January 19. “Button, now that you know that Dost and I are in Goa, I want to tell you that they have given us the suite where the four of us stayed the last time the family was in Goa.

And this is the room which my daughters shared. There is a private swimming pool attached with the suite where my elder daughter and I had splashed around. I made an attempt at swimming but sank almost every time. This brought back lots of memories of my childhood when, again, the four of us—my parents and
my younger sister and I—would go to Putimari—a village in Nadia—to spend our summer vacations. We would take a train from Sealdah Station and then a bus to reach Putimari. From there we would be ferried
either by boat or a bullock cart to the mud house where my maternal parents lived.”

“Mud house? The story you’ve just told me seems so unreal. I haven’t even seen a mud house! How long back was this?”

“I must have been 4 or 5 when we took our first trip. And this was the only place we could go to because we couldn’t afford fancy trips as we were very poor. The house in Putimari seemed like a palace then because of its sheer size and, the vast fields surrounding it with every kind of tree, was magnificent. There were mango trees of every variety, jackfruit trees with jackfruits sweeping the ground, flowering plants and herbs. And, some distance away, was this river meandering by. I actually learnt to swim there and would float on the water for hours on end. Of-course, my dad used to hold me in both his arms while I splashed around. But when I tried to do the same in the swimming pool here, I sank immediately. Dost held me in both his arms the way my father used to and a gush of memories came back.”

“Ah, memories. Pleasant ones can give you such a high yet the bad ones can be terrifying!’

“But everything comes in packages of good and bad. I wonder what it would be like if life gave you only the good or only the bad.”

“What happened to the house in Putimari?”

“I have no idea. Nobody knows, not even my mom.”