This time it was different, because knowing I would have very well died the day I was born was not easy to gulp in spot on. As I went around the hospital in which I was born, the one thing that quite contradictorily came into prominence was that it was also the hospital where I could have died. Well there's a lot more to add to just mere nostalgia, to memories of back when I was not even a day old, and to a place which I left when I was two. The visit left me completely awestruck, because I never knew that people at Asansol know me as well as people in Kolkata do, and the one thing that hurt me the most that I knew them as characters of another fiction.
It all began with the visit to the bedroom where I slept the first night at a home. The landlord seemed to have followed me intricately throughout my transition from a baby to a man. The room still was as we had left it(so did my parents remark) for my second home, a mere fifteen minutes away from the first. I was supposedly a six-month old kid then. Now the landlord of our second home had sold the place and went to live at a different place altogether. So neither a complete view of the room I used to live in, nor any sneak peaks of the same. All I could see was the balcony where I used sit as a child of one, one and a half and maybe just two. My mother believes that the repeated stories I would hear from her and dad, made me picturize the whole place, yet I claim that I clearly recall a few incidents and a few places, and silhouettes of a few people, and every time I put forward the claim, she would remain awestruck for the exact, correct descriptions and the next moment, invalidate it by saying it was again a story I heard times and times over. On a personal note, I still have hazy memories of my days back then, and that made the trip a whole lot more nostalgic than I expected it to be(I never expected a single feat of nostalgia).
The next big thing was the hospital, Sanctoria Hospital. I heard stories that my mother had pregnancy complexities, and sometimes she puts the whole blame of my not-so-good eyesight on the complexities. As I grew up, the answers from her took a different shape altogether, but this time, she mentioned something that completely changed the scenario. Some Dr. Maji had once told her after both of us were safe, way back in March 1992, that they believed that ether one of me or her would make it to the earthly side of life. Even my dad signed a bond before my mother's ceasarion that he would accept whatever the outcome would be. And twenty years later, I am forced to believe that I am alive because of a miracle, and more so that I had my biological mother bring me up for the twenty years of my life. The reasons for her complexities are something that time and again made me wish, that I was never born. But the truth is we are living so I put an end to the thoughts I put in this matter with the upcoming full-stop.
I met new people, many of them, who knew me and yet, I knew them today. The only two people I remember are someone I loving called my grandpa and grandma. And they will, I believe, forever remain to be the extra set of grandparents I have, and I will forever be their loving "bhaiya." They were our second landlord at Asansol. They had a dog, I remember, whom I lovingly called, "vudi-didi." She died days before I came to Kolkata back in 1994, and that was my first "worst day of my life." I hid my tears for all the time but when they showed a dusty picture of me and "vudi-didi," I could hold them no longer. I really missed her, my first sister.
Well, to sum it up, this was one trip I wished to make since 1994, but it happened in 2012. I am happy that I went to the place where I spent the first two years of my childhood, and for some reason or the other I can claim, that I know every moment of my life since day one, because all the places in those stories I did see, and putting the baby me into the picture isn't much of a problem for me. So yes, I claim I didn't miss a moment of my childhood. So years later if an autobiography of mine comes into being, don't be surprised when I mention the details of day one, as if I still remember myself living it.
