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The past and now-part3

Home was now close and I wish I could make the driver take off his vehicle right away and had dropped me on our courtyard. I looked at each thing, in which I saw my past, and recalled how they were like and in my mind I strove to re-enact what I had done there as a child. But each thing that I saw had changed and the changes were not the good ones. It was simply dilapidated and rotting, what was dreadful was the fact that people were still in those rotting places, that means they had been conditioned and now had become a different people. Rotting as the buildings and simply living out a rotting life.
The bridge over the creek leading towards my village was now dismantled and I saw people crossing a three-pole bamboo footbridge with a frail railing. From the distance one could discern the sound of bamboo poles creaking and some ladies trying to cross yelling out of fear at the tops of their voices. Yes, they were the frightened people trying to cross a makeshift  three-pole bamboo bridge which was to be used for a long time. Then apparently there was this hapless fear that I wouldn’t  be able to get home and if I couldn’t then what about my family. The fear made my mind play out several ominous pictures.
The home that I had known was an unexamined one and back then the place was free, people in the village could sit by the fires till late night roasting fresh potatoes and green peanuts.  Fear was there but it was the fear of what our parents would say if I had returned home late, the fear of being late for school or for a matinee show, but there was no fear that some “loony” with some fed-parrot talk of this struggle and that struggle would hurl a Chinese hand grenade or the fear that some masked Major V.J Singh of some regiment would break open your door and take away anybody he wanted with or without an arrest warrant, another term for cash memo.
Finally at home in the eternal like darkness because of eternal power cut I fleshed out the past picture that I had carved out and had long carried in my mind and asked myself if I could really place it beside what  was before me. It was still incomparable. Perhaps that was the reason why people who had left the place and had long been living in different cities easily lost themselves. Since they didn’t have the ethnic pride like the Japanese’s would have when they are in a chaotic Indian city. What they left behind is terrible and rotting and what is before is glittering and intimidating and for anybody with a meaningful name he or she would instantly become a speck.    
  

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