Those Were the Days

"Memory is the only paradise in which we can live again and again" is an old Chinese saying ... and Allahabad for me remains a paradise where the heart yearns to go again and again.

Allahabad! A name that conjures up for me years and years of memories entwined with my growing years in the city of Prayag, on the Ganges, at the Jumna, making it the holy pilgrim place of Sangam, a name renowned, revered and mentioned since time immemorial. Yet for me it is just a simple name that spells home and just home, a fountain of young childhood memories that fail to leave me in the race with time.

Marriage brought me out of Allahabad to be set in the soils of Madhya Pradesh, yet going to Allahabad every summer was an eagerly-awaited vacation, thus the familiarity with the place never faded, it in fact deepened my nostalgic love for the soil of Prayag.

Allahabad, surely, had its own enticing charm with its serene quiet, air. There was a Victorian spell enveloping the city, a grave culture breathed in and out of its road and lanes... and the names added a certain identity to it...Alfred Park, Minto Park, Elgin Road, George Town, Clive Road...names that only spelt discipline and grandeur and thus the place itself needed no separate introduction.

Every summer it remained for me a haven of relaxed enjoyment in the lush green lawns of 18 Tagore Town, enjoying the moonlit nights, the air with the fragrance of wet lawns, the cool breeze so typical of Allahabad in summer nights after a scorching day spent in khus-cooled rooms, quenching our thirst with chilled earth-scented water from earthern surais, buying the best mangoes of the season. So relaxed and stately was life then. The city oozed an endearing air, making my young mind want nothing above these luxuries. The years rolled by, age took its toll, and those closest to my heart left me. Suddenly, Allahabad was snapped off my calendar only, broken off, as if all roads to my dream city were closed to me for ever. Ten years piled up, one over another, and Allahabad seemed lost in the distance of time--- a hazy memory wanting to get back its colour often knocked at my heart, yet I could not make it to the same Allahabad again.

Finally, when my heart stood bereft of all those dear ones of Allahabad, I took the firm decision that once again I must tread that soil on my own, all alone, with just memories as my companions to draw on the lost strands of love and familiarity that Allahabad had for me. So this winter I made it to Allahabad again. My heart was heavy, eyes were moist, but somewhere a hope quivered in me that maybe my Allahabad too was waiting for me.

As I stepped out of the station, I felt myself losing my identity of the place--- everything seemed so strange, so new. I kept searching for some familiarity somewhere, but nothing of that old warmth could I find anywhere. That calm, serene, majestic beauty of the city with its quiet roads, huge sprawling lawns, cool, dark, long-veranda bungalows was nowhere...all was lost to modern stingy suffocating flats and small accommodation with modern touches---as if that lilting tune of soft music that seemed to blow through the lawns were lost to crackling, ear-dinning loud horns of posh cars, autos, a hoarding race to rise above all was strangulating the air, each house trying to grapple with it. The serenity of the city, the broad quiet roads bordered with thick foliage were no more, the passing through these roads in the quiet itself had been a royal pleasure---nothing was left of that. Residences, shops, clinics over crowded all over. Those old, friendly rickshaw pullers, mouth-watering aromas of sweet marts of Civil Lines all seemed lost somewhere, all drowned under a modern Allahabad.

My vacant eyes went searching here and beyond for that same greenery, that same peace of moonlit nights, the sound of rain on thirsty green lawns, but all seemed a forgotten story, yet it was still Allahabad. Maybe as loving to some young heart as it had been to me when I was young. It was the same Allahabad, the city of Ganga-Jumna and Saraswati, may be its soil still beckoned to me to reassure me, "I am still there, please search me out". But I stood lost, gazing at this new city through a haze of memories far off in the horizon.