A loaf of bread was exactly five rupees when I was eight years old. My sister and I used to run across the road, to The kade to buy bread, where all sorts of fascinating eatables and non-eatables glared from their glassy jars. Fizzy Coca Cola hopes, disgustingly smelly dried fish jars and chocolate dreams in paper wrappers with Tin Tins face on it; carefully collected, and thrown away only when an army of ants have claimed their ownership to it. An open-mouthed, goggle-eyed, innocent world that still sleeps, somewhere deep within us.

All sorts of fascinations were indulged in and forgotten within a decade and a half. All sorts. Now, a loaf of bread hovers somewhere over forty rupees and we can no longer run across the road in our pajamas the way we used to. It’s just not possible. One reason being that we have come very far – geographically speaking – from where we were ten years ago. And then, we have crossed an evanescent line which can never be uncrossed; we grew up. Frilly dresses were thrown out in shame, in exchange for blue jeans. Nursery rhymes forgotten, to make room for Pop music. In a blur of spaghetti strap tops, Alsatian dogs, and Backstreet boys, the children in us died a silent death. Inevitable. Yet somehow, unbelievable.

Now I’m here. But here, is something I can’t yet define. Somehow, I’m here. In body. Sometimes in mind. The people I know are mostly the same people I knew then. The things I do and the places I go to are not. It’s amazing how things have changed, and how these things have changed me. Amazing how I am the same and yet not really the same person I was when I was eight.

When the sun rises tomorrow, in all its pink and orange glory, the world will have changed a little more. And I, a little more with it. But tomorrow is not today, and today is nothing that yesterday was. I think it took a little while for me to come to terms with that. So I am content with today, and live for the here and now, because it has been quite a squeeze through the sandglass, for me, and the rest of my generation.

 But did you ever stop to think, and realize that coke doesn’t taste the same way it did when we were children? It really doesn’t. It tastes adult-ish now.