An era is at an end. After sixteen years of living at Munirka, having grown up there, having spent the most important years of our childhood there, we are moving out of our Munirka residence this evening. This is the home that love built…

I was unsure how my feelings for Munirka would pan out… It has been a mixed bag indeed… In my mind Munirka has always been the life we started “after” Kailash Colony, a second life if you will… almost everything was changed, everything became hazier in Munirka… from the small confines of our KC residence, where the rooms were small, but the love and togetherness was aplenty, to Munirka, where we had sprawling rooms, but couldn’t quite ever get into the hang of things. We grew in affluence and influence, and my folks and my brother made just such great friends here. I never really got to know my neighbors well, always coming across as the reticent kid. In my mind I think I just idolized the way we were, in KC, and Munirka just never seemed to measure up to that image. It was a tough demand to put up.

My views on Munirka are just so much in contrast to how my brother sees our life there. It is to him what KC was to me. He remembers nearly nothing of Kailash Colony, save the fact that we had this sprawling verandah on which he used to play. Munirka is the epitome of his childhood, all his friends and acquaintances he made here. Hanged out with that Aadesh and Pooja, had a HUGE troupe of friends from around the colony, who just hanged on to his every word. He just loved and enjoyed life here so much, getting to know every nook and cranny of this place. He started school from Munirka, discovered his independence once his bro moved to Europe. He entertained friends (and girlfriends) here. All his memories of childhood are from here. For him, the move must just render his heart asunder. I do hope he shall blog soon, and give me an insight into how he feels about this.

But on the other hand, I cannot help but feel wistful… it was the home that we loved, and decorated with care, love and devotion. I hadn’t of course seen the Munirka residence till about a few weeks before we moved in, and I could not be bothered by it either. I was so lost in my own world of tennis, friends and He-man figurines. The move from KC didn’t affect me much back then. It was as if one day we were in KC, and the next in Munirka. Amazing coz I had BIGGER rooms and so many more places to hide, sad and wistful for I didn’t have any friends here at all. Ecstatic because all I needed (Candy shops etc) were a stone’s throw-a-away from our door. Sad because it was just so noisy here compared to the KC house… Happy that the Video Store was so close by, sad because it looked so dingy… Happy that they had a super market in Munirka, sad for the super market had no book stores where I could just rent books from. The list goes on…

This is the house with my memories of mom in the later years… Mom was so enthusiastic about the move, I remember. She would drive with me and Rama Shankar in the day time and move small tidbits of stuff from KC to Munirka. I would be like WHY do we have to move from KC, and WHY oh Why? (but it is probably more due to the fact that I had a crush on a girl living right opposite our home in KC). Mom made it into home… Mom would go with Dad in the weekend and always return with a new piece of décor for the home, or some new enhancement for an existing décor. She just loved buying stuff for our kitchen, and just so lovingly did she put our kitchen together. I had forgotten the origins of the long cabinet that used to be in our lounge, but just remembered; we bought it before moving in, back in January of ’91 or earlier. I remember so vividly when she campaigned to get the final room of the house built. Dad was against that plan (something about it not being completely by the book, though tolerated), so she just took over the mantle, and handled everything with the contractors, the woodwork people and got the last room built. That room would be my room till I moved out at the age of eighteen.

She lived her last years in this house, and it was in this house she breathed her last.

Bro and I got to know each other and just respect and love each other in this house. KC was just a nightmare in that respect. He and I would argue and fight all the time, ha even though he was a lil babe of three and I, eleven. The bond betwitxt Digo and I just grew so strong, as we made memories in our home, painting our faces like characters from Star Trek, ordering and pigging out on Pizzas, going for interminably long walks around the Colony, laughing our butts off over comments the other made, shifting rooms all the time, talking about everything and anything on god’s green earth, trying just so hard to teach him something of French, the memories just go on and on.

Our room, oh boy did it undergo changes through the sixteen years. It is just unbelievable, that in sixteen years, the room underwent more than 18 transformations. It was a drawing room to begin with (when our possessions were modest)… Digo and I had this huge hall-room as our bedroom – so grand that we could play wall-tennis in our room. We moved into the smaller room back in ’92, relinquishing the other room to mom and dad who modeled it into a spacious drawing room. Just so beautifully did we decorate the new room though. There was a table in the middle and two single beds one either side. I took the left hand side bed, by the window, loving it because of the natural light it afforded. I remember sitting there at the Window, reading some book or the other, during my renaissance. After we purchased a second table though, the room filled up quickly and with it began what Digo and I would indulge in, so many times over the years, the relocations. I cannot count how many times we moved our rooms – from the room next to the lobby, to the end-room next to our parents’ room. Digo and I would do these “deals” in which he would relinquish control over some commodities, and I would relinquish control over the room. And then he and I would just start moving, much to the chagrin of our maids (who put up resistance to the moving initially, but would get into the thick of things, helping us out and cleaning after us), AND when she returned at 3:30 PM, our Momsie! But he and I would continue, and soon the process would repeat after at most a month. At any given time I had posters on the walls, of Tennis stars (no Pete Sampras posters though, because I did NOT wish to ruin a Sampras poster by putting it up!), and in my more “barter-with-God” years, a huge kick-ass picture of Guru Gobind Singh ji. Here’s a pic from the days of yore. This was in 1996 I believe.

God bless that unholy mess.

This was the house that hosted my renaissance. I remember having moved in ’91, just so unbelievably naïve, a person who’s most beautiful passion in life was not education, or the wisdom imparted by my books, but the games I could come up with the most outlandish ideas imaginable. I remember just how I used to take a carom board, some marbles and a scale, and spent the whole afternoon, just shooting marbles in the carom board holes. I would give it outlandish names, and draw up a huge long list of rules, written in Code of course. And then the renaissance came, and the place of play, became the house of education, as I amassed more and more books from all walks of life, learning and literature, trying to absorb the most I could. I still remember coming from school that fine afternoon in March ’93, jumping and skipping the familiar path from the road, which always guided me home, and looking up to see my little brother waving from my parent’s window. It was the day I had gotten my results from the class VIII finals. It was the first time in my life that I had stood first in my class with an aggregate of 83%… No small feat, for just the year before, I had stood amongst the last few kids in class with an aggregate of 43%. I came home and told mom I had failed in a couple of subjects. She was incredibly matter of fact about it… and then I told her the real news and she couldn’t have been more ecstatic. Just the look of pride in her and my dad’s eyes, changed my life from that day forth. My bro hugged me, without really knowing why! A very long side story, but something I shall always connect to Munirka.

God do I ramble on or what! But anyway, I realize it is a time of such upheaval for my brother and dad… I hope and pray the new home shall prove to be fortuitous for them indeed.

Goodbye Munirka, goodbye, farewell and amen.

Tim@12:23