farmer's Almanac : memories

growing up in chandigarh, i used to jump at the chance to travel to faridkot in punjab during our school holidays or weekends. the house that my grandparents had been living at, was a special place for me, as it had the mysterious basement below, built as a concealed door behind a kitchen cupboard, as a place for refuge to hide the women and children in during the time of dakoos and robbers, and which we as children used a place of slumber parties of sleeping together as ten cousins got together under one roof, very rarely, and these times were opportunities for me to practice my story telling skills of horror filled humour spice imaginary fables dreamt up impromptu long into the nights. there was a big farm on one side which stretched more than the breadth and length of the house. these fields continued at the back of the house, for a few hundred metres, all the way up to the next house, which was my dad's elder cousin's house, and then after tayaji's(dad's elder brother) house, began their own fields and my favourite place in the whole village, their tube well and cow shed. the fields in my grandfather's house gave a lot of vegetables to the kitchen and a lot of hiding places during hide and seek to all the cousins. i was so awe struck by the green fields, i would ask questions from the workers at the farm, about what they used to grow, when i saw them supplanting cow dung with some white powder.

for the six seven year old me, these were times of great grounding. i knew the joy of living a life with the house surrounded by fields, soil exposed to the percolation of rain and only a small roofless backyard was bricked in where during monsoons me and my elder sister performed daily evening shows of Bollywood dances with the rain adding it's chorus as it splattered down on us. i long to live in a space like this, and when this paternal house and the fields were sold by granddad, to facilitate the family's lifestyle in the modern town of chandigarh, the trips to faridkot lost there charm, and i started making excuses on every family wedding or funeral, and electing to sometimes stay behind alone in the house, as the family travelled to make the customary appearances and face shows and laugh or cry collectively, according to the expected protocol.