To Hamren...

    Just as I sit down and think of those lovely hills standing steady, memories flood me...

    

    The peace I nurture within stems up from times long forgotten; of days when life was unworrisome, placent and endearing. We matured as a family - me as an individual - unknowingly! i can feel it so suddenly warming me right now. It was surely those hills - the simplicity of the time; of our lives; of everything else around. Adversities so neatly tackled and tucked in place.
    

    True, I cannot go back to those times nor would I want to. Life simply edged its way slowly from those few beautiful years. I was so unaware of worries then.
   

    I can even smell those nights right now, the four of us travelling from one place to another, all of us tucked in neatly in our small car - our simple uncomplicated lives winding their ways through winding ways through winding roads with those huge, still and protective trees on one side and the silent hills on the other. i would sit in awe of the beauty of the moment notwithstanding the fact that I understood little or maybe nothing of its importance. Yet I know so well today it was those silent moments as I would stare silently into the dark through the tiny glasses of the car that it shaped me into who I am. No wonder i find it so hard to grasp the damning duplicity of a city slicker's life. Nature has always been a reliever - a relief from worldly worries.
   

    I remember once reading a quote by rudyard Kipling in a Ruskin Bond book that once the smell of the life in the hills gets into the skin of a man, he will, leaving everything else, return to the hills to die. I know for sure I am one of them! My nirvana lies in those very hills - those that gave me a direction to life itself.

(With my dad being in the Assam administration, postings in various parts of the state was the norm. This gave us a chance to see many places, explore many cultures and thereby, have a treasure-throve of memories wrapped inside me for eternity. The times I speak of here are those spent in this tiny town called Hamren in Karbi Anglong district in Assam. I must have been 5 - 6 years then. I remember the house, the place, the people quite vividly and at most time with a fair amount of retrospection. Though today, Hamren is inaccessible due to insurgents and no matter how hard I try, going back to Hamren, even for a small visit, seems impossible. My dad, the ever-enthusiast, who never left an opportunity to explore any place he was posted in, loved being here while my mom, the quintessential green-thumb, loved being surrounded by nature. As for my sister (Anwesha) and me, life seemed unfathomable as we kept wondering why we were all so different from the Karbis. It was a little later that Atreyee came along, making our lives more meaningful.)