Yester Years

Growing up.

Growing up,

I was raised by a village. Home did not live within four walls; it spilled across courtyards, verandas, and kitchens—
a many-faced guardian, always waiting. Words, when they found me, came like old companions in unfamiliar places.

Afternoons were quilted with hopscotch grids chalked onto dusty courtyards, hide-and-seek behind half-built walls, floors sluiced with buckets of water until it swelled into ocean where we played at being fish, darting from end to end.

Evenings spilled with cards and dice—Uno, snakes and ladders, Business, and Super Mario blinking in pixelated glow. Bluff, racing, and believing the world itself was a game we could invent.— laughter that left us doubled over at everything and nothing.

We tumbled in friendly roughhousing, horsed around like free spirited fairies, our high-minded jibes softened by affection. Misadventures embroidered the days, always chased by that delicious thrill of conundrum staring us in the face.

And when night came, it untwisted like a sequined saree, stars spangling the sky with impossible shimmer. My tiny heart would thump, and stutter, missing its rhythm under that grandeur—too stunning to behold, too humongous to contain.

There were kite fights, the paper wings flogging against the wind until one was cut free to tumble away. There were ice candies, syrupy-sweet, dripping sorbet down our wrists like studded rivulets, painting summer in scarlet drips. We doled our secrets into each other pockets. Mills & Boons sneaked under pillows; Archies ruffled into satchels.

Bryan Adams crooning from worn cassettes, The Wonder Years scurrying through TV light. Cotton candies spun pink galaxies at fairs, giant wheel turned the sky into a carousel of light, painted clowns and jazz at the carnivals, birthdays peppered with frostings, paper hats and confetti, summers and fall vacations opening like illustrated story books and enchanted tomes.

We stoned mango trees until one or two green bellied shook loose. We ran wild with cats, startled snakes, teased monkeys in a zoo, Petted rabbits, and whistled to parrots that lived one as family. We thundered through sugarcane fields, the stalks slapping against our arms, leaving stripes of the sun on our skin. Picnics on mountaintops, gardens and lawns-concoction of childlike whimsy and unruly imagination.

Sweet post its from my brother pleated into corners like tiny treasures. His love folded in papers no bigger than petals. Grandma’s recipes susurrating like heirlooms, Ambrosian air from Ma’s cooking, her hands stirring not just pots but generations and Dad’s love kept hoodlums at bay—uncles and aunts chimed in each with their two pence and then some- this was the true inheritance.

Life was loud but never no eye or ear offending bedlams. Only the soft symphony of colors, firecrackers, and festivals, marking the changing seasons with tender mush.

Yes, we were spoiled. But urbanity was kneaded, and humility was related into our bones. Childhood was not merely lived—it was bestowed. Felicitous, radiant, and whole, it remains the orchard I still carry inside.

@Rashi M