Magic Seeds

               It’s awfully painful for me to part with any piece of material reality that has a memory attached to it. In my case the pain extends to my old archived mails, ancient greeting cards dating back to my primary school days, strangely shaped dried leaves collected during old walks, old note-books (especially the ones with graffitied back pages!), dried up ink bottles, pebbles collected from stream & river beds (from the Kallaar stream-bed to the Ganges river-basin, as well as a few odd ones from an old decommissioned aquarium of ours)… Oh... and I could go on and on with this list forever.

               I've recently discovered that my hoarding skills can be paralleled only by my equally honed misplacing skills. I do not misplace important objects like my pebbles, my pet jars or my toy pandas, but only petty things like our house keys, car keys, medical prescriptions, marriage certificate and the like. Recently, during an ongoing battle of survival between my misplacements and associated discoveries, I stumbled upon an old bag that I appeared to have carefully hoarded (misplaced) inside the belly of my mother’s old almirah… years ago. Without even opening it I could say that I had discovered a few more precious relics from a bygone era. A couple of rough note-books, an old wooden pen holder, a disposable fountain pen and a little candy jar filled with shiny red manjaadikuru.

               The rough note-book had always been my favorite school book. The book not subjected to any subjects, but that occasionally transformed into the book of all subjects whenever I forgot my exercise books. The book which never had any issues with my pen ‘gyaaning’ or ‘graffitying’ as occasion or disposition demanded. The book of doodles, micro-fiction, bingo!, hangman, secret exchanges & funny chat strips (even before the dotcoms came up with their [already-obsolete] real time online chat-room concepts…).The pen-holder and the old fountain pen were old partners in crime too. And for such a re-union of the inanimate kind; it was surprising how much it could bring to my mind so many animated memories from a totally different dimension of time.

               The manjaadi seeds lay scattered on my work-table as I patiently explain to my curious and fascinated toddler that they are neither fancy plastic beads nor sugary little ‘red pills’. She does not look totally convinced. Before tucking them away safely inside a pouch, I gaze unblinkingly at their rich redness. They work their magic on me...  transporting me all the way back to a strange wonderland altogether...  where once two little girls sat huddled together, bent over a patch of red polka-dotted earth beneath a towering manjaadi tree at the lush green museum grounds, under the cloudy skies, immersed in their chit-chatter, picking up their scattered thoughts along with the countless shiny red seeds from the shifting white sands of time…

Manjaadikuru = Circassian seeds. 

For a beautifully detailed history Refer: http://waynesword.palomar.edu/plmar97.htm

Photo Courtesy: Google