Isha Roy ,B.Tech. CSE

2nd year

A blue vehicle is what I remember. A blue vehicle which was almost like a cart; it had two wheels in the front and two handles on the opposite side, and it had several compartments filled with many types of bread and biscuits. A bakery cart is what we used to call it. Every evening around 5 o’clock, an old man would roam around our locality pushing a cart and selling bread and biscuits.”Po-Po”, he would press a bhopu to make that sound and announce his arrival. We children would always make fun of that noise. We would yell Po-Po all evening while running around playing. It was a great source of laughter for all of us.

You see when you are a kid, even the silliest of things would make you happy. I think as we grow up, we learn many things but, we forget to be silly.  The bread was fine but the biscuits had my heart! There were all kinds of them: cream-filled ones, one with cashew nuts, one with jam, and many more. But my favorite was the coconut roll. It was like a wafer that was filled with coconut and was shaped like a roll. I was very fond of it.

It has been so many years now that we’ve moved to a new locality, near the main road and it’s so noisy here that you can barely hear anything other than the passing bikes and cars, forget about that bhopu. My old locality was much quieter. All you could hear there was giggling and laughter of children, fights between neighbors, and juicy gossip. But here in the busy life of now, a teenage girl burned with books and stress of entrance, there is no sound of that old innocence. And that’s how the everyday sight of that bakery cart now became a faint, distant memory.

After completing my first year of college I was visiting my old locality again. My aunt lives there now and she invited us over for tea. I saw the old playgrounds and streets and couldn’t resist myself. I went to take a walk down the streets. It seemed as if everything had changed, the colour of the buildings, some trees cut down, some rides added in the park, and even the colour of the grass seemed different. Amidst all these changes I was sure of one thing that would remain the same- that blue cart! So I decided to wait. I got so excited that I would have my favourite coconut roll after so long. “I’ll take 3 rolls today”, I thought. I waited for so long but no sign of the cart.  I sat under a tree, which I remembered was the one under which we used to play ghar-ghar. I would always play the teacher at school. I never liked the idea of playing the mom and serving your husband and kids. My mother raised me to have an independent mindset from a very young age. She would always tell me that a woman should stand on her own feet. She always embraced the quality of leadership in me. Women should become the leaders of the society, she would often say.

I sat there for another twenty minutes but still no sight of it. At last, defeated, I started walking back towards my home. I didn’t know why I was so eager to see that cart. It was not something quite fascinating, just bread and biscuits, things you can find anywhere these days. But I guess with so much change going on in life I feel like I could rely on one thing from my past, that was still there. That old locality was filled with so many memories, but now the area seems totally strange to me. I think I was trying to find my childhood there. For some reason, I still believed everything would remain the same- the buildings, the rides, the grass but nothing was according to what I thought, even the blue cart was now a thing of the past.