Do you have any collections?
The narrative follows a man’s life from a slow-learning child in a humble family to his old age, reflecting on his experiences and memories. As he grows, he accumulates both tangible and intangible collections, including objects of personal significance, while feeling detached from his surroundings. He has seen historical events and personal struggles, shaping his emotional connections to various items. Despite a modest life as a clerk and feelings of frustration about missed opportunities, he finds contentment in his memories and collections. Ultimately, he expresses gratitude for life and strives to balance past experiences with current realities, questioning if change is necessary.
Decades ago, a child was born into a below-average family. People used to talk about him as a toddler. He was a slow learner and would pick up things, incidents, and surroundings happening very slowly without registering them.
Like toddlers of his age, he was also treated nicely as he was the first child of his parents. He doesn’t remember his days as a baby. Narrations of relatives and closely related maternal uncles used to tell him about things he would do during those days. Gradually, as his brain grew, he started observing things, some of them stored in his subconscious mind and often coming to him as his past memories as a shadow. The memories of those times were obscure and blurred, but some of them recur often. The memories started to become solidified so much so that some of the poems, lessons and his thrashing are still fresh in his mind.
Stories of Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel are still fresh in his ageing mind. He often slips into nostalgic moments and tries to wade through the deluge of memories. As he grew, he started collecting things, tangible and intangible.
The toddler had become a boy. He used to visit his village and pick up many experiences, which were collected in his “bag”, which he always carried in his mind. They were piling up, and now, at dotage, he often groped his “bag” to recreate himself.
Many stories and a plethora of happenings added up. Some are good, while a few are not-so-good, and most are painful. A silent and timid boy was becoming even more introverted, trying to avoid people’s company. It added up to waning his basic fine human qualities.
An isolated person gradually becomes oblivious of the happenings around them and thus dumb. Though it seems a simple and plain fact, it is not that. The human mind is very complex and convoluted. Deciphering its role is still going on. Whatever crosses the human mind gets registered and stored somewhere in it, like the backyard of a house. It reveals many things on the occasional visit to it.
The developmental process is the same in every category of organism. It varies mutatis mutandis in different groups of animals and plants. Our protagonist is also among them, but his learning was slow. He took a long time to understand things. It was the reason why he lagged behind in his formal studies. Now, in the gravid stage of his life, he understands things easily and retrieves them easily. During his formative years, he was disinterested in reading extra materials except for his syllabus. He used to cram them without understanding the process and tried to regurgitate them in the answer books of his examinations. He managed to pass the examination, but that was not enough because the framework he was in demanded more. The years passed, and he crossed the threshold of his teenage years to become a young person of twenty. The world was changing, and time was tumultuous in the country. His mind was picking up incidents silently and putting them in his mental bag.
Slowly and gradually, the bag was getting filled, but still had space to accommodate more things. It appeared that it was a magic bag which stored many things but was still empty enough to store more.
He barely realised that he was becoming part of history. Events were unfolding before him. He used to be a part of them, though he felt detached. It was like being in a gusty river floating in a little canoe without oars. He was unconsciously picking and collecting many intangible objects, people call it experience.
He felt the brunt of the wars. Though not directly affected, he was a part of the Sino-Indian War of 1962. He distinctly remembers the days when the Bravehearts were received and treated with utmost respect and love while going on to war fronts riding on trains. People in large numbers, from all walks would flock to the railway station and cheer the army soldiers. They would garland them, shower them with love and solidarity, and gift them packets of biscuits/munchies. A collective, deafening slogan used to reverberate hours later after the train left. The nation met with humiliating defeat and lost a major chunk of land to the enemy, which is still in its control.
This and many more instances were registered. Time taught him many lessons, though he learned them the hard way. Like a calf that only realises too late that it has been separated from its mother and sold to a new owner, he came to understand many truths late in life. Nevertheless, despite this, the collectables continued to accumulate. He didn’t even bother to curate them; rather, he did not know how to do it.
Like many aspects of his personality, he did not know that he was an emotional person. He used to connect emotionally with any individual, place, object or incident he came across. With minor changes in his attitude, he remains the same emotional individual to date. He never discards anything that comes to him. A rapper of chocolate, an old pen, an old diary, clothes and garments, playthings of mud or wood, books, coins, currency notes, postal stamps and even shells of snails, everything was being collected haphazardly. His “prized” possessions were occasionally lost due to various reasons, like floods that washed away many of the things.
His unprofessional collection of objects was not more than a piling of things he felt attached to. Even today, on several occasions, he comes across things that he kept, which make him nostalgic. On one such occasion, when he happened to “discover” one of his old diaries, he found a pressed and dried specimen of a potato plant. He tenderly touched it and stared at it for a long. Things floated enlivened before his eyes when he picked that plant and kept it in this diary.
It was a time when the currency notes of Rs 05 were being withdrawn. It was gradually replaced by coins of the same denomination. The coins fascinated him so much that he started collecting them. He filled many plastic bottles with five-rupee coins. Gradually, he started using them in purchases. The digital Era had not started, and it was beyond imagination that the day would come when currency notes and coins would lose their sheen and digital modes of payment would start. It, nevertheless, happened, and now the digital mode of payment is in currency.
After several decades of his life, he often remembers his past and tries to calculate the profit and loss of his life; he finds an amicable balance. His life was an ordinary life like most others belonging to the category. A simple and almost smooth ride like the one is on a country dirt road with bumps and potholes, not very difficult to pass, his journey has been insignificant and listless. Worked as a clerk in a private organisation, he was surrounded by ludicrous people who were of his status but lustfully boasted about their physical possessions acquired by unfair means. At the end of the day, they are bare-handed despite having things of their choice. He feels no grudges about not having material possessions; others have accumulated but are incapable of relish them.
He feels comfortable with his “collections” and feels self-satisfied. Though sometimes a surge of frustration shakes him that he couldn’t get things he wished, nor was he capable of changing his life, he feels that the unseen and omnipotent Almighty has given him a lot of reason to smile. He tries to stay satisfied with whatever he has, for it is the only way of living peacefully with dignity and grace.
Every morning, he copiously thanks Almighty for granting him one more day to see and experience. He wants to keep himself abreast of with times and trends, harmonising past and current.
What do you think of him, dear readers? Is our protagonist wrong in his approach? Should he need to change at the far end of his journey?
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