I was riding pillion on a friend's moped this morning to work. While we were crossing Afzal Gunj, this odor hit my nostrils. It triggered a touch of nostalgia as it hit. It was the smell of my school's interiors, the first one I ever attended, in early 90s. I remember the smell freshly & vividly because I spent months, one day at a time, 6 days a week, dreading it during mornings & helplessly living through it between 9 to 4 pm.
Amid that acrid odor, there used to be a spell of home's fragrance. It used to emerge from my mother's sari when my face was buried in its folds, my tiny arms thrown around her knees, preventing her from going home after giving me the lunch basket at 12.00 pm.
Mother's touch felt home. Her sinister motive to get rid of me, targeting the larger good of her son's education, didn't seem malicious enough to hate her. Because of my distaste for school, my idea and experience of staying home was naturally enriching. I used to inhale the warmth of folded clothes that used to sit cozily on old newspaper sheets serving as mats on the shelves. I liked how my mother concocted ingredients into dishes that tasted homely. I liked the idyllic lives of shopkeepers - staring at the road on whose both sides their shops sat. Simply, I liked everything that seemed distant from school & possible without it.
Amusingly, I hated Sundays. Because being the pessimist I was born, I saw Sundays more as death knell to horror that awaited next week than as a break from discolored uniforms & semi-stale packed lunches. So Sundays went by in brooding. Saturday evenings seemed joyous. The world seemed like bearable place and I could relist the taste of Éclairs chocolates my mother used to buy and divide between me and my brother.
I used to pop in an Éclairs and jauntily walk to the unending green fields with white patches on them we called 'pitches'.
Those Saturday evening Éclairs were probably the last shreds of innocence I have ever enjoyed.
