Being unaware

Sometimes we just act on an impulse, not giving enough thought to what it actually entails and its consequences. Many of these instances are related to childhood when we don't possess knowledge to process the real meaning, only to realise it later in life. One such memory that I have is of the house in which I spent my initial months.

My parents used to talk about that house saying 'सत्तसोनौसी'. I used to believe that it is a name of a city where they must have resided in. I had even imagined a milestone board that we see on highways marking directions for a particular city. Despite having seen the house from a distance, since we shifted soon after my birth, I could never connect the dots to decipher it actually. It was only in teenage roughly, that I understood what my parents referred to was सत-सौ-नौ-सी 'House no. 709-C' just like numbers are said in Punjabi.

Needless to mention the messed up lyrics that only kids have the confidence to sing out aloud. Given the limited extent of vocabulary, they are hardly able to understand the meaning. What harm could a few more botched up words make anyway? I mean as an adult, if we don't know the lyrics, we'd hum those lines rather than singing them fearlessly or whole-heartedly.

The other day my nephew heard the sound of flute in a song and he immediately blurted, "That's Shree Krishna song." Even though it was a completely different song, but back in time, his mind must have created an association between flute and Krishna. I'm sure an image of Krishna must have also popped out in his mind. Told you of the limited extent, didn't I?

Let me warn you that we can't underestimate the imaginative abilities of kids. I remember we had wallpapers pasted on walls of our home. Beautiful natural sceneries. Out of fancy, I kept on looking at them. It would so happen that I would start seeing weird shapes and faces in them such that it became impossible for me to unsee them later on. Wait. Did I make it sound as if I had ghostly encounters? No, it's like how people see shapes in clouds. Or formations of stars. Just that in my case it's less of sky-observation, but more of wallpaper-observation.  Illusions so subtle that only I could imagine them.

This one is too obvious to the eye. 

It doesn't happen only as a kid. Once I saw an insect inside my home. Call it reflex action or irritation, I killed it instantly. Only to realise it afterwards that I killed it with bare hands, which now had its blood laced over them. I double washed my hands in disgust.

(On a completely irrelevant note: Once I was cleaning dust from the windows in a not so lit room. In the darkness, I held a stick, which was strangely placed in window frames. On bringing it under some light, I found out that it was a corpse of a baby lizard. It was wood-like in texture just to give you a bit more cringe. I don't how much soap did I use that day.)