Delhi! O sweet Delhi!
This is the only place which I somehow feel associated with. For every person, there is always one place they feel they belong to, it may be the place they were born and bought up, or spent most of their formative years. Or it can be places where its love from the first feel of the place.
Honestly, I don believe in love at first sight crap. But with delhi it was different. What makes delhi different from all the places dad was posted in.
Well for starters we did not stay at a villa, surrounded by hazar lichi trees with my own tree house ( yes I had one of those hideouts, made for me in jorhat where I used to play tarzan-tarzan or commando-commando ). True I did not have all the luxuries of staying in an army cantt. But what i truly cherished in Delhi was the stabilty in life, Delhi is the only place where dad got posted and I did not change schools after ever 2 years. There was a sense of grounding I needed and I cherished it while it lasted.
I remember the days spent playing cricket in the ground with a broken leg of a table, playing hop-scotch with the girls, getting excited when rakshabandhan was aproaching, playing hide and seek in the winter fog in the open football ground, or playing chungi till your knees couldn't bear the weight of your body. The memories are too many to recollect but the few ones which are from the top of my head, they overwhelm me.
But its the people who make memories and I miss all of them, Mohit, my bestest friend, loads of sisters who loved me and adored me for the smartass goofball I was. I learnt what families are meant to be like. I flourished in the maternal care of Rampal Ma'am ( my math teacher ) who knew I was a brat who was busy talking to mohit as to why Govinda sucks or engrossed in a mean game of book cricket, or plotting as to how to rule the pen game.
The one thing which bound Mohit and me together was our love for the game of cricket and movies. He wasn't much of a talker nor was he much of ladies man, though sonofagun knew how to kick anybody's ass in a game of cricket or chungi. I still have my suspicion as to whether he doctored the hindi book for the record breaking 1000 runs he scored or the 570 odd runs in chungi.
I miss travelling in delhi buses where you got to hear the choicest and the most creative abuses ever, miss the girls, miss the innocence, miss the winter, miss delhi!. My first love.
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