Summer Diaries

Chapter 3

“You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”

Holding hands of our mother’s we stood there engulfing the beauty of the giant river. Somewhere it flowed with force and somewhere it lay with all its serenity, burbling its story in our ears. Coming close-by we saw beautiful fishes, small and big of different color’s dancing to the melody of river music. Slowing loosening ourselves from the grips we ran towards the magnificent rivulet without paying heed to the elderly voices 🙂

River Kosi

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Dipping ourselves in the tranquility of the goddess river, we screamed with happiness. Most of us didn’t knew how to swim then so we use to sit on shoulders of our elder cousins who use to give us watery walk 🙂 Sometimes we use to bring junk car tubes and used it as swimming tube. But our swimming tube worked differently 😉 Here we made one to sit on it while others pushed it like a pram 😉 it was so much fun 😀 seeing our cheerful faces our mother’s use to join us in this game 🙂

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My mother who was quite a good swimmer use to show her mermaid skills. She taught us the beautiful “Red Mermaid” game .The game was one has to throw a red stone in water yelling “who has the red mermaid” simultaneously other’s had to dip inside the water to get that red stone 🙂 The one who got it was declared as winner and threw it in water for the next game. It was fun game 😉 where everyone tried to show their breath holding and swimming skills 🙂

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We use to comeback only after sunset babbling about that day’s game. Our mother’s prepared dinner while we recited tales of our courage to my uncle. He is my mother’s youngest brother who lived with my grandmother in their ancestral home. He pampered us so much that we never felt that we didn’t have our grandfather who had passed away when my mom was 18. He is an entertainer, to this date he never forgets any of ours birthday, he is the one after my parents who congratulate me on every achievement of mine. He truly holds a very special place in my heart.

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Dinner mostly included jack fruit vegetable with curd and chapattis. Oh I forgot to tell you …. We had big jackfruit trees too.

JackFruit tree

And my grandmother use to make awesome jackfruit “subzi” which we call Kathal in Hindi.

I still love it and make it quite often during summers 🙂  . So after having our meals we were separated by our mothers and were taken to bed.

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I had the habit of listening stories from my mother till I learned to read own my own. As the night grew darker the river roared as if attacked by demonic possession. Hearing its loud growl, I clutched my mother’s hand and asked her the reason of this sudden change. She unfolded the mystery behind the river’s changed attitude.

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Kosi was amongst the seven daughters of Mountain Himalaya. Once Himalaya did a Yajna for prosperity of his kingdom and invited all his daughters but Kosi ignored the invite and got indulged in her newly married alliance. So all the daughters reached on the decided date but Kosi was nowhere to be found. She was the youngest child and thus was her father’s favorite one too. So Himalaya thought that maybe she didn’t get the message and once again invited her but this time she came but reached after Yajna got over. Seeing such discourtesy by his daughter Himalaya grew angry and gave curse to Kosi that “She will always start from Himalaya but no one will ever know where she ends and she will cry every night for the pain she has given to her father and no one will ever be able to cure her pain”. The moral of the story was anyone who hurts their parents does not live a peaceful life. And this got inculcated in my concise forever. For the story I don’t know how much truth lies in it but I got the message my mother wanted to give me.

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To be continued …..

Please read the other chapters if you have missed them from below :

Chapter 1

 Chapter-2