A Sunday morning cup of tea

Isn't it one of the best times of the week - a Sunday morning? I do agree that a Saturday evening wins the race by a slight margin, but yes, a Sunday morning is still a close contender! As I drink a strongly concocted Tata tea in a vibrant red cup, and contrast it to the blue skies of a sunny Sunday, there is a peaceful smile on my lips, content in my eyes  and a flurry of thoughts in my mind. I start going back to the library of my life, and search for Sunday mornings in various times of my life, amidst myriad places that I have called home.

My first flashback brings back memories from Shillong - the Scotland of the East, where I was lucky to have spent my kindergarten years, thereby allowing the hills to forever emblazon me as a 'mountain man.' Those were days when dawn and early bright mornings would attract the little child in me (rather than the pensive fading melancholy of dusky evenings that became such a salvation as years passed by). Those were days when I would be content with simple, little things of life. Like waking up the earliest in the household at 5 30 or 6 in the morning. Then relishing the minty taste of Colgate, half of which would be a toothpaste, and the rest a sweet refreshing start to the day. If life was benevolent, then Dad would have returned from one of his outstation trips to the north east, which meant Amul chocolates. If life was too benevolent, it meant there were a few more crumbs of chocolate left in the drawer (in those days, a refrigerator was yet to be added as a must have in a household).

So there would I be, sneaking outside our house on the hill, walking happily in a large garden with either a piece of chocolate or the after taste of Colgate. Our garden would be covered with dried leaves shed from the numerous leaves of a few plum trees that dotted the garden. I would happily stomp over them to hear some leaves crackling and thus reach the boundary of the garden, with a low lying wall, beyond which I could see the large city of Shillong undulating over small hills. But who cared about a city - my attention would fall on the creepers and climbers that grew on that wall, and bloomed with small violet tubular flowers that looked like miniature morning glories! Oh how I loved those flowers - I would stare at them, pluck one and leave the rest (to pluck later in the day) and dance with joy. If this drove me mad, what drove me insane was the mock strawberry or the false strawberry - small, scarlet red looking berries that grow abundantly in eastern India, seeds on the outside, and looking like miniature strawberries the size of your thumb tip. Finding one of these gorgeous red berries in the midst of the dew laden green grass or yellow leaves was like a bonanza. I would stare at them for ages, touch them but never pluck them, for they would be few and far between and I had to return to them again and again throughout the day, dancing with joy each time.

In the present, I take a sip of my sweet chai and give a smile as I recollect my memories - childhood was fun indeed. My memory swings like a pendulum and goes back in the past again , this time, years later at Howrah - Kolkata's twin sister across the Ganges where I spent the later part of my childhood days. Sunday mornings meant waking up very early (I was yet to move over to the dark side). Sunday mornings meant being the first to grab the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. I didn't have time to care about the front page, the nation or the world. I had far more important matters at hand. Like checking the sports page at the end to see the records broken by the Indian Cricket team from the match the earlier day. If Sachin had scored a century, my eyes would search for the table that listed all of his centuries or the one that showed his ranking behind Desmond Haynes. That was not all. There were more pressing matters. Like opening the Graphiti magazine and reading the comics - Garfield, Legionary Beau Peep, and Moose Miller. But the killer was Blondie - no, not because I had developed a liking for fair blondes at that age already, but because it was the only cartoon that used to come in color and that too across one full page! The only thing that could beat colorful Blondie was Ducktales or Talespin in a few more hours.

I smile again in the present, chuckle 'Long Live Doordarshan... ', take a chai sip and search for the next stage of memories. They come faster now...

The comic lover becoming a music lover in the late 90s, and listening to FM radio early in the morning, humming with the tunes of the Hemant Kumars and Manna Deys...

The arduous student waking up and preparing for the engineering entrance exams, thereby tackling the most difficult Calculus problems from S N De or M L Khanna first thing in the morning...

Then, having conquered the mountain of the entrance exams, the Engineering student trying to sleep till late on Sunday mornings (he played Age of Empires and Wolfenstein till late night on Saturday) only to be woken up by Mom to go the bazaar to get the freshest stuff...

Years later, far away from home, in Lucknow, the same boy wakes up willingly at 7 am to grab the holy grail of sweet jalebis from the campus canteen before they could vanish...only to come back with a heavy belly and sleep again...MBA days meant never going to sleep before 2 or 3 am anyday of the week...

Even later, the grown up guy wakes up at 8 am in Mumbai to make Poha and tea, while playing Buddha Bar or Arijit Singh through the woofer system in the hall of his 3 BHK apartment, waiting for his friends to wake up....The smell of incense meant Chacha had woken up, while the sound of  a long shower coming from the master bedroom meant Justice was up...Or if it was the monsoon seas, it meant chasing clouds and cascades across the Sahyadris ...Who says, Sundays need to be relaxing and lazy?

My tea is over.  I stop thinking about my memories which are as unforgettable as they are endless. It's a sparkling Sunday here, great to sit on my balcony and feel the fresh wind on my face while the Spring sun gives the feeling of a warm assurance. For a brief moment, everything seems so timeless, woven by one word - Sunday. And a few lines of Ruskin Bond spring to mind: 'It isn’t time that’s passing by, It is you and I...'

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What are your favorite Sunday morning memories? What do you remember? Go on, scribble in a few thoughts...