This could be one of the worst stories you would have come across.

Actually this post is more of a personal thought for me which I have seen and witnessed right in front of my eyes.
I am sure many of you would have probably encountered similar or maybe even worst stories…

The idea of this posting this thought is to bring to light situations like these and learn from them rather than run away…

They were quite a progressive family I would say. Atleast much before when we actually came to know about them. This girl and her two brothers…
Their house was just two doors away from us.

We are three siblings. Born and raised in Mumbai. I vividly remember the moments where all of us as kids used to play together.
Power cuts, rains, storms couldn’t stop us at nothing. We were a bunch of kids, me being the youngest, five girls in the group and 3-4 boys amongst us.
We used to play together till the fag end of the day.

When it was 8.00 pm, it was time to wind up.

Serials, chayageet, chitrahaar, news etc would precede our lives. And we as kids would still yearn for the next day to break so we all could meet again and go wild in our playgroup.
It was all innocence personified. I don’t recall a single day till date when we had any difference of opinion over a thing or two, exchange of bad thoughts etc. None ever so existed.

Suddenly one fine day we heard that this girl’s dad passed away while travelling in a local train. He was standing at the foot board and it seems someone frisked him, maybe pushed him (You see, Bombay trains are always that crowded, so I guess it came to us as no surprise that it happened to him.)

And then for a few days it was all calm and quiet. We rarely got to play but we did play our our own houses though!

They say sometimes when the going gets tough, it gets even worse…

As fate would have it, the boys had to discontinue schooling and resort to the local municipal school. So you can imagine the level of education then… and there at the municipal school.
Badly maintained classes, poorly managed curriculum, teachers who cant tell an A from B and teachers who were never there for kids since the holidays in govenement owned units were far more than the actual school days.

Both the boys just got carried away and got astray! No father to control them and they just went with the flow… for worse!

The elder one resorted to drinking, smoking and what not… attracted several diseases while the younger one became mentally ill and one would often spot them at their doorsteps demanding alms.
It was one hell of a living for this girl and her widowed mother.

After that all that we heard about these two boys were that the elder one as expected died with some chronic illness while the younger one resorted to begging.
And he didn’t spend a single day on his own terms. He ate what others gave him and lived a life we only see in movies and the sadder parts of the town that we normally hear from people around us.

I ponder over the days and still feel that things started falling apart for this family much earlier than anyone could ever imagine. And these chain of events led the family seek refuge in a lesser world around us.

By the time we all could really figure out, we all had outgrown over them. We had our own set of problems and life’s demands. I guess somewhere down the line, I used to remember this girl. By age, she was almost a year older than my eldest sister. She still comes and haunts my thoughts… those happy days… carefree days…

But that’s not the end…

After she left our place, she was working in start up company on daily wages. Imagine one day you don’t go or fall sick… You lost your day’s salary. We are the lucky lot, we receive atleast a decent salary by end of the month in our bank account directly. And I still can’t thank God for that!

The last I ever heard about this girl was that she got married to another loser who dumped her for someone else and fled away… leaving her alone once again.

This poor girl is still in a pretty much bad shape with no support whatsoever. Her mother is too old, weak and fed with what life had to offer her…

I wonder if life, chances, fate etc has anything in store for her.

We too fall and fail sometimes. When we do, it is a bad time for us. But then we do rise again and fight and we have enough people around to support us.

Like they always say that there is a ray of hope at the deep end of the tunnel…

But for this girl its just another dark and gloomy day… everyday!

Coming up another sad story… which is more of hearsay!

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It’s amazing to relive the years of 70s and 80s. And each and every word of it is so true!

I hope you will find it interesting as much as it did to me…

Though you may not publicly own to this, at the age of 5-8 years, you were very proud of your first “Bellbottom” or your first “Maxi”

Phantom & Mandrake were your only true heroes. You can also nod your heads to names like Chandamama, Champak, Lot-Pot, Nandan. The brainy ones read “Competition Success Review”.

You took pride in turning to the back page of your latest Amar Chitra Katha and ticking off yet another title. How many ever you ticked, you still had many to go.

Your “Camlin” geometry box & Flora pencil was your prized possession. The only “Holidays” you took were to go to your grandparents’ or your cousins’ houses.

Ice-cream meant only – either an orange stick, a vanilla softy in a cone or at most – a Choco Bar if you lived in a swanky town.

Your first family car (and the only one) was a Fiat or an ambassador. This often had to be pushed by the entire family to get going.

The glass windows in the back seats used to get stuck at the two-thirds down level and used to irk the shit out of you!

The window went down only if your puny arm could manage the tacky rotary handle to pull it down. Locking the door was easy. You just whacked the other tacky, non-rotary handle downwards.

Your mom had stitched the weirdest lace curtains for all the windows of the car. They were tied in the middle and if your dad was the comfort-oriented kinds, you had a magnificent small fan upfront, below which screwed to the board was the cassette player.

Your parents were proud owners of HMT watches. You “earned” yours after 8th or the 10th standard exams.

You have been to “Jumbo Circus” ; have held your breath while the pretty young thing in the glittery skirt did acrobatics, quite enjoyed the elephants hitting football, the motorcyclist vrooming in the “Maut ka Gola” and it was politically okay to laugh your guts out at dwarfs hitting each others bottoms!

You have atleast once heard “Hawa Mahal” on the radio. If you had a TV, it was normal to expect the neighborhood to gather around to watch the Chitrahaar or the Sunday movie.

If you didn’t have a TV, you just went to a house that did. It mattered little if you knew the owners or not. Sometimes the owners of these TVs got very creative and got a bi or even a tri-coloured anti-glare screen which they attached with two side clips onto their Weston TVs. That confused the hell out of you! Black & White TVs weren’t so bad after all because cricket was played in whites.

You thought your Dad rocked because you got your own (the family’s; not your own own!) colour TV when the Asian Games started. Every one else got the same idea as well and ever since, no one came over to your house and you didn’t go to anyone else’s.

You dreaded the death of any political leader because of the mourning they would announce on the TV. After all how much “Shashtriya Sangeet” can a kid take? Salma Sultana didn’t smile either during the mourning.

You knew that “Indira Gandhi” was somebody really powerful and terribly important. And that’s all you needed to know.

The only “Gadgets” in the house were the TV, the Fridge and the Mixie. All the gadgets had to be duly covered with a crochet covers and sometimes even with ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers.

Movies meant Amitabh Bachchan. Before the start of the movie you always had to watch the obligatory “newsreel”.

You thought you were so rocking because you knew almost all the songs of Abba and BoneyM You had a turntable “stereo” and a collection of LP Records.

Your hormones went crazy when you bought “Disco Deewane” by Naziya Hassan & Zoheb Hassan. You couldn’t contain your happiness when you suddenly had knowledge of Grammy awards and Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper & OMG even Michael Jackson became familiar names.

School teachers, your parents and even your neighbours could whack you and it was all okay.

Photograph taking was a big thing. You were lucky if your family owned a camera. A reel of 36 exposures was valuable hence it justified the half hour preparation & “setting” & the “posing” for each picture.

Therefore, you have atleast one family picture where everyone is holding their breath and standing at attention!

When you really counted down days to “Diwali” every year.

I must thank my school friend Mrs. Kanchan Srivastava to have shared this piece of info on our group forum.