A Peek into Sweet Memory of My Childhood

Friends, hope you like this small snippet of my childhood joy. Thank you.

Friends,

The memories of childhood are so joyful! Below is a happy extract from my own childhood. Hope it kindles equally pleasant memories for you, too.

When I was three years old, my Papa joined a new job in New Delhi. Initially, we stayed in a first-floor flat and after two years or so, shifted to a lovely bungalow in that company’s residential colony. The month was September.

This shift blessed me with a passport to heavenly treasures. The reason was the presence of a big garden attached to the new house.
I could now roll in the lawn... smell the marigolds... taste the tomatoes... pluck the guavas... everything was about to come true for a Nature-lover like me. What joy! What tremendous joy!

One December morning, I discovered our gardener uncle digging soil in a long rectangular plot just outside my study window.
When I returned home after school the next day, I found that he had planted six stems in that rectangle. On enquiry, I came to know they were rose stems. Frankly, I was not impressed... they looked so bare! Little did I know what magic was to unfold in these very stems in the days to come.

Within a fortnight, the branches on the stems began to show tiny growths here and there, which gradually unfurled into baby leaves, deep maroon in colour. As they grew, that shade gave way to a beautiful light green and the previously smooth edges became serrated, which is a distinct sign of a rose leaf.

All six stems gave rise to a good number of branches laden with a lovely foliage of dark green leaves. This was early February. I was happy to admit each looked elegant as a rose bush in its own right now. And by the first week of March, the first rose bud of my garden made its grand appearance. It was, however, so uninspiring! As a tiny green onion-like thing, it hardly looked like a prince that would transform itself into a rose, the king of flowers.

My apprehensions proved misplaced and to my pleasant surprise, that small green onion became bigger and bigger as the days passed and shades of red began to peep out from within. The outer green cover then began to peel one by one and slowly, a cone of tightly curled crimson petals emerged by mid-March... yes, now it looked its part as a king-in-waiting.

The D-day arrived within the next two days as I woke to discover a glorious red blossom of a rose gently swaying before my astonished eyes in that early morning sunshine.

It was so beautiful!

It had such a lovely fragrance!

It was so silky to touch!

My delight knew no bounds.

Decades have passed but the delight I experienced remains as fresh as the day I experienced it and I am happy to share that joy with you here.

Hope it kindles a joyful memory for you, too.