New year memories!

A flood of memories come rushing through when I think of the 20 odd New Year eves that I have spent. They have been mostly spent watching TV or calling up friends, for I am not really a party animal. Yet, each eve carries a sweet memory with it, an enchanted space-time whirl encased in it.

One of my earliest New Year memories starts with a bus journey. I must have been around 7 or 8 years old and I am sleeping cozily in my mom’s lap. We must have been traveling to our native place. After a 3-hour journey, we end up at Grandpa’s place. The December chill is palpable and Mom covers my head and ears with a scarf and hurries through to the porch. The memory blurs a bit after that. But I take home a sense of security and carefree life as a child. It is midnight and people are running around shouting “Happy new year”. In some distant place a loud speaker blares out the New Year songs from the Kollywood movies. Everyone seems to be happy. There are no enemies and no ill feelings. Everyone is good – or so it seems!

The next memory is of a lonely night spent as a teenager. Everyone is asleep in the house, and I am spending the night watching TV, sipping some coke and answering the sporadic “Happy new year” calls. There is some English movie playing on the TV. I don’t seem to be interested. I sit there in the semi-darkness, engrossed in some thought. What am I thinking about? I don’t know. May be about that morning’s minor street-cricket scuffle. May be about that new girl in my class. May be about my dipping grades.

Then we come to a pretty recent memory. It’s New Year’s Eve again and I am standing in the crowded necklace road. People are shouting and moving about in frenzy…the sodium vapor doesn’t seem to have enough light to shed and so the area turns a bit foggy. Lots of yelling and jostling all around. I am alone amidst total strangers and yet I don’t seem to have any fears. No worries about tomorrow. I am here and it’s a great place right now. “Let me enjoy”, I tell myself. Screaming my lungs out, I run through the milling crowd. I can see that I am not the only one doing that. There is a group playing loud Bhangra music from a near-by matador and jumping around. I join their freedom dance. Care free again? Or is it escapism? Or am I just having fun?

New Year’s Day seems like some kind of a check post for the speeding time. Perhaps, it says, “Hey there, pause for a sec, take a look back, catch your breath and move on”. May be the day is like a symptom of our diseases –“Hey mate! This is what is troubling you. Why don’t you go ahead and tell her?” or may be it says nothing at all. May be it’s just a silent day like any other day that you shout at and try to grow happy and grow very tired. God knows what it is thinking of you!