Childhood revisited …

Thanks to The Daily Prompt‘s new blog post idea, I get to write about my earliest childhood memory.

Me !

Before I begin with my earliest memory, there is a bit of a family history that you should probably know. When I pose the same question to my sister about her earliest memory she’d tell me some stories about things that happened when she was just 6 months old. I think that’s an elaborate cock and bull story that she always pulls off on me. My father’s told me that his Uncle could remember things that happened when he was in his Mother’s womb. Well,…Let’s just say that I’m reserving my judgment on that. So, in a family with such ‘history’ of good memory I seem to lack that skill very much. See that little baby in the left side of blog’s banner ? That’s me but I have no memory of that phase of my life.

My earliest childhood memory is in my kindergarten classroom. In the first few months of school I felt very homesick but was fortunate enough to have a sweet classteacher Mrs Ramathilakam who put with a whole class of cry babies. I was also quite lucky to have a kind girl for a classmate. I remember her face vividly. She was a very fair and chubby girl with a coconut tree hairstyle much like mine and she brought the coolest set of goggles to school everyday.

Every time I cried, she would put on the goggles and give me a big smile. Then, I would stop crying. If she put down the goggles, I would cry. This went on for sometime but never once did she stop being cheerful. I don’t remember how we both talked to each other. She spoke Malayalam and I spoke Tamil and neither of us knew much English to have a lively conversation. Yet, we both laughed and smiled at each other. She was also the first person to teach me a Malayalam word “Vellam”(Water). I don’t remember much of my kindergarten though. I think she left the school in UKG. It is all very vague right now. I try hard to recollect her name but I guess it has just left the realms of my memory.

Yeah.. Vague it may be but thinking about all those good memories brings some warmth to the heart and I hope the girl grew up to be a kind person as she was the day I met her. So, what’s your earliest childhood memory ?

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