“I’m getting a feeling that your life may not be just sound and fury and certainly not a twice told tale.”
“Coming to storytelling,” he said, “there is none to better my grandmother at that. It’s true, all grannies of yore were storytellers of note, and what cradles of tales they made to stir the curiosity in children! But now, which child has a grandma for company and which mother is fit to play that role when it’s her turn? Whenever I said that she was repeating herself, my grandma used to challenge me to recap it; that I remember every tale she told me has as much to do with her narrative ability as my uncanny memory. You know, I didn’t read any of our epics in the later days, and yet, I’m a sort of mini authority on those. But the icing on my childhood cake was the absence of school regimen till I was nine. You can gauge my fortune if only you contrast it with the kids these days who are bundled out to nursery schools with donkey loads of books that they could hardly grasp. How sad, times have robbed childhood from kids in other ways too.”
“Oh, how I wish I grew up in your times,” I said. “Though I’m half your age, still I didn’t have a quarter of your leeway when it came to going to school. I was packed off to a nursery school before I could unzip my knickers. Maybe, the rural-urban divide persists in some ways even these days.”
“How mirthful that childhood period was though we didn’t have a tenth of the exposure the kids these days have to the ways of world,” he said with a glow in his visage. “But it was different with girls even in our days, why they tend to get exposed to their sexuality well before boys can grasp a thing about their thing. Wonder how they used to conceive those man-wife and doctor-patient games. Once, when a girl had chosen me as her doctor, and as others wrapped us up in a makeshift tent, she exposed her private parts for my physical examination and it was then that I realized that she was made differently over there. Thanks to the movies and the media, now all know all there is to know about sex, but it was only when I was fifteen or so that I got an idea of it from a married woman. Later with her sister, I had a mini affair; oh how we were always at necking and petting though I didn’t press further for fear of making her pregnant. Whoever knew about condom those days and by the time I came to know of it, my rival for her affection had penetrated into her life without it. Sadly for me, ignorance was no bliss for once.’