Snatches Of Time…

BREAK:

When I was six, I broke a vase. It was a typical childhood mistake –a turn taken too suddenly around too sharp a corner into too fragile an object. When my parents heard the crash, they ran over to find me sitting amidst the pieces trying to put them back together. They took my hand and led me away and picked up the pieces

When I was 10, I broke my arm. It was an inevitable mistake, caused by my adolescent belief that I was invincible and nothing could touch me. When this belief shattered with my arm, my brother sat with me and held my hand.

When I was 15, my heart broke. It was a misunderstanding, a fight between two best friends over something that probably didn’t matter. When my friend went online, she asked me if I was okay and I said yes. And so she signed off and I went about picking up the pieces myself.

TRAVELLING

Soon after we bought our first car, we took our first long road trip. The green car was small and compact and barely fit us and all our luggage, but back then, it was okay, because I was small and fit quite snugly in my mother’s lap. The tiny car shook with the reverberations of the bass of the music and the laughter as we sung along with it, completely off-tune.

My mother sat with a map, trying to draw out with a highlighter the path she remembered the travel agent telling her. It took us two days to get down there, and along the way we stopped at a small, run down motel run by an Indian family that took a liking to us and gave us free dinner and a discounted room. The next morning, we came outside and saw that a pack of crayons I had left on the back seat had melted into the seat, a rainbow reminder of my childhood that would remain no matter how hard we scrubbed.

Our second long road trip was taken in the family minivan, silver and large and difficult to park but easy to pack. The GPS called out directions, interrupting the music my brother had burned onto a CD. We stopped at rest stops, but otherwise kept driving until, 10 hours later, we finally reached our destination – my brother’s new home for the next four years. This time, when we drove back, there were three of us not four.

CLOCKS:

My brother thought we wouldn’t fit it in. My mother thought we could definitely fit it in. My father didn’t care – he just knew he had to fit it in. I sat on a rock as the rest of my family was faced with the greatest geometry problem of their time: how to fit in the last four years of my brother’s life into the back of the car.

The luggage came in all different shapes and sizes, with square cardboard boxes of books to the black statue of Buddha to the laundry hamper of dirty clothes.

There were two decorative clocks, black and embossed in gold, and the frame we bought for his diploma and the copious amounts of food my mother had packed, as though we had been gone for years – not a few days.

There were picture frames of life before college and picture frames of life during college and picture frames of friends and of family. There were suitcases filled with clothes and pillows and blankets and the animal print Snuggie he told me he didn’t buy – it was a gift. There were DVD’s and CD’s, laptops and TV. There were moments of frustration that came with disagreeing over whether or not this box could fit in, punctuated by tearful hugs with the friends left behind.

The last things to go into the car were the two clocks. They didn’t quite fit.

Anjali Agarwalla is a student in New York. Growing up in one of the cultural hubs of America has made her enjoy not only writing and reading, but also art, dancing and music. She is a trained Kathak dancer.