Memories from my childhood.

Today, its been more than 6 years since I left my home country for a foreign land in pursuit of my higher education which ended successfully a couple of months earlier. I read an email from my sister and somehow my brain linked some thoughts and took me back to the days when I and my sister used to be in secondary school, it was time when we were around 10 to 16 years old bracket. 

I still remember how we used to study for our exams. The whole time during the schooling days we used to just laze around, do our homework to keep ourselves out of trouble but it in no way helped us because TV was a constant companion defeating the whole purpose of the homework which was to make us learn something. Then the school used to announce our timetable for the exams. Ideally it used to be done 5 weeks prior to our main exams. That is when the panic used to set in. Fun and frolic was over and now material worth 3-6 months was to be crammed in 5 weeks along with normal schooling hours. My sister and I had a common study room which used to be our den for the following time until the exams were over. Since we both studied in the same room continuously for many many many many hours (such smart kids you know) we ended up always coming up with some new stuff to make us busy which we wouldn’t have even thought of normally. Like one time when we were fighting a lot over the use of the study table and the space in the room, I suggested we both draft a demand list on a paper and then we negotiate (yeah, I had such thoughts even when I was growing up). So having done with our respective papers, I made my sister sign my draft making her accept my demands but then denied signing on any of her demands, however I still insisted my rules be implemented since I had her signature which implied that she accepted my demands. Obviously this didn’t work when our parents came in the situation but it still was so much fun (for me of course) to annoy my sister “legally”.

One more thing many of our friends may have noticed is that I and my sister have god given ability to be able to laugh continuously on very trivial matters, on our best days no reason is good enough for us to laugh. And I don’t exaggerate when I say laughing continuously; unofficial records say that we have laughed up to 45 minutes without a break for no apparent reason. We both used to laugh so much that sitting at one place used to be impossible and the term “rolling on the floor laughing” or as popularly know “rofl” might have coined by our parents and somehow made famous in today’s generation lingo. The trouble used to be when our parents would be half-asleep thinking their children are burning the midnight’s lamp studying only to be awaken in the middle of the night to see their children lying on the floor without even being able to stop and say sorry or explain our plight.

Then we had one more favourite activity of ours. It was to use some poems from our textbooks, turn it into a song and make a dance routine on it. It was funny how only those poems stuck to our memory and everything else was awash the moment we set our pens on the desk after finishing the exam. We also planned a few pranks on our parents while “studying” but let’s not get into those and ruin our public images. However I can share one of my pranks on her. One day, I stood hid behind a door with a waist-belt tied around my neck and making its tip stand up so that it resembled a snake with its hood up. My sister, when she entered screamed out of fear, I am yet to know if it was because of me or the snake resembling belt but that is one incident I cannot forget. Since my sister was stronger and taller than me during a certain period of our life, these pranks always ended with me running away from her and her badly targeted things at me.

As I write this, I am taken back to our good olden days and today, I do realize in my own way why childhood days are quite possibly one of the most memorable days of one’s life. For I and my sister, those were the days when we could just talk to each other face to face, unlike now when emailing and web chats are the norm. Sometimes just for this to happen, I have to call my sister as she is a grown up and busy girl unlike me who is a busy boy (ok please people, get this joke and make my day).

This blog is dedicated to my fortunate sister, fortunate because she had the privilege to be my sister. Hahaha, if I won’t get a call from her after this statement, I don’t know what else will make her call me. 

My sister, me and our mother.