Circa 1988 or may be 1989, morning 5 AM, he was half asleep and yet not frowning at the thought of getting up in a few minutes time. Rather, he was smiling as wide as a mile and there is no denying that the reasons for that angelic smile for a 8 year old child were obvious. That was the last day of his final exams and the prospect of having 2 months full of fun filled summer vacations was giving him goosebumps.
When I look back, kids from late 80s and early 90s weren't blessed with Ipads, Playstations and any thought of social networking was limited to the roof top meetings with friends. Meetings which had no fixed agendas, meetings where minutes weren't recorded and most importantly those meeting had no stakeholders. The only gadget that those kids have laid their hands on were either Nintendos or a few pocket video games but then they had lots of other games. Games which you can now call primitive if not stone-age but those games involved 20 or 25 kids at any given point of time.
There used to be lots of pushing, hugging, kicking and dust filled embraces but no one, not even their parents bothered about who pushed whom and why? Again, everyone knew that they have to live, survive and enjoy together and the idea of nuclear families was still far away. Even the newly formed nuclear families haven't found their identities and were still searching for extended family in their new neighborhoods. It's really hard to recreate that era and especially when most of the memories are faded away. Yet, a few rare pages are so strongly etched in the memory as this one.
Everything was so routine. As a kid, he was yet not aware of the exam pressure. He knew, all the answers and to an extent, he was sure of the teacher's pattern of examining the answer sheets as well. He would attempt almost everything and may be there would be a few mistakes which his mom would term as silly ones. So, out of 100, he would correctly attempt for around 95 or 97 and he would get marks ranging from 85 to 95 depending on his luck and handwriting. These marks may seem too high but even with these marks, he knew he would be either 4th, 5th or 6th in his class, a 7th and 8th position would be a below par performance and the top three positions were surely out of sight and he never really thought these elite places belonged to him. Even the names attached to each positions were obvious to everyone including teachers, students, parents and even their neighbours knew about it. That's why I started with the word "Routine". Everything was so much in its place for so long that it seemed that life has no hiccups and would go on like this forever.
So, that smile in those early hours was a smile of content, a smile which has hasn't yet seen life's surprises. A smile which didn't knew that in years ahead, it would need big reasons to reappear and even if it reappears, it won't be absolute. It would always measure the magnitude of the reason to smile and then would expend itself to a measured and controlled limit.
There were still few precious minutes left to leave the bed and he could clearly hear his mother working in kitchen. His grandparents awake for long now, chitchatting in the living room. He felt so secure around them with not even a single apprehension in his mind and saw his father sleeping calmly besides him. For once, he thought, oh he's so lucky. Oh how desperately I wish that.......!! Oh no no no, Can I just Ctrl+Z it ? just for once?
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