You know, lately, since I have lot of free time at my hands to think, my early life has been running before my eyes in a very different way. Of course we all remember our past and sometime think about it, but for me, these day, it runs across in slow motion, and in reruns. Perhaps an effect caused by practice of slow reading books, which I have been doing a lot recently.
Slow reading, is when you read a book much much slower than your normal reading speed. Reading each line of book multiple times, word by word, emphasising and investigating each word; trying to figure out why writer used only this particular word, or trying to find meaning in the punctuation that writer used; or do a lot of reading about the author him self- like reading his autobiography, and read books on the country he was born in- it’s social structure and history, to get a hang of his thinking, so that each line of the book, that I am slow reading, becomes more meaningful. In this process many hidden meanings reveal themselves. Like they are revealed when writer is writing the book. Slow reading is painful, almost as painful as it was for the writer when he wrote the book, the book seems never to finish .
This ‘slow reading’, seems to be affecting my thinking in some odd physical way. Everything seems to be slowing down around me, like I have more time to look at, and analyse, each action. It, simply, could be the age too; but, I am less willing to go with that explanation.
This slow motion rerunning of early life is revealing past events in a new light. From such angles which earlier seemed unimportant and, therefore, were unexplored. For example, the other day I was thinking about my grand family at my father’s side and remembering each of my cousins. How we use to play together, the bonding with some, remembering which still makes me feel a little mushy, and play tussles with the others. I was recalling their behaviour, their mannerism; and in the present doing the assessment of each of their’s potential at that time. Some of them were much smarter than I was, and some were powerfully built and bold; I, on the other hand, was the meek one who would not speak much and get scared even looking at a cow and start crying. I recollected what each of them was doing now. To my Amazement, if one looks from social status and financial position point of view, I, the meek one, was doing better, far beyond any comparison, than all of them.
Wondering what had happened that their and mine lives turned out to be so different I started looking back at the events which could, possibly, have made the critical difference. And I, in my opinion, was actually able to zero down on the key event which made the difference.
I remembered that during the long summer noons in the village, when after lunch all my aunts took their naps with my cousins in tow, there was one woman who did not sleep, and neither allowed her children to sleep. My mother. All noon, while whole village slumbered, she taught me and my sister alphabets, number counting, and Hindi alphabets. All other children would be resting and charging their batteries for a boisterous evening of games and running around, me and my sister would be getting smacked on our heads when we made mistakes in learning. Those days, then, we thought as punishment, which only two of us had to endure while all other children were having fun. And presently, while thinking about all this, it suddenly hit me that those noons were the reason that my life turned out to be so different from my cousins’.
When all of us were put in the school none of them could deal with it, they could not pick up at all, while me and my sister, because we were ready, prepared by my mother in those sleepless noons, flew. We caught teachers’ attention and they took us under their wings and supported us, while cousins were ignored as burden. It all became a vicious cycle for them, and turned out to be a virtuous one for us. And that small detour, there, made all the difference in our lives.
I was little shocked, too, thinking about its randomness; such a small act of my mother made such a huge difference to my life, what if she would not have done that. Like other mothers, she could very well have given preference to mid day rest, which, by the way, would have been well deserved because the days were very hard in village, full of physical labour. Three women of the house had to cook three meals a day for the family of twenty five and ten field hands (twenty kgs of wheat flour was rolled into flat bread each day, festival and sowing days were even bigger monsters), had to take care of dozens of barn animals, and look after two to three kids each. And yet, despite being not well educated her self, eighth pass, she had the good sense to gift us education. How lucky we were. Believe me or not but thinking all this I cried.
And then I could recall many other things too that made huge difference to my life in a very fundamental way which were completely accidental. As they happened they, very well, could not have happened in even slightly changed circumstances, and my life would have been altogether different, and for worst. The fragility of occurrence of such life changing events actually scares me thinking about them. How tenuous are the links that connect various event and make good a life; if one link does not present it self at the right time life could remain much smaller, and definitely much less meaningful.
-Pulastye
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