Memories

When I was a kid, for some years, my sister and I would spend a lot of time in the home of my Periamma and Periappa, partly because my maternal grandmother was living with them, and also my mother was like a daughter to the two of them, and also because for a year and a half, my parents were in Agartala and our education in the AP Board could not be interrupted, and another year when my mother was away in the US, we used to stay both with father about 2 km away and with Periamma and Periappa. Their home had a garden, large enough for us to play a lot of cricket very noisily, table tennis and also some card games. My uncle was a judge of the high court and a person with remarkable concentration and could work despite our shrieks and screams. Later on in life he became hard of hearing but not during this years that I am talking about. The house was full of books of all kinds that belonged to his children, our much older cousins, from various bound volumes of magazines of yore, to comics, to very heavy stuff like Goethe's Faust, and also vinyls of Beethoven and Bach and such exotic stuff as Flight of the Bumble Bee and some calypsos. No one would listen to them except for me! Not far were the City Central Library and later the British Library and the Max Mueller Bhavan. And Moghul and RK Libraries about which I wrote. So the experience of actually sitting with physical books remains indelible and I do remember some of the things I read those days. Later when I went to IIT Madras, there was the German Lab with lots of music, and the USIS Library in Nungambakkam, where one entered into a world of splendour, or large halls and spotlessness and a large collection of books and magazines that you would have to read and then leave. I think I had a card that allowed me to borrow one book at a time. They even had movies on some days and I remember seeing some. The experience of getting ready, riding a bicycle in the heat of Madras, catching a bus to see a one hour movie still seemed to be worth the trouble. I think the mind is an amazing thing. If you have to work for something it stays with you longer. With the passage of time, and with the internet, I do read and look at things, but rarely remember things. Of course I am 4-5 decades older...as my mind goes back again and again to Hyderabad and parents and aunts and uncles and grandmother, none of who is here any longer, each of these memories plays itself out, like those gramophone records at 77 rpm...