11th Nov 2023

Dearest Palak,

This is what happened while I was at home.

One day, I noticed there were two bikes in the garage. So, I asked dad if the older one still worked.

‘Takes time to start off. But yeah, it works,’ he replied.

‘Why don’t you sell it now that you got a new one?’

He thought for a moment, as if hesitating, before answering, ‘Your mother got me that one…’

I couldn’t help but smile.

I came back to my room. My old table has a drawer where I used to keep my ‘precious things’ back in my school days. I felt like going through it.

In an era when we need Facebook to trigger our memories, it was amazing how a certain conversation with my dad brought back so much of the buried past.

Rummaging through the drawer, I realized it wasn’t touched at all in all these years. Even I didn’t bother to open it when I returned home. Untouched memories from more than a decade back.

Among other things, I found a small box and I opened it. There were folded pieces of paper – pages torn from my school notebooks where you had written my name or anything else, maybe those FLAMES thingy – basically, your handwriting.

I remembered how after high school, I sat one day and went through all my notebooks to find where you had left your handwriting. I had torn those pages carefully and saved them in this box.

Little did I know that those scribbles would become cherished memorabilia. Perhaps, I inherited this sentiment from my dad. Our items may vary, but the essence of saving them remains.

As I closed the drawer, I couldn’t shake the realization that sometimes, the most precious memories are tucked away in the simplest of places. And so, both the old bike and the pieces of paper continue to tell stories—each a silent narrator of the chapters of our lives.

With love hugs and other things,
P