The Summer We Danced To..

                                 

                                    The Summer We Danced To…

Vacations were the time when our old tape recorder could get it’s hands on brand new cassettes. It was the pre Internet, mobile phone era, we had sufficient time to just play and make merry. The days were bright and sunny, not hot or we never bothered about it. 

Those were the days. We live in a place with a paddy field to which most of our houses faced. It was far from the main road, nobody not even Columbus, would notice that a huge settlement and picturesque area, lay peacefully, within the green covers and the road too. Daily, we are fed with shades of green by just looking around and into the field, which would turn into a cricket or football ground in the evenings, everyday not just during the vacations. We could see people walking the road all the time, the number of vehicles that would cross our road were limited in number, of which we actually knew who was passing by by the sound of the vehicle. One such tested and proven sound was that of my father’s brother, whom I called Sunny Papa. His bike had a peculiar sound and the icing on the cake was the song he would sing aloud, while riding his bike. He still does that, while taking his grandchildren around for a ride.

The newly released songs were a part of the games we played. I still remember us dancing to songs from the movie ‘Kakkakuyil’. ‘Sushachechi’ the eldest of us all would choreograph for the first few lines of the song, we would follow it for a while, later, for the rest of the song we would dance to our own tunes, till our mother’s called us for lunch. Not to break the flow I would sometimes eat from there and continue playing.

There were few summers, like that. Either I was too little to remember them all or time moved past us quick enough, that the summers, which succeeded, called some for entrance coaching, extra classes in school and joined colleges far and wide.

Years later, another summer never brought all of us together but just the three of us. Shany Chechi had come from Pune. We sat on the wall that faced the field. It was still the same except for the shades of green that surrounded, which had grown into a much darker version. We didn’t have to talk much while gazing at all of it. Finally before jumping down from the wall, we had made our statement, “We could go places, and live elsewhere for a living, but our life lies here. It will be the place where we would ultimately come back to. It has the charm only we can find pleasure in. The freshness it offers will remain afresh in our minds wherever we might be.”

It is my hometown, that taught me the binaries of travel and home, foreign and familiar, and the different shades of green in a single frame.