The pink cloud

Reminiscing childhood memories

That pink cloud passing over our horizon.

Images of the favourite toys, the broken doll, the empty blue patterned cream jar that your mother gave you to play with and became one of your much-loved pieces, the cheap plastic airplane an uncle gave, the bright neon colours you remember to date.

The early birthdays, colorful balloons in reds, pinks, blues, yellows. The chocolate cake in shape of your favourite Disney character. Early childhood… the blue tricycle, the first day at school. Once in high school looking at those working with longing. Thinking, when will you join those working and join the world of ‘grown up people’.

The Eid get-togethers where a five-rupee note present from an aunt or uncle meant a fortune. The lavishly laid out trolly, sweetmeats, sewayian bowl, channa chat, kebabs, homemade halwas and many other delicacies just made your mouth water but was shushed away by Dadi Jan to let the trolley be for visiting guests.

Dressing up in pretty taffeta ghararas on Eid and milads. The gold tasseled sitting mats laid out for guests.

Few relics remain of our childhoods; perhaps a faded photograph or an old toy, passed on to a child and which now lies forgotten in a cardboard box. The best relic, of course, is not tangible, for it is preserved in the form of our memories.

Childhood has an air of magic, a sense of surrealism that one takes for granted while experiencing it, for one has not yet tasted the challenges of reality.

A child watching a magician at a birthday party will be held spellbound and enthralled as the magician performs one magic trick after the other. However, to the child, or at least to a very young child, there is no ‘trick’, there is only magic. There is only magic that allows a magician to pull a rabbit out of the hat, or a string of colourful ribbons from his sleeve.

When we are children, monsters are real and they hide in the dark, and we’re too afraid to go to the kitchen for a glass of water at night because the monster from that horror movie that your mother told you that you really shouldn’t watch is hiding in wait and will snag your legs as you go down the stairs.

The letter from Hogwarts is awaited for with excitement and anticipation and even when it does not show up, there is a hope that it was merely late and that it will come one fine morning with an owl at the window.

Memories, though, are a funny thing. They erode over time and they are the product of a single perspective — ours — that romanticises and glorifies a period of our life simply because, based on comparison, it was much more carefree than our adult lives. Our adult lives are saddled with worries and tensions and responsibilities that eliminate the haze of naivety that we once held when we were young and sheltered and our thoughts did not extend beyond the limited sphere of our home or our school.

So, just how good did we really have it?

We realise at some point that the magician was just a run-of-the-mill magician, the sort hired at every birthday party, whose material is unoriginal and when we chance upon an old photograph we finally notice that ugly, neon orange tie that he wore. A simple YouTube video explains the tricks and illusions that we mistook for magic as a child.

Upon re-watching that horror movie, we saw that the art direction was quite poor, the special effects mildly mediocre and you can see that the ghoulish monster, so frightening to us when we were young, is just a cheap costume stomping around in the dark.

Our Hogwarts letters never came and we all graduated and took up less adventurous careers, like engineering, law or medicine, instead of something more appealing, like becoming an Auror or even the next Minister for Magic.

Moreover, we notice other things.

Our parents, we suddenly notice, are no longer young. One’s mother suddenly has wrinkles under her eyes; you notice your father has graying hair. They are no longer as active as before, their back hurts when they bend, they are more tired and weary and these things register with a slow, rising panic.

Suddenly, one of them falls unwell, very badly unwell, and you realise how fragile they are, how fragile everyone is. At some point in our lives, when we might be young or married with children, a parent passes away and perhaps at that point, even if we are middle-aged and the younger generation had begun calling us ‘uncle’ or ‘aunty’ a long time ago, we realise that our childhood is, indeed, over. If you lose a parent when at a young child, you realise the childhood is over. At least, a part of it. A big part.

That is when we first feel the first pang of mortality.

Our friends from childhood, those friendships forged in classrooms, suddenly disappear upon graduation. A decision to revisit your old school results in a mix of nostalgia and depression; everything has either changed drastically or you just don’t remember it the same way. Was the playground always this small? Wasn’t the classroom a little brighter?

So, really, what was it all about?

Were our memories really that exaggerated? Well, of course. To an extent, they were, but that does not make them any less good.

Perspectives alter over time and we change as people. What we like at one point, we will not like at another. What matters, I suppose, is what we felt during a certain period of time. Childhood was about being naïve and casting a haze over, say, that magician and his tricks. What matters is that we were happy.

Honestly, how many people have the luxury of enjoying their childhood? Not every childhood is peaceful and sheltered and peopled with individuals who love us and care for us. Not every childhood was privileged enough to also include backgrounds like schools or even a functioning, warm household.

Every childhood experience is, ultimately, different. Moreover, if one is privileged enough to have had loved ones and friends, or to just simply have enjoyed a period of peace, then it is worth cherishing in our minds and in our hearts. It becomes our ‘happy place’. In addition, it offers hope for the future, as all good memories do.

It makes us relate to our children, our grandchildren, to be sensitive to a child terrified of bony fingers scratching at the window because we can soothe it and show it that the bony fingers are just tree branches on a windy night.

The magician might not have been the best one out there, but he was special because by a twist of fate he was the one we encountered as a child at a birthday party and dazzled us before it was time to cut the cake.

It is important to cultivate that sense of magic in our children because when the parade is over and everyone goes home and the streets are all empty and the lights go out, they will remember those moments long, long after.

Long after the pink cloud over our horizon has passed on.