in memoriam

one of the sustaining memories of the house where i spent most of my growing up years in is a shelf stacked full of old letters and cards. my father would take those stacks down periodically, often covered in the fine dust that characterises the steel city, and brush them clean. this would be followed by untying some of those stacks, in an effort to throw away items that did not score too high on nostalgia value. this would be a cumbersome exercise, as throwing away letters is something that does not come naturally to us. and the image of my father sitting for hours, mulling over these bunches of letters is quite strongly embedded.

i often engaged in electronic versions of such acts, in the days when email accounts used to be of limited capacity. from time to time, emails with heavy attachments would be deleted, or those that had become too mundane for posterity. or those which were better deleted, from the inbox, and from life, in a hopeless effort to start afresh. needless to say, with the advent of giga-mails, such efforts became less and less frequent. so much so, that gmail advertises itself as 'you'd never have to delete a mail again', or is it yahoo with its unlimited storage? all this comes at a price though, in that they reserve the right to wipe your mailbox clean if you don't login within a month's time.

hence, when i discovered that i had lost pretty much all of my emails between 1999 and 2001, that i was hit by a particular bout of sadness, quite unmatched by other kinds. it's as if i had not had the opportunity to save up, and it's as if a whole segment of my life was gone for good. a segment that also happens to be the happiest years of my life so far, spent in the delightful bubble called st.stephen's. my first years away from home.

i so wish i could hold on to them. the memories, the mails. the years. adieu, cbhisma@go.