I should simply accept my fate, for this is how my life is going to be – the same loop over and over again – a soul-sucking corporate job, confined to a four-walled cubicle with its fancy windows overlooking the glamorous life of the city while the soundproof glass blocks out the contrasting cacophony. Despite the perks, the monotony of this seemingly high-profile job possesses the capacity to drain one out. Thanks to what I bring to the party, I at least have the luxury of having the view outside my picturesque window being changed every few months. It’s a big firm with offices nationwide, catering to the various needs of their customers but one need common to all these offices is advice on how to rip people off more efficiently or as we call it, consultancy. As a senior consultant, I get to go around quite a lot. I’ve worked great lengths to come so far. I have been to over 30 places in the past decade and yet failed to explore any of them. Well, that changes today. I am determined to alter the monochromatic grey scale of my life and add colors of adventure to it. I cannot magically metamorphose though, so, I’ll start small. Determined, I step out to take a long walk around the city which I’ve limitedly known through my window for the past 3 days. 

​

I walk around for quite a while. My initial dreary plodding transforms to a spirited stride. I see the brilliant skyscrapers, the highways, thousands of cars and lakhs of people going about – fairly conventional symbols of city life until I reach the park and spot a solitary house tucked in the canopy of two ginormous banyan trees. I am sure that I have never stepped foot into this city before and yet I am certain that I know this house, I have been in that house. A memory arrives, already warm. I am taken back to a day, some 30 years back- a child, about 5 years of age, dressed in a rugged shirt and no shorts, putting on shoes in a hurry for he can hear his friends playing out in the park. He rushes out of that same house. 

​

His mother is calling behind him because he left his food half eaten. He tunes it out though, in the urge of not wasting a single minute of his playtime. He runs aimfully, failing to see the rock that he stumbles into and trips. He gets up just as quickly though, his spirit unaffected by the scratch on his knee and finally reaches the group of kids crowding about the swings. That’s what every Sunday looked like for this kid, distinctions of class erased between him and his “friends” who came to the park from the high-rise apartments yonder. Weekdays, however,  were different- the distinction somehow managed to restore itself as these others kids headed to their fancy private schools, in their fancy cars while this little boy walked to his “necessities only” public school, wearing his same hand-me-down school shoes which doubled as play shoes on the weekend. 

​

While the boy is away, the mother takes her precious time to attend to the daily chores of the disintegrating hovel. She mops the floors, makes dinner, dusts and arranges- making that destitute abode feel like a home. If left with time before her child returns, she sits in the hall, on the blue sofa, whose battered cushion is covered by an old red bedsheet. For the hundredth time, she reads the only book she owns- an ancient copy of Great Expectations, hoping her son could undergo a similar transformation into a life of great wealth as Pip by some miracle. She often falls asleep on that couch and is woken up by her son coming back from school, asking for food.

​

I do not remember being a child like this. Not here. Not dressed in borrowed clothes, not barefoot so often, not this unhurried. My childhood, as it exists on paper, was tidy. Apartments. Elevators. After-school classes. Photographs where I am always looking at the camera, always aware of being recorded. This memory does not pose. It moves. It breathes. It refuses to flatten itself into a frame. The discrepancy should alarm me. Instead, it irritates me in a strangely distant way, like a factual error in a book I otherwise enjoy.

​

The faces of the other children never settle long enough to be described. They are defined by motion—by the way one always runs too fast, the way another hesitates before laughing, the way a third never quite lets go of the bat. I recognize them without naming them. I anticipate their movements before they happen. When someone calls out, the sound bends, stretching into a shape I understand even if the words dissolve. It is not language that binds us here, but familiarity—thick, unquestioned, complete.

Then comes the feeling. Not an event. A feeling. Sudden and total. Belonging. It swells before I know what it belongs to. It spreads sideways through the chest, loosening something that has stayed clenched for years. It is not joy exactly—too quiet for that—but something steadier, something that does not ask to be earned. I realize, distantly, that I have not felt this way in a very long time. Possibly ever. The realization lands without drama, heavy and undeniable.

​

My body reacts before my mind catches up. My breath shortens. My hands curl slightly, as though expecting to grasp something familiar. I am standing still in the present—on a paved path, phone vibrating uselessly in my pocket—yet my legs ache with the remembered urge to run. The city around me sharpens. Sounds acquire edges. A horn flashes white. Footsteps smear into grey streaks. For a moment, I am unsure which body I am inhabiting, which gravity applies.

​

I think of photographs then. Of birthdays I am told I enjoyed. Of places I can list but not summon. I think of timelines and résumés and the polite coherence of a life that makes sense to others. All of it feels strangely thin now, like paper held up to harsh light. Accurate, perhaps. But incomplete. This memory—this impossible childhood—does not compete with those facts. It simply exists alongside them, denser, warmer, humming at a frequency facts cannot reach.

​

Where does a memory come from, if not from experience? I ask the question quietly, without expecting an answer. The city does not respond. Neither does the park. The house remains still, tucked beneath its trees, indifferent to my inquiry. I realize then that the explanation has become irrelevant. Whatever this is, it does not require my permission. It has already settled.

I let it stay.

​

I walk back to my office. I look out of that same window, but the view has changed. In the mesmerizing ombre of the setting sun and the perceivable pandemonium that characterizes the city, I sense a strange hush- fainter, older. The memory I revisited settles as an undertone — As if somewhere, beneath the life I am living, a childhood I never had continues—quiet, persistent, humming—remembering me.