OLD AND NEW

My dad taught me to collect old things, told me no matter how much your mom calls you a hoarder; never stop.

Show your kids the oldest coins, oldest postcards, receipts and letters.
Show them the first picture that your grandfather clicked, the oldest vinyl your mother bought or that rusty transistor she's so eager to throw away.
Tell them about Campa-Cola and the 10 paisa Kulfi !!
Tell them how 'whats up' has toppled our good 'ol comradely greets, how we've lost the sweet elation of waiting for a letter, hued beautifully with half a dozen stamps.

Tell them about our adventures, and yours.

~That day when you showed me the oldest book you owned, I almost tore that fragile cover in excitement.

"This is just as old as me" well the blood thinning pride failed to impress me!!
I sneered, thinking my oldest book was my grandfather's 1950s copy of 'The picture of Dorian Grey' and 'Peter and Wendy'.
Not forgetting half a hundred copies of the Russian magazine Sputnik that mom read to me when I was 1.

"yeah because i don't flock lost love letters from the local post office like a complete creep, so this is it for a normie."

"HEY ! that was just once !!"  "okay thrice. but it was for a cause !"

I was 14 when i discovered you can ask for lost old postcards and inland letters from the post offices and they'll give them away happily because not everyone's backlogging junknest like me.
The first one I read was from a cot merchant to his wife. The second one was a death news. But it did get better later.

"Sell them for drugs , cause ??"

"NOOO!! these things are my guide to get through the stale linear march of time which is agonising for some humans (like me)who are believed to be born in the wrong era." Well you asked for the drama.

"and you're one of them ? Born in the wrong era?"

"five hundred percent ! "

I always loved those silly questionnaires where you choose if you'd like to go 50 years back in time or 50 years ahead. I'd always choose a hundred years in the past and force you to do the same, "We have to be in the same time, this is a must" I'd say.

Years later, Holding the same old Catch 22 which looked older than it actually was, I flipped through the pages, mapping the paragraphs that you once read, touched..twice, thrice or more. The chaotic footnotes and encircled words, as if you were solving a crime mystery.

How fascinating that I still know which chapter had the coffee stains.

But in other news, I bought a new copy, and it somehow feels happier. Blander and barer but happier. It also has an additional author's note which you, of course were never interested in. 

I know I can't tell the world how this book was older than me, or how you paid a fortune to get that 'SPECIAL VINTAGE EDITION' , or how with every passing year the pages turn from tan to sandy but the bitter almond smell would never really change.

But, at least I can lend it now, and read it without fondling each page only to shed a stream and falter before I reach to the end.

I know its empty. But its mine.

I know we (I) never liked new things, That we (I) were scared of changes.
But you grow a taste for it once you've returned everything borrowed.

Either I sit right here and yearn trying to squeeze in my jottings between your all due footnotes, or I write a chapter from scratch , a little for you and a little for me.

- Ayu. 🖤