When you are two, the world is a big fat rainbow circling your cot. Your pleasures are limited to a warm bottle of milk and your troubles hardly ever exceed a wet diaper or two. But when you are four that is when the magic truly starts.

Suddenly your frail shoulders sprout invisible wings and your horizon extends beyond the borders of close family. You discover a whole new series of worlds waiting for you, reciprocating your eagerness to touch, smell, and feel everything new and mysterious. Every day you take a new step and that step is a new adventure and a novel quest. Every night, you see a new dream and that dream paves the way for endless possibilities.

When you are young, you make new friends and truly love them. You are totally oblivious to their social status or intellectual prowess. If he can throw a ball and play hide and seek, he is your man. That is when the only lines you know exist on the pages and not on your face. Your love is free of sensual and materialistic selfishness and your heart is miles away from conceit.

When you are young, guilt is still a stranger, its ghost hiding within the folds of sin and haunting only the towering adults around you. That is when sadness is just a minute-long tearful episode, but happiness is an ever-happening phenomenon. You have fears but instead of business losses and job insecurities, you are afraid of nightmares, thunderstorms, darkness, and ghosts.

You do not have any problems and even if you come across a formidable obstacle, well the warm embrace of mom and the he-manish chest of dad are never really far off.

In those golden days, I had a lot of friends both in the neighborhood and at school. But like all of us, my best friend lived within my head and accompanied me everywhere.

To me, she was the genie of the lamp, granting my every wish. She made me Tarzan of the Apes, when I wanted to explore dark forests. She made me Superman when I wanted to feel the texture of clouds. And she made me Blackbeard when I wanted to go hunt forgotten treasures.

She loved movies and books and derived her power from their scenes and pages. She taught me how to sail ships within the stormy environs of a bathtub and how to hunt lions on my grandfather’s lawn. When I wanted to race cars at that tender age, she just smiled understandingly and put a dinky in my hand. When I wanted to fly an airplane and be the captain of my own boat, she instructed me in the delights of origami. She even introduced me to an old mottled turtle in our backyard that could talk and tell stories of days gone by. I swear it could.

She never let me get bored. She brought me, exotic friends, to gossip with while I was sitting on my potty and helped me define shapes in the dark clouds. She is still the best friend of little boys and girls and goes by the sweet name of ‘Imagination’.

Unfortunately, with the process of growth, I am gradually losing touch with this old friend. We now lack the romantic intimacy and the mysterious magic of the early days. Knowledge has brought along many wonderful things in its wake but has more or less replaced mystery with logic and science. Turtles are now just turtles, even when rarely seen and there are no more lions lurking in the bushes of the lawn. Yes, I would still love to find a treasure buried in the backyard, but I never try to find it.

When I was four, I was innocent. Dictionaries generally define the word ‘innocence’ as ‘the state of being unsullied by sin or moral wrong and lacking a knowledge of evil’. It is all that but most importantly it means being unaware. I was unaware of guilt because there were no serious consequences of anything apart from a few cardinal sins – well defined by my mother.

I still remember my first seriously hurting pang of guilt when I shot a grey wild pigeon with my air gun. I held its trembling body and fluttering wings against my sweaty palms and felt it growing cold with a sinking heart. But well, that was a bit later in life.

At the age of four, there was simply no guilt and no difference which a simple apology could not resolve. I occasionally fought with my friends and class fellows. Those were quite serious fights. At least I considered them violent epic battles and majestic showdowns with suitable soundtracks of crashing cymbals. But there were absolutely no consequences. At the most, we stopped talking, and that too for a day or two. Remembering a slight was something not known in those parts and revenge was an unfamiliar entity. We were like true and honorable knights of a just kingdom with nobility and not malice nestling in our young hearts.

 When I was young pleasure had no name. It was just a mix of small joys, excitements, and adventures amalgamated within the hours and minutes of each day. I never had to wait or look for them. Instead, they came my way one by one and sometimes in hoards.

They came drenched with monsoon with promises of hours-long prancing in the rain and playing in makeshift ponds of murky water. They came riding the shoulders of dust storms – blowing ghostly whistles and shrieking like banshees. They barged in uninvited during long summer afternoons, when the adult world was asleep and took me tunnelling for earthworms. And sometimes they accompanied the bitterly cold winter nights while I was basking in the warmth of my cozy quilt.

As far as I remember, childhood was a landscape littered with endless possibilities. A mound of sand in front of an under-construction house had serious architectural possibilities, and a couple of colored paper sheets and a bottle of gum were enough to build an impressive glider. Everything opened multiple vistas of creativity and fun. A discarded nylon thread, a few inches of dirty elastic, fallen branches of trees, broken laundry clips, and ball pen casings – all were treasured collectibles. I could make a crossbow out of this junk and sometimes even a helicopter. A bottle of cola and a packet of ‘ginger nut biscuits’ were a feast unmatched till now and missing school for a day was an ecstasy deeply missed ever since.

Gradually and with the passage of time, my pleasures have gotten refined but also harder to obtain. Some of them even border on sins. My first sin, charmingly disguised and whispering sweet promises in my ear, also brought along guilt. I never liked the added company but had to tolerate it for the sake of pleasure. And gradually, with each new pleasure, guilt became a permanent guest.

My sinful pleasures do not come cheap and almost always, they lose their charm once experienced. They always come with a foreboding of doom and their glitter is often masking the dark shadows of guilt. I cannot let myself ride the waves of pleasure without a tightening knot in my gut, warning me of the fragility of my bliss. Now a bottle of coke is just another soft drink. And ‘ginger nuts’? I wonder where they have gone. I am now painfully aware of the dust of time muddying up the clear waters of simple pleasures.

Guilt introduced me to fear over drinks one day and from then onwards, it became a secret club with an ever-growing members’ list. When I was a kid, like all my friends, I collected stamps and coins in beautiful leather and velvet-bound albums. But now, I just collect fears in a gigantic and tightly locked box of guilt. I fear for the loss of possessions, I fear for the future of my kids and sometimes I fear fear itself. Fear has aged me prematurely and plays games with my mind. But no matter how much I dislike it, I cannot get rid of its poisonous existence corrupting my soul and seeping into my tired bones.

I used to have a nightmare repeatedly when I was about six. It was full of eerie sepia landscapes, dead bodies, and ghoulish distorted faces. I still remember waking up trembling with my mother hugging me and soothing my paralyzing fear. Her warm lap seemed to be the safest place on earth and a simple solution to all my problems – both large and small. She had the power to cure a bloody nose and a nasty bump on my head with a kiss. She knew the art of treating fevers, sprained ankles, and headaches with love and attention. Home-works, exams, difficult teachers, she had a ready solution for all. She was a soothsayer, enchantress, supercomputer, and counselor – all nicely packaged into one.

Now I have grown older now and my troubles are far more complex than a nightmare or a twisted ankle. My fears have taken a gigantic leap from incomplete homework to an uncertain future. There are fewer solutions to my problems now and I have to find them myself. But unfortunately, at this time of need, my mother has lost her touch. Or maybe it is me and my grown-up world that has cruelly negated her magical abilities. I wish I could hide my head in her lap and forget the matter-of-fact attitude of the world around me but I am hindered by my own realities. And this makes me wish; of a never ending childhood and everlasting songs of innocence.

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