for the moments to be consumed outside while I wanted to play tiny polychromatic glass balls with the street urchins on the road;
I wanted to play hit-woodblock game on the street with the neighbor’s oafs.
I wanted to climb the roofs to fly the kite; I wanted to go into the remotely located field to play rubber-ball-hit with all kind of boys and I wanted to just stroll by the railways line and enjoy the magnificent silence and the loneliness that the scenery offered.
I wanted to go free on my volition. My mother won’t let me go. As a growing up kid I wanted to be an old man so that nobody should stop me going to where I wanted. Later on, one of the poem I read about the ‘liberated soul.’ I thought it was about me.
And now I’ve grown up an old man. My mother is no more and so my father. Now nobody stops me where I go. Nobody seems to be interested where I go. Because I’ve grown up now.
I can still bring back the memory of small preparation that my mother did on my 13th Birthday. She cooked the rice in milk and sugar and put some nuts, covered the junket with wafer thin real silver- foil (chandi waraq). I don’t remember any birthday celebration after that. There might have been very many reasons to let go that day. Surely, poverty was one of them.
Then time passed like the Hindi song – ‘Rat jaise guzar jaye sote huey…’
I became rich in time, got plenty of worldly pleasures and possessions. And when I stood on my 64th Birthday before the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. I recalled my parents and felt a vacuum in life that was not physical but spiritual. It is pity that we often don’t savor those great moments when we travel through them; we don’t understand the feelings of those who loved us once and parted from us.
As we travel along the tedious bumpy roads of lie, we celebrate birthdays as routine and ritual without taking stock of what has passed by. Everyone knows what birthdays are supposed to look like? When we were young, we looked for a romantic dinner with a bunch of good friends and relations on that day. And as the years rolled by, we wanted a secure and happy evening of that day with a lot of extended families. We enter the silver zone and day of birthday winds up as usual.
And when you are alone in your bed and your spouse escaped into the zone of comfortable sleep, a big nasty bells rings in mind; a call that everything to do with birthdays ends up being exactly the opposite of what we think they should be: Our unsuccessful aspirations, expectations and sense of guilt. We failed in our expectations and that leads to feelings of disappointment, depression, and sadness.
Where we’re actually at in life may not be exactly where we expected to be at during this age. All too often, birthdays become a nightmare, a reminder of all the things we haven’t accomplished, of all the ways we are behind our peers, or all the things we are lacking.
I’ve been deluding myself into thinking that for the past decade that I’m still 21. I feel young in my mind. So when those birthdays roll around reminding me that I am a 64-something now, I feel the loss of all that time with little to show for it. Where did all those decade go?
As a growing up kid once I wanted to be an old man so that nobody should stop me going to where I wanted to go. My mother won’t let me go. Now I’m entering the twilight zone of my life. As I am grown up I want someone to tell me – Don’t go there!
