123- Of Mangoes and Rains

123- Of Mangoes and Rains

There are somethings that we enjoy doing not because we like doing them now, but because we liked doing it in the past. It is the memory of it that is the real source of joy and not the activity itself.

We go to an old city or an old neighbourhood and drop in a particular restuarant for a particular dish or a tea corner with quite ordinary cookies or a paani-puri waala or a walk through a park or a street, or a visit of an old theatre, or we revisit a tourist junction we go and visit all the places we had visited in the past. The same thing is at play in each one of the above - we are not enjoying the current taste or fun or beauty as much we are enjoying the memory of that joy. This is not to say that it is not any less enjoyable today, but it is the sweet something that it creates, the lingering after taste of a time gone by, mostly romanticised as the good-old-days, that is the source of that glowing abstract feeling called happiness. Revisiting it now is perhaps the umblical cord that connects us with what has been left behind, when everything has flown by,  providing us with a sense of rootedness or a semblence of permanence, in a life where one realises that nothing is permanent.

If only Youth knew and Age could! They say growing old is not a choice, but growing up is optional. I also have a feeling that growing old is not a particularly enjoyable process. It brings along with numerous disillusionments and shattering of myths - that daddy is not the strongest, that parents are not immortal, that heart breaks, that bad things happen to good people, that relationships are not permanent, that evil exist, that good people often do bad things, that there are so many things that were taught in the moral science section that are observed more as exceptions than as rule and that being good is not a default options for human beings but a choice that is fraught with struggle and requires more courage than an average man on the street has; so on and so forth. As life moves from one painful discovery to the next, its likely that an unencumbered and unblemished soul becomes a casualty. The loss of innocence is the greatest personal sorrow for each one of us, which ironically and tragically enough we are not even able to bereave or lament publicly.

So when we reach the tea-stall, eatery, paani-puri wallah and the park, street or neighbourhood, we feel a desperate need to connect, and sometimes to our horror that place has actually moved on, just as we have. They do not have any duty towards us to remain as they were, but we laden with our own need for an anchor want it to remain as it was many years back - because its being as it was, gives us some semblence of continuity and permanence. This anchor holds us back, roots us, provides something to hold on to, when everything else around is flowing by like sea planktons. Only a handful of us can attain liberation in being comfortable in the rootlessness that i describe above. Most don't event know or understand leave aside articulate what this need for continuity and permanence is like. They suffer and agonise but cannot explain why. But when they do visit these old place and enjoy the old pursuits they feel a sense of happiness and joy.And that keeps fuelling their need to keep going back, again and again.

It is in these contexts that i become a glutton when it comes to Mangoes and when it rains incessantly in Mumbai. May the Mangoes always smell the way they do and may the rains lash on my windows forever.

Guru