Musings

Connectivity puzzle

Its the same feeling I have every single time I come back from home. Well, the feeling can be surmised in a simple word. But before you go, I have to tell you something else. Its about the connectivity-puzzle: I invented this name (I am too lazy to do a "TM" superscript but everyone has to assume that its present) for one of a likable games I play ever so often. Everyone gets this, at least I believe so. Its the crazy feeling when every time you are at a particular place or do a specific thing or remember it in your mind, something else which at first seems totally unrelated to the former comes to your mind. I have such a feeling so many times - its one of my favorite tasks to try making the connection - some of them would seem so ridiculous after the connection is made. Here is one example - I always remembered Sharukh Khan when I played NFS-5 Autobahn circuit. It has always been one of my favourite race tracks in all the race games I have played so far (and that's plenty) but I always remember Sharukh's smiling face when I get down the last over-bridge in the circuit and bank left steeply in full-throttle (the best thing about NFS games is that it needs very little braking). I couldn't get the connection for quite a while until I realised there was one such road in the song from Pardes where he drives crazily all around.

When I was a kid, I liked to talk to a guy who we all knew as "Saadiq mama". He was a frequent visitor to my Grandma's house (where I spent most of my vacations) and we used to have a good time while I was there. He was the only one who used to take us out in that dreary place and he had an excellent humor. Not that he was extremely witfulo about it, but he was highly tolerant to all the childhood-jibes we made at him and would make sure we felt comfortable in his presence. One day in such a past, he took us to his under-construction home - he called it his home but I learnt from others (the others are my cousins who resided in my Grandma's place and knew more about him than me) that it was in fact been built by his dad and he may just inherit it one day (he had four siblings). It's irrelevant now - what's more relevant was that it was getting dark by the time we had made a good "look" at the whole place. The building was a huge one by the standards of its surroundings, it had four floors with a myriad of rooms in each floor, all of which suggested that a lot of work was still pending. Crude wooden planks lay all around us and the stairs were all barren with no support linings at the sides. He tried to usher us outside since it was getting dark and the building had no power supply yet and we could be lost if not outside soon. I was loitering around in the first floor without getting much thought to getting lost (well, I didn't give much thought about any advice those days, anyway) when I realized that someone was just coming up. Thinking that scaring whoever came would be a good idea, I moved quickly to underneath the stairs. I was still moving inside when something gave up under me. My right leg was certainly going down and I realized that I was bending badly and about to fall down - face in front. I did exactly that - I fell into a water tank of some sort. When going down, a pipe which had been protruding from the wall of the tank struck my chest and left a scratch. That was when I shouted. I was into the water completely, and the pain from the wound was excruciating and I kept shouting for help. I realized that by then I was drinking the stale water as well. The water-tank, whatever size it was, was certainly taller than me by a feet and I had to constantly push myself with my feet to stay afloat. For the first time in my life I had the possibility of getting drowned (I swear I never went a mile near any pool till that time) and I realized that some strange feeling was around the corner. It was like someone was squeezing some part of my body and that I would very soon would not be breathing at all. It gave a new fear to me that knew no end. It would be a few years before I realized, they had a specific word in English to denote the feeling. The word was "choking".

There - thats the end of the story. I remember this experience every single time I come back from home.

1 Comments