Chapter 1: Nostalgia

This story, I had long forgotten. Don’t mind me- but I’d rather have it forgotten forever. May be the safety of this big busy town that I live in, and the ease of putting my thoughts out there due to the internet, has given me the courage to finally tell this story or even just think it out loud. But it wasn’t always the case back then.

I was in high school and I had just turned 16 and my brother was 14. We were a bunch of delinquents. Always after some mischief or other, making our parents, teachers and others chase our tails. Now don’t get us wrong, we were delinquents, yes. But we were lovable delinquents. We lived in a small town of 800 people, where time took its rest, nothing ever happened in our small hillside town. The school we attended had a strict semester system throughout all the grades and had everything from kindergarten to high school right within its compounds. So, we never experienced the whole switching schools ordeal.

As boring and uninteresting, attending semester school was, we had one thing going for us, that was, we got an extra holiday break after our first term (mid term for most of you), so we had summer break, mid term break and a 12 days of Christmas break! We were lucky compared to kids from city schools in terms of holidays. On the hindsight though, it absolutely poured down during our midterm breaks, so it would have been hard to keep the school open anyway. Though we didn’t have the variety of toys and gadgets like the city kids, we had huge amounts of landscape to play around in our town. But the one thing we did without failing was going to our grand parents’ village, Every.Single.Holiday-Break! They were from my mom’s side of the family, my dad wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with his side of the family. By the way my dad worked as a supervisor at the hydroelectric station that was just outside the town, it was one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen. We were happy, a good lower middle class life, nothing too special.

Chapter 1: Nostalgia

That year wasn’t so different, I was writing my last subject of first term exam, the new sociology teacher had taken absolute revenge on our entire class. I remember vividly how dog shit my map sketch was. But as soon as the bell rung, all my worries seemed to melt away instantly. Though I said we went to my grandparent’s village every holiday break, my grandparents were long gone, they had 4 kids, my mom and three uncles, my mom was second in line. Her older brother was like the gem of the family, he’s sort of a technical advisor for various companies, but at that time he was doing his PhD abroad. My other two uncles took over the family property and carried out as farmers. Then my youngest uncle was still unmarried, he was about 12–13 years older than me. The other uncle married his childhood friend and had 2 children, they were 1 and 3 at that time.

Whenever we went there, we’d gather with some of our friends who were locals and also we would get to meet some kids from different cities who were also visiting, but their numbers would be far lesser during midterm break compared to summer break. Other than playing and eating a lot and swimming in the streams and lakes around the village, we’d also help our uncles in chores and other activities. Usually the other uncle handled the business side of the farm so he would often go out to town for market and stuff. So, we used to hang around our youngest uncle a lot, and boy did we have fun.