Heck No! I am not going to bore you people with all of my memories!! Only some!

This week I had four days off due to the continuous holidays of Milad-un-Nabi, Good Friday and Holi and finally Sunday.  So I went to my home town, this time determined to clear all my things.  My cousin (who is a few years younger to me ) and I got down to clear the books first.  Ha, all those heaps and heaps of comic books, our prized collection of books ranging from romance, detective to philosophy.  Even as we were sorting out the books, we could not resist reading the comics.  One never gets too old where comics are concerned.  Or was it just with us?

We could not decide to give away the books or sell them off to the kabadiwala.  ‘Sell’, urged both– the older generation and the new generation.  We were naturally annoyed at this.  But decided to hold on to the ones that were still in good condition and had not been eaten by the moths.

Then we went on to our personal things and again were immersed in re-reading all those greeting cards we had received from friends and boy friends!!  We became those young college teenagers as we rummaged through those greeting cards especially by the ones who were trying to woo us.  Imagine, we had still kept those cards!!!

There were some letters too! From pen friends, from the rotract club of which we were members, and from .. you know who.  Soon we were rolling on the floor as we regaled all those days.   But there were also some letters that sobered us up.  Those were the painful, heart breaking ones.  We decided to tear them all up.  Both the ones that were pleasant and those that were not. 

And soon I found a trunk full of my diaries.  I had been writing them since I was 16.  And there were so many of them. In some I found dried roses, small notes, New Year resolutions and in one I found the lost Re.10/- note I had been searching for.  That note was my first pay when I was 17 which, I had got from a school for minding a class when the teacher was absent for the day!

After consulting my cousin over the diaries, I decided to set a bon fire of them. 

And that evening sure enough, we gathered in the back yard and lit a pyre of my past.  My cousin asked me if I was feeling sad for burning all those treasured memories.

I thought for a while… maybe I did feel a little sad.  But then, I told her “People usually bury their past, I am burning mine” and soon it was ok.  It took quite a long time for all those books to burn.

The next day we got down to it again.  And this time we sorted out all those trinkets which remained despite having given away so many of them.  These were a err… a little special ones.  But now after all these years, though they were still special, it was time to bid good bye to them.  So we stacked them up neatly in a small bag to be given away or thrown..or whatever…

Now, the best thing folks.  We found two neat little pouches.  You will never guess what these were!!

Those were our detective kits!  Yes Sir, Detective kits.  We aspired to become detectives when we grew up.  Those kits were not from our college but school days.  Inspired by the Famous Five, Secret Seven and other amateur sleuth of Enid Blyton, and Nancy Drew and The hardy Boys- the teenage detectives, we had decided on our future careers!

So in that quest, we had invented a written code language.  And we often passed on secret notes to each other written in our code language!

Those detective kits which we now found were still intact with its contents.  And the contents were:

A note pad (its pages now yellowed),

A pen (the ink now all dried up)

A pencil and an eraser (now hard as stone) and a sharpener.  (the sharpener in our kits is on its way to becoming antique, because they no longer make sharpeners of that kind now)

A pencil torch (ours did not have cells in it!)

A match box and a candle (both useless now)

A blade and a penknife (totally rusted with time)

A piece of string

A small packet of red chili powder (now unrecognizable)

Some money (only a few coins were left)

We laughed till tears rolled down our eyes.  Then we consoled each other, “At least we did something, look at today’s kids!  All they do is watch TV”.  We felt better justifying ourselves.  Well, everyone does commit follies in their childhood and youth.  We committed our share, I guess. 

‘So, shall we keep these kits or throw them away?’ my cousin asked.

‘A testimony of our foolishness?’ I asked.  Again we burst out laughing.  ‘Ok, we will keep it, yaar. Maybe for some more years. I said.  And so we decided to keep them - the only thing among the many treasures of the past.

So all I brought back with me after discarding away the rest was my detective kit and the Re.10/- note.  As the time to depart arrived, we grew nostalgic despite the bravery with which we tore and burnt the things that held memories of long.  We may have done away with the material things but the memories will always linger.  We live only once but walk down the long lanes of memory several times in this one life. 

As I boarded the train, I noticed again that the quaint little town had changed so much.  I could no longer relate to the town of my childhood and youth.  It has grown and expanded just as I had in all these years!