For one moment everyday, I am six years old once again. For that brief moment, or rather a fraction of a moment, when we have just woke up and before the world takes over, we are just our souls. I am sure if somebody asked us what our childhood was like, we all go to our earliest memories. Mine is when I was six years old, living with my grandparents. Since both my parents worked, and sometimes had to be away, I stayed with my grandparents at mamaghar. My grandmother like many women of her generation, had lived a hard life: married off at 15, she had given birth to six children, received no education and toiled silently all her life. She was not always practical but always very compassionate. I could write about my mother and fill ten pages, but my grandmother was in many ways my first mother. Money was tight when I was living with my grandmother. My parents were not as better off then as they were perhaps half a decade later. I remember the time my grandmother or aama as I called her, sent me to buy something for my ‘tiffin’ for school. I had seen my classmates bring ‘wai-wai’ for tiffin. One of my friends, Smita had let me taste a little bit. I liked it, but hadn’t dared buy it when my grandmother sometimes sent me with money to the nearby shop to buy tiffin. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it was not a round number, it was something like 4 rupees and tin suka or 5 rupees and tin suka. This was about 18 years ago. So, I went to the shop and asked the sauji for wai-wai. I was half sure he would say the money I had with me was not enough. But it was and he gave me one suka back. I was elated that I was going to have wai wai for tiffin that day and went back home saying ‘aama, aama yi paisa firta!’ She was so mad at me, when she saw what I had bought and how much money I had left. Obviously, she had expected more money back. Even as I write this, I feel a tinge of pain for the things that I didn’t have on my early childhood and my pre-teen years. I also remember that house where I lived with my grandparents. I remember waking up every morning and watching the sun rays stream in through the opened window and hearing my grandfather chant prayers in the other room. I remember my grandmother washing my face and wiping it with the corner of her dhoti. I still remember the smell of her dhoti. I remember her making me take the very bitter ‘ausadhi’ prescribed by ananda kumar baidhya for my stomach upset. To this day, I don’t know if baidhya was his surname or his profession. I remember my grandmother waking up at midnight because I had a bad cough to make me ‘mishri ko kaada’ to make my cough better. My life is not the same anymore. I am not the same person anymore. Even the sun that streams through my apartment window every morning is different. But when I think about my childhood the dominant feeling always is that I was loved. My life is more privileged than my grandmother’s because aama and the other women who came before me lived the life they lived.