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Cradle of Life |
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by BS Murthy |
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Continued from “Pains of Regret” “While I was still in the cradle life had signaled that it wouldn’t be a case of the run-of- the-mill for me,” he began delving into his extraordinary life. “You know that kids don’t mind the change of guard at their cradle as long as it was kept rocking. But I was insistent that the one who began should hold on to it till I slept off. I was not even two then and I’ve a vague memory of it. That’s not all, in those days, women invariably used to wear silk saris while performing their daily puja only to change into cotton saris after it was over, and were I to be hungry during her puja time, I was insistent that she breastfed me in her auspicious attire without changing into her mundane dress, well I’ve my mother’s word for that. The first time my parents took me to the movies is so vivid in my memory. As I was drawn to the heroine, holding sleep at bay, I glued my eyes on her whenever she appeared in a scene. When she failed to grace the silver screen for long to engage my eyes, I sank into my mother’s lap that was after instructing her to wake me up as and when she reappeared. Well, my mother ignored my diktat, and when I woke up on my own, I saw her on the screen. What a fuss I made that my mother let me miss her earlier appearances! All my mom’s assurances that the heroine had reappeared only then and that she was about to wake me up didn’t cut ice with me. I was not even five then.” “How remarkable it was all that is apart from your photographic memory!”
“Without a solid memory to back it, wherefrom would a sound memoir emerge?” he said with a glint in his eyes. “Maybe we tend to have a grasp of the sensuality of the opposite sex well before we develop a sense of our own sexuality, and it was a teenage girl’s enamored look that ushered me into the turbulence of adolescence. That day, as I was crossing a house in a side-road, it is still vivid in my eyes, as though on cue I turned my head, (he had turned his head sideways as if he was reliving that moment) and found a teenaged beauty with her eyes lost for me. Oh as the fuse of her look lighted the bulb of my sexuality, the sensations I had experienced then are beyond my ability to picture in words for you. Though the nascent beats of my infatuated heart made me loiter around her place ever after, I could not see her again. But the memory of the manifestations of the sexual attraction I induced in her never waned, and so, I came to regard that house as a shrine of my life. Maybe, she was a visitor at the house who came just to wake me up sexually and not destined to fulfill my life in her possession. Whatever it was, are not small pleasures the lasting ecstasies of life?”
“How mirthful that childhood period was though we didn’t have a tenth of the exposure the kids these days have to the ways of world,” he said with a glow on his face. “But it was different with girls even in our days, why they tend to get exposed to their sexuality well before boys can grasp a thing about their thing. Wonder how they used to conceive those man-wife and doctor-patient games. Once, when a girl had chosen me as her doctor, and as others wrapped us up in a makeshift tent, she exposed her private parts for my physical examination and it was then that I realized that she was made differently over there. Thanks to the movies and the media, now all know all there is to know about sex, but it was only when I was fifteen or so that I got an idea of it from a married woman. Later with her sister, I had a mini affair; oh how we were always at necking and petting though I didn’t press further for fear of making her pregnant. Whoever knew about condom those days and by the time I came to know of it, my rival for her affection had penetrated into her life without it. Sadly for me, ignorance was no bliss for once.’
“But then, you can’t have the cake and eat it too,” he said. “Whatever every fool of an ass has a girlfriend these days while in our time even the smartest had to rest content with the yearning looks of the enamored dames. Why it’s the longing for love that shapes the nature of one’s love life and in adulthood it’s the childhood anecdotes that serve as antidotes to its vagaries. But the beauty of childhood has an ugly facet to it. How many lament that they were not of the Birla household as their later-day Amabani-like riches fail to offset their sense of childhood deprivation! Let us put it differently, being a Rockefeller is not good enough if you are not a Rockefeller’s son as well. It was as if my miserly grandfather chose thrift to catapult my father into the zone, but that didn’t help my father’s vision to expand the fifteen-acre family holding to make the grade. In a way, my grandfather was a colorless man and none seemed to have missed him in his life or death, not even my grandmother. Being a miser to the core, he was not even superficially warm.” |
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27-Apr-2013 | ||
More by : BS Murthy | ||
Views: 1249 Comments: 0 | ||
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