Nostalgia of April 1 2389

Coming to this legendary game of Kalla Police or Chor Police , we had amazing fun. It was always me or one more kid, who got to chase everyone around and not catch them.

We would come back by eight thirty, no one had a watch , but still we knew it was time and our stomachs were growling anyways. We had a small breakfast that always used to be lovely and go to play.

We played and played and played. We stopped when it rained or when we lost the ball in the bushes.

Back then there were still green places left around, there were snakes that could eat you and kill you and not the other way around. And on occasions when someone did get a little adventurous , they would hit the ball high in the air, only to land up in one of the houses that never allowed us to play. We used to stand in front of them, sorry faced and pretending to listen to them go and on about being good kids, sitting at home and not playing around in the hot sun. we listened only until we got the ball back and then it was back to live action.

Here everyone was a cricket player, everyone was a cricket pundit and everyone wanted to have a bat first and especially if someone got out first ball , we were sure to see tantrums on the field. Our wicket usually was a tree and a brick, we were excited beyond measure when we hit a boundary and sometimes we only had to fetch it back when that happened.

All of them almost always played near my home, our home was the mecca of our road cricket diaries , the lords pavilion where our names are still etched in the broken window panes.

Now that April has arrived, the smell of mangoes is ever present, I look back and see if at all I need to eat one. But then it was all different, each one consumed on an average four or five big ones and still be hungry. We were always hungry and always thirsty and there used to be a huge jug of water kept outside our house for all of us.

Lunch was never skipped , lunch was an interim just after which play resumed . on too sunny days we chose to sit and just talk with each other, chat was a term that was exclusively reserved for Pani Puri and masala puri. None of us had phones but we had one notable addiction. Video games were the rage and not everyone had them , so we set about to one or more of these posh houses that had the luxury of video games and spent the afternoon , saying yes to everything our host told us to do. If the host was impressed with us , he would give us the nod to play with him. Whenever he felt bored that was the end of the video games session for the day.

Then we would roam around the road with our cycles, vary of the little traffic that still ran those days. We had competitions from one end to another, cycling, racing and almost losing our heads while braking. We fell too many times to notice, just got up , cried for a while and got consoled and we were up again like clockwork.

Nobody got sick in the summer, but the ones who got sick also wanted to play with us, and this was always a topic of contention with our mom’s. Some way or another we made time to play. No one had phones or whatsapp groups then , we just visited every home at 2.30 or 4.00 in the afternoon and rang the bell , most oftened answered by sleepy parents or grumpy grandparents. We got shooed away saying that they had relatives at home, their kid is still sleeping even though we knew that nothing of that sort had happened.

Some of us would go to swimming classes, Veena classes , speaking clubs and summer camps , meeting more people in the process but never really getting to know them. There was this craze of going to cricket coaching but this came in very very long into our childhood experiences.

Girls, boys , young and old; there was no distinction when we played. Evenings mostly was reserved for playing together. Hide and seek was the best of all, running around, hiding in new places, jumping between houses, getting scolded by many of them in the process. But it was fun.

What was more fun, was this social event called birthdays , where we got drunk on rasna and high on samosa. Gifts were always about ten or twenty rupees , nothing more but the excitement of opening a gift box was legendary. Plus you could get to show off to all your friends your latest plastic watch, goggles and the best part was the group photograph ,not to mention the food that followed. I loved the part where we sung the Happy birthday song in twenty different voices , each one trying to outdo the other.There was always competition, never a day did not go by that we were not competing against each other. But it was all healthy in terms of everyone knew everyones’s strength and weaknesses , mainly in terms of batting and bowling and sometimes in running around. We knew where these guys hid during Hide and Seek and whose mom cooked the best chappatis.

We always had time for television and mainly cartoon network and national geographic, most of the times we had no clue what was going on but we watched anyways. We also watched television with parents, the 8.30 to 9.00 news was the bell gong for the entire family to sit together, watch the news that came only for half an hour and then to start eating. Once done that was the end of the day. No more television, no more games. Lights out and good night.

And then another day would begin. April and May would roll over the blink of an eye and those were the best days of my life.

Written by
Sunil Sathyendra