Of childhood and nostalgia

Paagla Dashu

gonegonagone

iwanttogoback

long, hot summer days - playing in the streets with a pack of children from my streets. running through lawn sprinklers to cool down.

PeakXV

I remember going on two-day fishing excursions with my Father. It was during school too. He would just call me in sick and off we'd go. I was always a little apprehensive about it because nobody else seemed to do that sort of thing (parent induced hooky) - but he said "son you'll learn far more about life out fishing then you'll ever learn in a school" and he was oh so right!

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Don't go to India ~ Pre-trip Warnings & Misconceptions?

natasha chanda acharya

Reviving this post started by one of my favourite IMers, who has done a dissapearing act...

There are so many childhood nostalgia moments...

I still remember my favuorite afternoon activity during winter holidays. I was in Ranchi, which is now the capital of Jharkhand. It is a hill station of sorts and gets very cold in winters. My sister and me, we would finish lunch and go up to the terrace armed with oranges. The quilts would be put out on the parapets so soak up the sun. An average quilt was approximately 6 inches thick filled with cotton, and stitched inside thin white linen sheets. Our parapets were 3 feet high with a narrow ledge close to the floor that ran around the terrace. So we would duck behind the sun soaked quilt and sit on the ledge and eat oranges. Behind the quilts, we were hidden from the world and would spend hours chatting and giggling over Lord knows what. Since I moved to Calcutta and then Bangalore, I neither get coooold winters nor do I possess a single quilt. So I still cherish these memories.

Anyone else want to share childhood nostalgia?

Aishah

Nice Thread this and great you've revived it,natasha. Loved your glimpse back - and speaking of parapets immediately brought back a very vivid memory when I was 4. In Christchurch we had an old Edwardian style large house with a verandah out the front and a couple of parapet-supports for the wooden arch above. As children one of our favourite things was to climb up on the supports and jump down onto lawn below. I jumped one time and was immediately violently sick. Put into bed, doctor inspected and a siren sounding ambulance rushed me to hospital. I had a burst appendix. My mother many times told me thanks to the invention of penicillin my life was saved.
Joyful memories (it was joyful before the jump!) are picnics to the beach, the river, out in the country for apple picking, blackberry picking. And longer holidays up in the mountains (Arthurs Pass).

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Bigzero

Ah, childhood memories!

Where do I start? a few top-of-the-mind ones..

- running back from school after classes in unbelievably heavy rain, making big splashes in the small streams that were once village lanes..

- spending most part of the afternoon on holidays on top of trees around the house ( mostly mango trees, the occasional tamarind, cashew nut trees as well ). Imagining that we were fighter pilots while sitting on small branches that swayed dangerously in the wind.

- the evening trips to the river half a km away - the crystal clear water, the wast expanse of exposed riverbed available for monkeying around, picking up largish pebbles one the way back and rubbing them together to see bright sparks in the dark..

- the thrill of successfully pulling up a pail of water from the rather deep well at home..

- monopoly, scrabbles or chinese checkers at home with grandparents and other kids on a rainy day

- the trips to the local movie theaters and the long walk back in the darkness, with our flashlight helping us along..

.... those were the days..

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natasha chanda acharya

Picnics! There were so many. I wonder now how as kids we would find the most incredible hideouts just so we could sit quitely or chat away hours, just so we could be away from parental supervision. Climbing trees and finding a comfortable branch to sit / sleep on, going down the river stream just around the bend and finding that special boulder, even handing durries / sarees to create little tent houses under the staircase, on the rooftop, even under the dining table! I wonder how we had so much to hide.

Aishah

Kids the same the world over - we also did much what you did with what we called hidey houses! The name got changed over the years to cubby house - more in Australia the last name I think.
Using blankets, sheets draped over chairs etc. There's just something about whispering so the adults don't hear you - I think much of the time we were talking about them!

Barkha

Hi Natasha,

What a co-incidence tht m meeting soemone at IM who has spent her childhood in Ranchi jus like me.. ..Ranchi means a whole lot of world for me still and my best days were the ones when I use to go to Morabadi ground with my uncle on his Bajaj Super scooter holding abt 10-12 Sugarcanes and then once at the ground we use to climb up a tower and sit n chew them (I use to chew abt 2) and watch the local fellas playing cricket..(I din know anythng abt the game then)...also going with my frnds to Firayalals to have the famous softy and as we wanted to have more than one softy we use to walk to the place frm home n back (in order to save the money spent on rickshaw)...and yes who can forget the Durga Puja festival...gosh..those were the real happy days...Missing Ranchi so badly especially here in Dubai when m so far frm my motherland..

rebellious

childhood....hmmm...let me see what i remember.........crying myself to sleep every single night, dreaming of toys and rasna, missing a big chunk of school due to typhoid, crying alone in the bathroom many many times, getting a good beating coz i wanted to grow long hair just like other girls in my class and sometimes for absolutely no reason................but i am thankful for each and every memory coz what i am today is all because of my past experiences.

natasha chanda acharya

Rasna and Maggie had just come in when we were growing up.

Both my parents were working, so that meant even when we had holidays at school, parents would still go to office... and we (me and didi) would be home alone. And the first, the very first order of things to do once you've waved them goodbye and shut and bolted the apartment door, is make a beeline for the fridge to steal milkmaid (that's sweetened condensed milk). My sister would at least run to the kitchen to get a spoon, I would just directly pour it into my mouth. Yummy. How I miss milkmaid. Of course, you get it even now, but for some reason I haven't bought it in years.

Hey Barkha!
Ranchi is definitely special. I grew up in North / South Office Para, and spent 14 years in DAV Shyamili. My parents and sister are still there so I go back every couple of years. It's not the same since it became Jharkhand, but it still holds all my fond childhood memories. We used to go to RK Mission in Morabadi almost every Sunday. And believe it or not, even after so many years, I still dream of Tegore Hill.

Bigzero

.... picking up ice cubes from the fridge and eating them...

Nick-H

sweetened condensed milk! Yes!

Ours, in UK, was "Fussell's' make.

One of the things I did soon after leaving home was to buy a tin of the stuff so that I could eat it unrestricted by parental guidance!

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iwanttogoback

ooooh, sweetened condensed milk!

did you know that it doesn't really freeze, it just gets very sticky and hard. i would put a teaspoon in an open can and put it in the freezer and every so often have a spoonful.

i'm sure it wasn't that long ago....

Nick-H

We didn't have freezers in my childhood!

It was that long ago !