My Past

My past keeps running into many corners, accumulating like cobwebs and makes me run around in the most inconvenient nooks of my life when I need it. I have tried making a home for it. A diary or a cookie can or a shoe box, but my note books keep changing and the trinkets keep going to  boxes other than the shoe box. Photographs are another nook, this one is a new type, I cannot put them in a cookie can or a journal, they have to be in albums, but I don't have the money for one. My grandfather wrote a book, it is in Marathi and I have been trying to make transcripts for several years now. I keep putting it off on the pretext of more work or a tired body. I see now why historians are trained, the past is an unruly insect, it will find the most obscure places to build it's abode and then when the most elaborate arrangements have been made for it's stay, it will run away to another continent, it will reproduce itself a million times, each time in a different form and scatter these all away into the cracks of the skulls of dying people who have to be interviewed before they breath their last. The other day I caught the past sleeping in an old briefcase on a dusty loft of my parents holiday home, it was a bag full of letters that my father wrote to his siblings and his diary. There was also a patch-work quilt that my grandmother made for me when I was born. It was time to go to bed when this happened, so I took the quilt to bed and used my history to keep me warm on a winter's night.