Patna and then some

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about work. It's gets grimmer when I reveal that that also happens while I am on leave.

The other day and why only the other day - I have been cribbing about this all along the past one year - I said something about the responsibility of my job weighing heavy on me. Well, it struck me suddenly that doctors, young doctors, surgeons have infinitesimally more responsibility and that compared to them, my job is a breeze. No?

Patna has been great this time, considering that I have 'grown-up' so to say and bring into the equation a lot of wisdom now. Ahem, relatively. Wisdom to look beyond the petty difficulties of living for some time in a small city and a joint family set-up - the lack of privacy (that used to rankle when one was seventeen and one thought one had a life which had to kept a secret because firstly - just, and secondly - the parents would be liable to throw a fit at some of the ingredients that constituted said life), the unpredictable status of electricity (although all homes have generators and inverters now), boredom (yes, grown-ups can be boring. Oh wait, only those above the age of thirrrtyyyy-five. Now, fortunately, there is the laptop loaded with stuff waiting to be watched, there is the phone which is connected to the internet and also, one is old enough to engage fruitfully in adult conversation). So, really, due to reasons known and unknown, Patna has been different this time.

Mostly because for the first time, I saw it from the outside.

Till the time my grandmother, my Nani passed away, Nana's house was the regular haunt for all us cousins - an entire cricket team, or something close. We would do the same things again and again every summer holidays - watch the same movies - Naseeb, Namak Halal, Apne Paraye, Woh Saat Din - these are the movies my Nani had (which got robbed some time back, yes - ROBBED). We would go to the same places to eat, our favorites - the Chow Cart serving up huge quantities of noodles, delicious to our young and innocent taste-buds, Sweet Home with the best Pizzas in the world (those were times unsullied by Dominoes and Pizza Hut, but I still maintain that Sweet Home Pizza is the best I have ever tasted) among many others. We would lie in wait for this guy selling Golden Ice-cream to show up, banging his ice-cream box and we would plead with out mothers to let us have it just this one time, as if our lives depended on it.

Patna would mean cousins, food, movies, gossip, some fighting and visiting relatives one didn't even know one had.

My Dadis's house was relatively sober in comparison, the cousins there younger and not quite so rambunctious. It had a pond though. A green taalaab just behind the house, where I used to believe one could go and fish. I also remember us having ducks in the backyard - batakhs. Angry little things, always flapping their wings. And best of all, there was the bhandar - the storeroom. A dark little place piled high with all sorts of things stored in glass bottles and tin cans. I was a regular raider on those premises, stealing achaar (which people around would keep insisting would darken my complexion and lead to unimaginable consequences). I remember how my Baba and Dadi would constantly keep fussing over me, wanting to know what I wanted to eat and I would constantly keep asking for Maggie.

All this came to an end, when first my Dadi passed away around ten years back. And my Baba came to live in Mumbai. Then my Nani passed away around six years back, my Nana continued to live in the same house, though much changed.

And now that I have come here after almost eleven years, I see the difference. That feels like an era and I am looking at it from the outside. Reminiscing about simpler times, although I must admit, I was always a great one for complicating everything inside my head, a great, or at least an incessant thinker if I have to put a positive spin on things.

But all said and done, I don't think I ever woke up in the middle of the night, obsessing about holiday homework. No Sir, that is a recent phenomena. And I daresay, I need treatment.