There is that Pink Floyd song we used to listen to in college, with its downbeat lyrics, Kicking around in a piece of ground in your hometown / Waiting for someone or something to show you the way, and somehow knowing, even at 19 or 20, of the essential sadness of life that awaited one.

I suppose it was around the same time that I read in a book these following lines, or at least something like them: I was young and every day was long. Every day felt long — yes, I could feel it then, but compared to what? Almost two decades later, I have the answer: the days were long compared to the short days of the present, where between family and household chores and work, the day mysteriously ends not long after it has begun, even if one has got up early.

What shortens our days as we grow older is the inevitable narrowing of our horizons. Life is no more that vast, wide-open prairie we felt it was in our 20s; two decades later, it’s more like a house whose rooms we know and which will not change in the foreseeable future. We have, for the first time, a sense of time running out. And comfort, more than adventure, is what we find ourselves looking for.

I recently recalled the stories my parents or grandparents used to tell me about how things were during their days, and realised I had now reached that stage myself. I tell my son about how there were only black-and-white TVs in my childhood — no YouTube, no tablets, no smartphones — and I suppose it must sound to him like it did to me when my grandmother told me about how she and her family travelled by bullock cart to the nearest town to watch the first black-and-white Assamese film, Joymoti.

Tricks of time

Memory is a strange thing. The passing of time can play tricks with it. And who can tell what it chooses to retain and what it chooses to discard, what it chooses to reveal when you think back? Growing up in the Fire Brigade area of Shillong — named after, well, the fire station there with its red fire engines — the field next to it, madan iewrynghep as the Khasis call it, occupied a central part of my childhood.

It was on this grass that I first started playing cricket and football. We often played cricket with a leather ‘real duce’ ball, or a hard cork ball, and painful knocks were common. Football for us was largely about all the boys in the field simultaneously chasing the ball, rather like Afghans on horses rushing toward the dead sheep while playing buzkashi.

There was a diagonal path worn in the grass, I remember, by people walking from the Adventist church to the road that climbed up to Lumsohphoh. A butcher’s son would graze goats in the field. He is now grown up, and runs the stall in Laitumkhrah bazar from where my father has bought mutton every Sunday morning for the past three decades. Around the field was a scattering of shops and just two buildings — the fire station building and the newer Kiddies Corner hostel. The traffic was light: the occasional ‘bazaar bus’, a jeep, Ambassador or Fiat.

Today, the field is a dusty patch strewn with stones. All manner of shops and buildings surround it. Cars and buses and people stream around it endlessly. During the drier months, exhibitions are shown here, which leaves the place strewn with garbage afterwards. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were running around and playing on the grassy field here?

A slight unravelling

Time is a strange thing. You get used to the slow unravelling of your body: the lines on your face, a little grey in your hair, some of it falling off, fading eyesight, a painful knee. Then you get used to it, this slight unravelling of the body, the way you eventually get used to everything else in life.

I remember driving to Laitlum — now a busy tourist spot, made famous by the movie Rock On 2 — with a classmate who lived in nearby Smit; we sat there on the slopes drinking beer and looking at the canyon below. When I visited the place again recently, I was surprised to see tourists, a car park, and tea shops. It felt like a small part of my life had disappeared.

I feel I must stay away from Shillong’s new cafes and festivals — they give me a vague feeling of somehow betraying the small-town Shillong I grew up in, with its tea and puri-sabji shops (still around), bars with curtained cabins (mostly all gone), the drives in someone’s borrowed car (with maybe a hundred rupees among us) and the fêtes, where fights would break out between boys from different localities.

And how important food was to us then and how tasty the food eaten in the streets. The puri sabji at Jalpan in Laitumkhrah, the soup chow at Hong Kong in Police Bazar, the egg roll from the old shop on Keating Road, the jadoh from the stall beside the garage near St. Edmund’s gates.

I sometimes go back to these old haunts to eat what we ate so many years ago. (Jalpan is long gone, of course.) But it is nowhere near as good as it once was.

And then I realise that what I am looking for is to relive a memory; but without everything else that made up my childhood — being in school, walking around town killing time, having ₹5 in my pocket — the food will never taste the same again.

The writer is author of the Detective Arjun Arora series.