THE GREEN HOUSE AND THE BLUE MOUNTAIN

Chapter-3

Boyhood and By Cycle

Collecting the smells, sounds, songs, sorrows, tastes and the appearance of boyhood makes me nostalgic. If you look at your own nostalgia closely, you’ll find most of it relates to the place you grew up, what you were wearing at that time, which are your playmates at that time like stuff. Its mental makeover that makes everything in the past seems better.

I still wish to look over from our blue mountain top to the hazy foggy village in December days. I still wish to sit in the third bench of our country school.
In my Indian boyhood I was subjected to religious submissiveness and parental humiliations.

Our country school was situated in a hill side. In my first standard classes was end in midday. Chanting Malayalam syllables in a hoarse voice was the only activity conducted in the school. In my second standard I had writing Thara…Para.. in Malayalam.

Our head master came in a by cycle. It is our guiltiest pleasure to release the air from tire tubes. Our bald headed head master gets angry when he realizes the condition of the tubes. My first encounter with the female sex happened in the school’s open toilet.
We boys are stand still and face the wall to pee, but girls normally sit and release their bowels. Once I peep to these sitting pee girls. That was in my fourth standard.

Our back school ground was a bushy forest. Fruit trees covered the bushes and normally the forest became our favorite arena of activity. We climbed the trees and pluck the fruits from the tree top. Some of them stock it for homes. It was ruthless rustic life.

Its Jojo’s idea to hire a by cycle and travel through our village. We prefer Sundays and Saturday to this trotting. Our cycle went through narrow streams, through tall trees, through lonely homes, through foggy mountain paths, through the valley of wetting rocks, through paddy fields, through forsaken churches, through LP, and UP schools.
While this travels my senses were brooding, I became a Robert Frost in heart and a Wordsworth in mind. Once while in our expedition we smoke a beedi butt in the shadow of a big tree. On the way to back to home we chewed several leaves to ward the smell.
Apparently my friend confessed about this smoking sin in a Friday prayer. I still keep the sinful boyhood habit.
(Will Continue..)