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Can you ever trace back to the joy and memories of childhood?
Reclaiming the little joys of what used to be home, once more
- PUBLISHED: Thu 21 Aug 2025, 7:20 PM UPDATED: Thu 21 Aug 2025, 7:25 PM
- By:
- Suresh Pattali
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One, two, three, four.....ten.
Son, if your brain is still foggy after staring at your laptop’s blank screen for a good 10 minutes, you aren’t going to get it right. Unless it’s a topic that needs humongous research and has been in the works for a while, you need to beat the deadline clock by unscrambling your thoughts in lightning speed.
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“That’s why we keep reminding you from the beginning of the week. You get it? Remember, I asked you on Monday what’s the topic for this week?” I understand what Anamika or Somya or Karishma say. They all move from one dark corner to another in the office and jam the keys like rockstars. I play it differently.
If there is a topic that has been a pain point in your cognitive or subconscious mass for some time, it flows like a flash flood after a cloudburst of thoughts. Words, phrases, ideas and arguments are swept across the screen like in a tsunami that hits after a 7.5 submarine earthquake. But you don’t expect a tsunami every week, do you?
At well past four in the morning, I don’t have anyone or anything to blame it on, except for a pilgrimage to my roots that begins a few hours before ink is put on this column. It’s a perfect setting at the moment to write with people sleeping in farther corners of the house. The smell of a new dawn and Fajr prayer calls from the desert community where I live flow through the window screen. Yet, more than four decades after my plunge into the profession, I still feel a flutter in my tummy — and brain — every time I sit up to write a new article. It’s the same pang that I felt as I joined the newsroom in the early 80s.
Every article is a new journey for a writer. Like every patient is a new case study for a doctor. Like every sculpture and every piece of pottery is a new experience for its creator. Writing a column is also like fishing in a placid lake: if you don’t get the big one within seconds after you cast the line, then the bait is eaten by a shoal of insignificant fish swimming around. Or like in a music show, if you don’t hit the right strings in the intro, random thoughts tend to take over your cognitive arena.
Especially when your heart is misplaced, in my case in the journey that’s set to start. Every trip back home brings out a monsoon of memories, sweet and sour, ultimately triggering a mudslide of nostalgia. Random thoughts billowing from the sludge of retrospections fog my brain and wet my eyes, ultimately freezing my fingers. I am not able to write.
It has been 36 years since I landed on the shores of Dubai with a heartful of dreams. Generations and skylines have since changed here and back home. Is there an old middle-school classmate left standing here or there who I can go and hold hands with, once more? Is there any old neighbourhood chap holding on to good old mischiefs who I can take to shallow streams to fish for fun, once more? Meera, Lily, Padmini, Kasthoori, Jagdish, Dasan — anybody out there to follow me to pick flowers for this Onam festival, once more? Where have all the little lambs of innocence disappeared? Nobody wants to play hide and seek with me in the tapioca orchard, once more? Hey, let’s run and run and run until we drop dead on the white powdery beach, once more. Anyone game for it?
This weekend I am taking a break to reclaim the little joys I had left behind 36 years ago. The joy of stealing mangoes from my unfriendly neighbour’s farm. The joy of gifting a drop of attar to my good old Ayisha. The joy of rereading her little holy Quran. The joy of relearning the squiggly Malayalam alphabets. The joy of daring the cacophony of the mynahs in the lush mango groves. The joy of lifting a pocketful of candies from Ramettan’s musty grocery. And finally,
the joy of reclaiming the title of a little ruffian that no one could ever afford to miss.
A gentle touch on my shoulder, followed by a lazy question enveloped
in lethargy.
“What are you writing so early?”
“Column, baby.” I tell my 65-year-old baby. “It’s Wednesday morning.”
“If you are still struggling for a topic, why not the journey back home?”
She sounded sense, after all. After a long spell of indisposition, is she trying to reclaim the title of being my muse ever since the column started nearly six years ago?
“Thank you, dear.”
“Listen, all’s fine as long as you don’t reclaim your good old Ayisha. Remember, three is a crowd!”
I love her resolve to reclaim the joy of fun and pun, once more.
