The Life I Left Behind

I have spent more than thirty years in cities. I have watched my children grow up in them.

I have sat through school admissions, exam results, office transfers, late-night calls, birthdays, departures—and now, increasingly, conversations about their careers, their plans, the lives they want to build for themselves.

These days, the house is quieter.

There are fewer questions waiting for me when I return home. Fewer voices from the next room. Each of us seems to have acquired a separate little world, connected by a phone call, a message, or a hurried conversation over dinner.

I should feel proud. I do.

I worked for this life.

I earned, saved, built a career, bought the things I once thought belonged only to other people. There is comfort here. There is security. There is nothing obvious to complain about.

And yet, every now and then, usually late at night, when the house has gone completely still, an old uneasiness rises without warning.

I look around at everything I have spent my life building and wonder:

When did life become something I was always preparing for, instead of something I was simply living?

I never had an answer.

Perhaps that is why, whenever the city grows quiet, my mind goes somewhere else.

Back to a village.

Not the village that exists today. The village of my childhood.

The one with more kacchi mitti than concrete, more open sky than walls, and more people who knew your name than people who knew your profession.

Morning began differently there.

Before the sun was properly up, the village was already awake.

The hand pump went chak-chak, chak-chak in someone's courtyard. Buffaloes shifted in their sheds, their bells making a dull tung...tung. Smoke rose from chulhas, carrying the smell of burning cow-dung cakes, onions and garlic frying in mustard oil.

Someone's mother was already scolding a child. Someone's father was calling for the bullocks.

A woman swept the courtyard with a jhadu, raising a little cloud of dust. A man walked towards the fields with a gamchha on his shoulder.

The village did not need an alarm clock. It woke itself.

And we children belonged to every part of it.

The pond, the fields, the khalihan, the mango orchards, the narrow lanes between houses—we knew them all.

We knew which mango tree had the sweetest fruit. Which wall was easiest to climb.

Which buffalo would chase us.

Which old man would shout if our ball landed in his courtyard. There was no television to keep us indoors.

No mobile phone. No electricity.

So when the sun began to lean towards the west, we were already running. A ball made from old cloth was enough for a game.

A wooden stick became a bat.

The dusty lane became a cricket pitch until somebody's uncle appeared at the door and shouted,

"Ball se khaprail tod doge kya?" We would scatter.

Ten minutes later, we would be back.

We fought over runs, batting and rules. Sometimes we fought seriously. Then someone would say, "Chal, ab tu batting kar."

And the quarrel was over.

Nobody carried yesterday's anger into today's game.

People could fight in the morning and sit together over tea by evening. And then came the festivals.

Fagun seemed to stretch across the whole village. At dusk, a dholak would appear in someone's verandah, followed by jhaal and Fagua. People wandered in from neighbouring houses, children ran between them, women listened from the courtyards, and nobody needed an invitation.

Holi was the village spilling into its lanes—gulal, coloured water, laughter, gujiya, and the inevitable cry of "Mat lagana, kapda naya hai!" followed by another bucket of colour.

Diwali was gentler. Small mitti ke diye flickered along walls and courtyards. The next morning, we collected the empty ones and turned them into toys—little bowls, stoves, shops, whatever our imagination demanded.

The girls had their own evenings during Pidiya, gathering together to sing and laugh until mothers called them home.

And on Nag Panchami, the khalihan filled with people. Kabaddi, chikka, wrestling—the games hardly mattered. What mattered was that everyone came. Dust rose, arguments broke out, laughter followed, and by evening the same people were sitting together as if nothing had happened.

There were no photographs to preserve those days.

Yet somehow, they remained.

Years later, when I returned to the village after a long gap, I noticed something before I could put a name to it.

It was too quiet.

The old hand pump was still there, but nobody was using it.

The khalihan where we once played was smaller, squeezed between boundary walls and new construction.

The mud houses had disappeared behind cement. The open courtyards had become rooms.

The mango tree near the lane was gone.

So was the old chaupal where men once sat in the evening. The pond had shrunk.

The fields had been divided.

The lanes were still there, but they seemed to have forgotten the footsteps they once carried.

I stood near one of them and waited, almost without knowing what I was waiting for.

No children came running.

No mother shouted from a courtyard. No buffalo bells.

No chak-chak of the hand pump.

Only the occasional sound of a motorcycle passing through. The village had not disappeared.

It had simply become another place.

Some people had moved to towns. Some had gone abroad. Some houses remained locked for most of the year.

The village had changed, as everything does.

But standing there, I found myself remembering not the buildings that were gone, but the sounds that had gone with them.

A voice calling from one courtyard to another. Children arguing over a game.

The dholak beginning somewhere after sunset. Someone laughing before the joke had even finished.

Those things had no walls, yet they were what had made the village feel like home.

I returned to the city.

My children are grown now, building lives of their own. I am happy for them.

The evenings are different here. Sometimes, when the bungalow grows quiet, I find myself listening without meaning to.

For what, I don't know. A hand pump.

A cowbell.

Children running barefoot. Someone calling,

"Arey, ghar aa jao! Andhera ho gaya!" Of course, nothing comes.

Only the faint sounds of traffic below. I close my eyes anyway.

For a few moments, the fields return. The dusty lane.

The old courtyard. The evening gathering.

And I am a boy again, running home only because someone has finally called me twice.

When I open my eyes, the room is still there. Outside, the road stretches beneath the streetlights. Empty.

I watch it for a while. Then I switch off the light.

In the darkness, I think of those little earthen diyas—how we once picked them up the morning after Diwali, careful not to break them, because we still had so many things to make.

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