Many close friends have questioned me regularly, the reasons of my visit to Gwalior nearly every other year. I don’t have my parents anymore, I happen to be the only child of my parents and we don’t have any existing dwelling there. I do think deeply and wonder whether it would be far more pleasurable to be a tourist in UK, USA or the Europe. Yet I save money to travel to Gwalior and stay in a hotel there. It’s a 16-hour journey via Dubai to Delhi on an economy class, staying in a hotel at Delhi and then finally boarding the Shatabdi Express reaching Gwalior at 11 am.

I have more than 3000 friends on the Facebook and more than half of them, I have never met. I can unfriend them at any moment and vice versa. Yet we call them ‘friends’. I also have friends from both sexes with whom I had grown, shared poetry and understood the beautiful heritage which can only be Gwalior. I have learnt from them, tehjeeb and believe me I also learnt about Viking’s conquests, Richard the Lion Hearted, Normans, Saxons, various castles and counties in bonny old England.

I have developed such strong relations with them that they are far more than just friends, we have invested on each other and such a relationship cannot break so easily. I have invested too in the environment of Gwalior and I talk to the ground, trees and even the fort.

So friends can be more than close relations, they cannot be called connections. I phone regularly to all my friends with whom I grew up, just to hear the whisper of Hello at the other end.

Eagerly waiting to touch and smell the soil of Gwalior again!
  

 
Some memories don’t go bleak nor they falter while trying to remember them. My children say that I may be having the beginnings of Dementia. So I start writing every day, chips of remembrance of Gwalior. I long for Gwalior.

Let me take you today to Rawalpindi ki Mashoor Dukan. Nestled at the corner of Bala Bai ka Bazar and the Government Printing Press, this happened to be the biggest grocery shop in the entire Gwalior region. The owners were Sindhi in origin and had close relationship with the biggest sweet factory in India, the J B Mangaram and Sons.

I grew up in my school days with my Ma keeping cream biscuits of JB Mangaram in my tiffin box along with a hard-boiled egg.

I believe that both the brothers had migrated to Gwalior from Rawalpindi during the partition.

It’s raining outside today in East London and I draw the images of old Gwalior in my mind.

The Sindhi owner had impeccable manners and always took the list of condiments written in cursor English by my Ma. Soon we sat on a stool, inhaling the stinging odours from the shop. Two cups of milky tea were delivered and while we were sipping, a Tonga (horse driven carriage) was being loaded with all our groceries. The owner brought out a packet of Boondi Laddoos. In spite of gentle refusals from my father, he said, ‘these are for my son, please don’t refuse’. The Tonga started, the horse galloping, the Sindhi owner in a loud voice uttered to the Tonga driver, ‘make sure, you carry all the groceries to the inside of sahib’s home.

Such was the special relationship between the grocery shop owner and customer. There is no longer any Rawalpindi nor the JB Mangaram’s sweet factory. The sweetness of once a relation, lingers in the mind, heart and the mouth. 

Gwalior lives on.