Ah! That carefree life!!

When I was going down for a walk a while ago, this little kid in my apartment put out both his hands in a “Wide” cricket decision giving manner and yelled, “Stop it!” at me. Yeah, I wanted to say “Yevan avan…” but decided to humour the kid and stopped. He then smiled and said, “Go!” I found it so cute and said “Thank you!” to the kid and his joy knew no bounds. This kid Mone has always been a sort of mystery to me. I was taken aback this time when he acted traffic cop, as for a change, he had not shrieked and ran away, as he usually does. Well, to make up for all this cute act of his, as I came back and tried to pinch his cheek, he yelled and ran away, making threatening signals at me at a distance he felt was safe.
Mone is actually his nickname, the Malayalam word for “little boy”, the male version of mol. I knew this fact quite late, and till then I was thinking he was Monu. I always used to call him “Monoooooooooo……” and my mother used to look at me with some surprise, I never knew why. Until the aunty next door called him Mon, and I asked my mum why she spoilt the kid’s name like this. The big bulb I received was that I was calling him wrong!
Well, so much for the kid. As I looked at him and proceeded for my regular walk around the huge apartment in the night, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of the kid. He had not even started school, and showing people that he knew the words stop and go made him so happy. And here I know thousands of words but rarely am I happy with it! Cares change as we grow; they never remain the same.
I often wonder why I never remember what all I had done as a kid; all I know are things narrated by various people who had seen me as a kid. And with all these fragments of tales I put together that jigsaw puzzle of how I had been as a kid. I imagine myself crawling under tables and chairs as one uncle keeps telling me; I imagine myself gnawing at wooden sofa legs to put my new, growing teeth into use; I imagine myself looking down a deep, still-being-dug well, miraculously not having fallen down and imagine my mother searching for me as I do deep studies connected with this well. I see pictures of myself sobbing because I didn’t get to wear that pretty dress my sister was wearing for her dance performance and pictures of me smiling triumphantly after wearing a cousin’s nice dress (while she was angry and frowning standing next to me, by the way!). I wonder why I only cared for such things at that time? Simple things like getting a new toy kept me satisfied for days. A hassle free life then. No generation gap fights, no school, no university, no cute boys, no grades, no disappointments, no crushes, no failures, no need to keep up promises or behave any particular way. Life seemed to be so simple then. Wake up, eat, run around, eat, maybe cry a little bit on the way to get something done, eat and sleep. The best part was being put into sleep in the afternoons. Try it now, and all I get is a whack for sleeping. Wow, how much my mom might have fret if I didn’t take a nap then…lord, why should things change so much within just 18 years? :P
I wonder how we call ourselves grown up, and therefore mature, but get so difficult to please. Things just aren’t simple anymore. Yes, cares change as we grow. Mon will also get into this cycle soon with all his schooling and blah. And then there’ll be those endless tuition classes and ECA classes- tennis, cricket, dance, and so on. And he will very quickly lose his innocence as all of us did, too. Well, the only difference is that each of us loses it at some different rate.
But that is the essence of the whole thing. The fact that we no more are child-like makes us cherish those times when life was so simple! I now have slowly started thinking about how my life would take a dramatic swing again in another month and a half, and how it keeps oscillating between Singapore life and Chennai life. Uhh…maybe it’s not right to think about that now.
Like any normal kid, I too wanted to grow up quickly so I could be “grown up” and also get some attention that my sister used to get. Yeah, green-with-envy kid I was, at times! And as any other normal person, I wish I could go back to that age again. That age when I just woke up, ate, ran around and slept. That age when the only cares were toys, playing, and, well, I can’t even remember more. That age when I was free and umm, happy?