Always the same

Over the last one month I have been reading a lot…it feels great to be back to my good old hobby of reading I must admit. And each of the books that I read were like gems in themselves. I started off with Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and then went on to Harry potter book 5 i.e The Deathly Hallows and then read Cane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer and finally I am just done with Leap of Faith by Danielle Steel…Four different books…with distinct themes…and four different experiences altogether….

Especially the book ‘Leap of Faith’ which discusses about a little girl’s family home in great detail just somehow took me to my childhood days when my cousins and I used to spend our summer holidays together in my maternal grandmother’s house…..My father being in a job with frequent transfer orders the only home that in true terms I can recall as a family home for me has been my grandparents place which always takes me to those childhood memories whenever I visit the place….and just as the book describes I am not sure it is really so or if it just appears to us as such because our memory of the place is so strong that even after so many years when I pay a visit to my grandparents the house still appears to be just the same..And I can still visualize all of us running around in the corridors bringing the whole house down with the racquet created by us…..with spankings from our mothers…and our grandmother protecting us always being on our side…all the delicacies prepared by my grandmother being equally distributed among us kids to the very last bite otherwise the raucous that we created…the innumerable weddings that had taken place in that house and it had meant as many rasgullas and sweets as our hearts pleased for all we kids…..with us feeding every single bit of paper found in the house to the domesticated cattle through the window railings…..the garden by the house that seemed like waiting for us kids to trample down it every summer and weed out every possible plant most religiously and get spanked which didn’t seem to matter after the triumph of our achievement…..And my sweet grandmother as always greeting us sitting on that very window looking onto the road awaiting earnestly for our arrival with the aroma of all the delicacies cooked all over the place that unfailingly invite you right near the cranky gate….

Some places just seem to never get old enough to be trampled by time in your memory and each time you visit them the place along the memories only seem to renew and one such place that the book talks just makes you think of one such place as this. I wonder if our kids will ever have such a place that can form their memory which is permanent and not changing and just stays intact with time in this everchanging world in this era…