For those who did not grow up in India in the 90’s, I understand why you’re not teary-eyed. This is an anime version of Jungle Book, made in Hindi. It aired every Sunday morning for a half hour, and in those days, sans internet/computer/real-cable, half hour seemed enough. It aired as part of Sunday specials, and just watching the theme song brought flooding back to my mind – not a single episode from the show, but rather tonnes of memories of what my childhood wrapped in it’s warm arms. A 2 minute song became a high-speed salvia trip to my childhood and back. This very instant, I can feel the nippy breeze coming through my Grandma’s living room’s open window where I sat on the sofa across from the little TV. That Sunday, we had just finished a breakfast of Aloo Paranthas and I can feel the contentment that can only come from a good meal and a full stomach.

Such is the power of nostalgia. With anchors dropped into every part of our lives, waiting for the right trigger to send the signal – to hoist up and out of the dark abyss, fragments forgotten. Now gleaming in the light, you see tiny parts of your life, mundane and entirely forgettable when you were living them, shine bright like beacons to guide you back.

Living miles away from where all the memories from my first 25 years were made is difficult. I feel nostalgia pull at me more now than ever. I remember little tiny things from the city of my childhood. Like the way summer afternoons felt like they could go on forever, while I lay in the shade of a peepal tree in the central park of our colony. I would take a leaf from the tree, put it to my nose and take a deep breath, not realizing I was inhaling not just the scent of a leaf in the summer, but the essence of my life in that moment. Now, I try to recreate the peace I innately knew in those summer afternoons.

I often find explanations about certain behaviors or attitudes of mine in these recesses and hidden corners. In a teacher’s voice, in a movie or show, in my parents’ reaction to something. There lie the building blocks for my constitution. These memories serve to provide roots. Every interaction, every lesson/book/movie/fight/conversation/argument/kiss/poem/song, literally every minute of every hour, including this one right now, is forming us. We are works in progress, wheels in motion, art in creation. We’re dropping anchors everywhere and these minutes are what we will be hoisting up into the light some years down. We live to drop anchors in the right places.

Living on my own, working on my music and art as a young and healthy person, I can say with certainly that I will be extremely nostalgic when I pull these moments up from my memories a few years down. Other times I have had this feeling include the one year after I quit my job to work on my music when I spent 18 hour days producing/writing/studying music, or when I went backpacking solo for over a month along the west coast of India, or the first time I lived alone in a foreign country (France for 3 months). Even while living out those days, I was acutely aware that I was going to be nostalgic about them.

A complex infinitely-tentacled web, the way these minutes and memories cross-connect is astounding. A single event triggers a series of unrelated memories – an impossible multi-dimensional domino effect of nostalgia. Like the one I am having right now, watching this video clip of Jungle Book.

The quiet dark interior of my grandma’s high ceiling living room with it’s antique furniture, and huge fireplace, transforms into the little garden and nursery outside the house. And then it starts raining and I am sailing paper boats. The city of my childhood bathes itself clean now that the monsoon showers have hit, perfuming itself in the aroma of wet earth. I can hear the crackling rain, walking around Connaught Place’s circular plaza, with ice cream in one hand and my mother’s hand in the other. Now, I can hear the sound of a cricket ball hitting against a wall – in the gallery of our second floor apartment, the veranda of my grandma’s house, the gully where my best friend lived.

These are the places I grew up in. These are the rooms of my childhood.
And I realize, I still live there.

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