When the watch stopped ticking.....

It has been a trip down the memory lane for me for the past few weeks....a lane which had got lost a long ago. The caprice of nostalgia that over-whelmed me really left me surprised. The obscure memories came back to life.....the landmarks of the memory lane could be discerned again...I couldn't believe that some little moments of life that had passed long ago still remained with me. Its something like the fact that “you still know the time when your old watch stopped working.”
On a wednesday morning I was glancing through telegraph, going through the movies for the day. The movie which interested me was “The Guns of Naverone” to be shown on Pix from 10p.m. Its the story about a group of British soldiers during the world war 2 on a mission to destroy German tanks situated in the cliffs of the island Naverone. Immediately I set a reminder on my cell phone...i was bent on seeing the movie. For I would be seeing it after perhaps about 13 or 14 years.
My mind was transported back to that time. I was perhaps about 4 or 5. It was a night show on the good old Doordarshan and me and my father was watching it. I couldn't understand much then. Baba translated few of the dialogues in English for me. I can vaguely remember the storyline of the film. A gun 'kaman' belonging to the 'enemy' hidden amongst the cliffs used to blow up ships of the 'good' soldiers. So the 'good' people sent out few men on a secret mission to destroy the guns. I could remember a few visuals...like a few men climbing a stiff cliff and then congratulating each other upon successfully climbing it.....a person killing a guard with a silencer gun. Later that night when I watched the movie alone, I wondered that some night 13 or 14 years ago I had watched the same movie with Baba. It was perhaps the first English movie I saw (or maybe it was Jurassic Park in the hall). Nothing had changed in the movie....yet so much has changed in life.
Another incident happened in the past fortnight. I found one of my old friends on Orkut. He was my best friend when I studied in Army Public School, New Delhi. I found him through the school's community, although I was sure he was the same person I asked him if he was from the 2006 batch. Few days later he answered in the affirmative but couldn't recognize me. Obviously I didn't expect he would. I said its unlikely for him to recognize me...that I had studied in that school till class 4..that I was in section A. After some days I get a reply “I remember you were my best friend dat tym.” I was overjoyed. I could remember him because I could see the time on my old watch which had stopped working a long ago. But for him, the watch never stopped. So we really were best friends!!!
Soon enough I reminisced about my old school...Army Public School, Dhaula Kuan. I remember it was a very large school. You had to walk 10 mins from the place the bus dropped us to the primary school building. It was a yellow two storried building. As you enter you faced a courtyard. If you turned right, the first room was of the Headmistress, Mrs.Gill. To get to our class 1A you had to go left and then turn right. The first room on the right was our classroom. The two wings of the building was connected by a sort of bridge which divided on the courtyard into two halves. Behind the back courtyard was the huge field which stretched throughout the length of the school premises.
Mrs Dipti Mahapatra was our class teacher in 1. Mostly I was a obedient and disciplined student. Once in an art class we were asked to make impressions of cut vegetables dipped in ink. I was given a ladies finger and I managed to overturn the ink pot and spill the ink on my copy. I was scared, but being in the teacher's good books I escaped with a rebuke. I remember playing cricket in the courtyards and later in the field with my friends. We didn't have a bat....we used wooden back-rests of broken chairs! I remember playing chor-police with paper guns. They were not many in the class who could make it. It required 2 sheets of paper. Before tiffin time I would start imploring those guys to make one for me. Eventually though I succeeded in making those guns! Another tiffin time game was making small hard paper balls and aiming it at others by flinging it with a rubber band. It annoyed me when it first started and resulted in many tiffin time scowls. I have another tiffin time memory...there was a wide iron gate in the courtyard which opened into the fields. We played some sort of a game where we swung standing on the gate. One day I was trying to board the swinging gate or maybe just passing by the gate when it smacked straight into me. I started bleeding from the nose and was really tensed. I was taken to the infirmary to get some medication. It was nothing serious.....(to be continued)