Tours to village

          One day, I'll be an old lady telling my grandchildren the stories about how I had a perfect childhood just because it had an annual tour to village and may be getting slowly yet suddenly detached from that village was a perfect disaster in itself for I would have never realized how intensely my soul could crave for such apparently petty things as sitting in a mud houses on a charpai under a keekar tree and drwaing paintings with a wooden stick on soil underneath my feet .I would never have realized that even beauties of Kashmir would never be a replacement to that beauty of Punjab. 

       My sane mind has no idea how those days got lost . For it still craves those restless sleepless nights a day before going to village, excitements of boarding a train and unnecessary childish fear of missing it and then riding donkey cart to ultimately reach that humbled small mud house . How that wooden half broken half mended door was the most beautiful piece of wooden architecture I could and would ever have witnessed. How an old, tired yet sturdy tree stood on that road to the village as if it were the sole guardian of that village.

         How we were always teased for being city peeps not strong enough, how we always used to fall in some naali immediately after our mother dolled us up. How we could never jump over the canals even from the narrowest of places. How that misty sweet smell of burning woods a little earlier to maghrib for night meals could be the cause of intensely nostalgic feelings one day . How everything used to go dark after Isha and how a slumberous silence and a dark starry sky enveloped the whole village . How we couldnt sleep early for we were tired yet awed by the beauty of sky and feared by dogs barking somewhere really far. How we insisted on going to fields even on some of the rainy mornings when everything was slippery .How we never listened to natives and then got extremely tired halfway but the whole tiredness just instantly used to vanish on getting first  the sight of dera. How we used to stare keekar trees for hours and hours, the trees made the scorching heat just unfeltable. How we used to play with other kids their games, how they always favoured us, went a little light on us but even then we always lost ,, but it never really mattered. How we used to get awed at the kids using slates instead of notebooks. How trying to climb every damn tree and getting hurt was such an entertaining thing. 

      How we came back all sad and disheartened and felt a little ashamed when our classfellows made fun of us for getting tanned and dark.