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Showing posts from March, 2008

Lost, Never Found

The little neighborhood on the banks of a green river where I spent all my childhood was like a ghost town when I visited it a few years ago. The alleys were much narrower than I had remembered them, closing in, claustrophobic. The houses used to be much bigger in my childhood. Now they all seemed to have shrunk, aged. And I couldn’t find my friends. Not a single one. I sometimes wonder whether I had imagined it all. The big gang, hide-and-seek games in a cocoa grove, radio performances, ramparts of the ancient temple ruins, and lily ponds around school. “School? Oh I hated school—don’t have any pleasant memories,” said one gang member when I met her in Chennai briefly, 10 years ago. The Orkut community on my neighborhood has no familiar faces. Maybe I never existed there. Or maybe I was always a visitor, an amusing outsider. “Gosh, your Malayalam has such a strong Tamil accent! You’ll never get it right!” Being an outsider—oh, I do it well. “Do us a favor—don’t even att

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