For us little boys, it was an amazingly beautiful place, full of the possibilities of all sorts of adventure. There were big stands with white umbrellas on them inclined at different angles. While the corners of the rooms were dark, the centre was fully illuminated with the light reflecting off those umbrellas.
There was a lot of light in that space, much more than we would have seen at our home. My brother and I ran around in the studio and explored everything.
There were wires running here and there on the ground. The wall in front of us had a number of background options. They were a sort of curtains. We pulled out a few to see how they looked, and then pulled out a few more.
There was a dressing table with a mirror in one corner, along with a small plastic comb that had a few missing teeth, some talcum powder and a few lipsticks.
All those items smelled bad, so I kept them back as soon as I lifted them. There was a huge carton in another corner of the room. It was way above our height, so we could not find out what was in there. Soon, the door opened and someone walked in. He said hello to us. He was our cameraman. He was paying us so much attention because we were special for him. And, sure enough, he told us that he had got something for us.
Then, as soon as the cameraman placed the tricycle at the centre of the room, he ran to grab his seat on it. I too ran after Tinku. We were about to enter into a scuffle when the cameraman intervened and shifted Tinku to the back seat. I loved the cameraman when he did so! Tinku protested, but the cameraman told him that the one who would sit on the back seat would look better in the photo. I silently thanked the cameraman for being secretly on my side.
So my brother took the rear seat without protest, while I sat in front and jammed my feet into the pedals. Somehow, the front seat with the handle in my hands made me feel more powerful and special! Sitting on that tricycle, with the umbrella lights focused on us, we were the centre of attention for the cameraman and our father. We took a considerable amount of time to settle down well.
But the cameraman was an expert. But our smiles did not last long. It was only a photo studio, and that tricycle was a prop belonging to the studio owner. We never wanted to get up from that tricycle.
We wanted to pedal it down to our home. And thankfully, in no time, his melodrama was over. The red tricycle remained in the centre of the room, alone, surrounded by the focused umbrella lights.
It was heartbreaking to leave that beautiful toy there. As the two of us stood next to Dad, another family with two kids entered the studio. The same cameraman led them to the same tricycle. The parents lovingly adjusted the positions of their kids on the tricycle. It was as if, right in front of our eyes, those kids were celebrating their victory. My brother stood calmly and watched everything without blinking. I watched that family, and then turned to look at my brother. I felt protective of him.
Soon Dad was through with the payment and asked us to follow him back home. Asi taa vaddi cycle lavaange! We will buy a bigger one! With that, I tightened my grip over his hand and we walked out of the studio.
The sound of gunfire and the boulders behind which they are hiding, in the hills, fill in the entire scene. He tosses the coin. Jai shows the coin on his palm to Veeru, and asks him to immediately leave along with Basanti, and come back with four cartons of ammunition. Soon, he is all by himself, fighting the bandits on the plateau. I believe he will make it. I believe he will kill everyone—the way he has done so far. But the next time he opens the chamber of his revolver, there is only one bullet in it.
Something tells me that he is going to do wonders with that one bullet. He has to. That is when he spots a bomb over the wooden bridge, which is the only connection between him and the bandits. But time is running out.
The bandits have already stepped on to that bridge, and are making their way towards him. He has all my attention. It is a dangerous moment. I love Jai and I want him to win.
But he is all alone. I cross my fingers. I shout and tell him to wait and not to come out into the open. He is safe there behind the rocks. Just then, from behind the rock, Jai jumps out into the open to pick up an abandoned revolver.
His body rolls in the dust. A few more rounds of fire are heard. I am worried about Jai. I pray to God for his safety. He picks up that revolver and walks straight to the bridge. The bandits are advancing from the other side. Jai takes an aim at the bomb with his revolver in the left hand. Right then, I see a spot of blood oozing out of his body. Goli lag gayi Jai ko! An injured Jai shoots at the bomb. It explodes, and the bridge collapses. A few bandits are killed, while the rest of them run away.
The blood-soaked Jai is lying on the ground. That confirms he is not going to survive. I am about to break down.
I still pray to God that my fear should not come true. He dies. My hero dies. My Jai dies. The sad tune of the harmonica that Jai used to play follows his death.
And I start crying. Tears roll down my eyes. I grieve for the loss of Jai. I spend a sad day thinking about Jai. Occasionally, I cry. Later in the evening, when my father is watching the news in the prime-time bulletin, I spot Jai in one of the news items. What happened to him? And his name is Amitabh Bachchan! There are a lot of people around him. He is signing something for them and smiling.
He bursts into laughter. Dad then explains to me that movies and serials are just fiction. News is for real. I listen to him very carefully. Just before going to bed, I go to Dad. He is in his bed and fast asleep. If there was anything that I was afraid of as a child, it was the hospital in our town. The hospital building was the biggest structure of brick and concrete in Burla—a light pink colour, and surrounded by tall green deodars and gulmohar trees, with seasonal orange flowers in them.
A never-ending row of bicycles and motorcycles would make a serpentine line in the shade of the trees. Every time I crossed that building, I used to feel a chill run down my spine.
From the outside, everything was just so quiet and normal. But only the people who would have walked into it would know about what happened inside. I had walked into it a couple of times. I was made to do so, against my will, by my father. So I knew what went on inside. My brother and I had not been given our inoculations at birth or in the few months afterwards, as was the usual practice. Our tragedy was that by the time our parents realized the importance of those injections, we were old enough to understand that injections hurt.
Therefore, we used to run away from them. But they were necessary. So Dad, very cunningly, never told us when he was taking us to the hospital. He would make the two of us sit on his bicycle and tell us that we were going out for a nice ride.
Tinku, as usual, would occupy the front bar while I would sit on the carrier, holding on to the front seat, on which Dad would be sitting. Only when he would miss the right turn towards the Pakka Market and continue to go straight, where the road led to nothing but the hospital, we would be clear of his ill intentions.
And then suddenly my brother and I would start squirming on our seats, knowing what was coming our way. It was quite common for our father to not provide an answer to that one. The bicycle would keep moving.
The two of us would keep talking. He too would want to see me. But the two of us used to be separated by our father. Right at the registration counter, our fear would take a mammoth shape. The clerk at the registration desk knew our father very well.
He would smile and fill in half the details on his own. As we walked up the staircase, I would realize how close we were to the terrible process. The peculiar smell of disinfectant would fill my nostrils and virtually choke me. The sight of the green curtains, the nurses in white and the number of sick people around would make me also feel sick. The whole atmosphere in that government hospital was that of a horror story. That horror multiplied by several times the moment we would reach our ward.
We knew her well. She was acquainted with us too. We were a challenge for her. Many times, we had created a scene in front of her and the rest of the hospital, crying, screaming and running out without our pants!
Knowing our desperation to escape, Dad never forgot to lure us with items of our interest. Most of the times, he would tempt us by saying that he was going to treat us to Frooti—a popular mango drink —if only we agreed to take the shots.
We were madly in love with that three-rupee drink, which came packaged in a square green Tetra Pak. The front of the packet had an image of two ripe, yellow mangoes, with droplets of chilled water sliding down them.
Dad knew very well how much we loved this particular drink. Insane as it might sound, our deep love for Frooti overcame our fear of the injections, and our father knew how to use that. We would willingly lie down on our stomachs on the medical bed, baring our bottoms for the injections.
In our minds, we would see the shopkeeper taking the chilled packets of Frooti out of his freezer, just for us. In the meantime, the nurse would take out the needle from the boiling water over the electric heater. Our dreams would progress, and we would now be holding our coveted drink in our hands.
The nurse was constantly in the process of preparing the injection, pushing in the nozzle to flush the air out of the syringe. And, as we imagined piercing the tiny round foil at the upper corner of the Tetra Pak with our pointed straws, the nurse would pierce our behinds with that injection. The reality of that moment, for the next few seconds, would break our reverie and leave us in great pain. But, we knew, the key for us was to keep holding on to our thoughts, to relish them enough to be able to overlook reality.
Soon it would all be over, yet we continued to lie there, exactly in the same posture, happily imagining sipping our Frootis, smiling!
Two brothers, lying half-naked on their stomach, with their eyes glued to a daydream and smiles pasted on their faces! Ho gaya! Our experience of drinking Frooti would not just end there at the shop.
It was a ritual for us to bring that empty Tetra Pak back home with us. We would blow as much air as possible into it with the straw, place the inflated packet on the ground and ask everyone around us to watch as we jumped over our packets.
That would mark the completion of our Frooti adventure! One day, Dad took me for a visit to the hospital again. He told me that my injection course had been completed, and so I could relax. But how could I relax—when I was being taken into that same building? I was only convinced when he took a different staircase this time, leading to a different wing. I had never been to this part of the hospital earlier. Yet, I was sceptical. Dad took me straight to the dental outdoor ward.
There was already a long queue there. He then placed a paperweight over the pile, and went back to relax on the stool by the door. I wondered why we were there. I looked at the people around me. They all had their mouths closed, so I could not get to know what sort of dental problems they had. Which made me wonder—What sort of a problem did I have?
Everything was fine with me. I had neither complained of any toothache, nor did I have foul breath. My father sat me down and told me the reason why we were in the dental ward. My front two milk teeth had fallen a few months back. The gap should ideally have been filled up by a pair of brand new, permanent teeth. My family kept expecting this act of nature to happen by itself. But nature had been probably too busy with other things, and forgotten me. He asked me to quickly put back on the rubber slippers that had fallen off my hanging feet.
Together, we rushed inside the room. The room was bright with sunrays, which flooded into it from a spacious window behind the dentist.
There was a person sitting next to the dentist, with a black bag on his lap. Once in a while, he pulled out a medicine from it and kept talking about it to the dentist. Dad told me that this man was a medical representative.
The only time the dentist looked at him was when he placed a nice-looking pen set, a diary and a calendar on his table. Soon after this, he left. I looked around. The walls around me had neatly labelled diagrams of jaws and teeth. I had read about them in my science class. I wanted to show my father my brilliance.
So I tugged at his hand, wanting to tell him that we should tell the dentist that my incisors had failed to develop. But he ignored me and continued to explain the problem himself. I continued to look at the decorated walls. There was a poster of a beautiful lady with glittering white teeth. She had a tube of white-and-red striped toothpaste in her hand.
She had a beautiful smile. Now, finally, the dentist looked at me, and asked me to open my mouth. I smiled, imitating the smile of the lady in the poster. The dentist, unimpressed, asked me to look towards him and not towards the poster.
Like this—aaaaaaaa! He looked funny. I made my tongue dance to the sound. As I held my mouth wide open for the longest time, my eyes seemed to shrink and my cheeks were stretched. I had invested a lot of energy in sustaining that show. Everyone around me was looking at me.
I closed my mouth and turned my attention back to the smiling lady with the toothpaste. The dentist explained a few things to my father, which I completely ignored.
He prescribed some medicine for me and asked us to visit him again after two days. The last thing I heard him saying was that the procedure would take an hour when we visited next, so I would have to miss a period or two at school. I checked with Dad if he was going to do anything to me, and whether it was going to be painful.
I realized that after two days I could legitimately bunk school! For the next two days, each meal I ate was followed by a medicine.
On Day Three, I looked at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth to see if, by any chance, the medicines had worked and I had new teeth. The inside of my mouth appeared, more or less, just as it had two days back. Paagal dentist, I told myself in the mirror. At school, I proudly told all my friends that I would be there for only half the day.
I was going to bunk the second half! Dad was there right on time to pick me up, and, as my classmates watched with envy, I quickly put my schoolbag on my shoulders and ran to Dad. It all started exactly the way it had started the other day. We first got a slip made, took the other staircase and walked through the other wing and arrived at the outdoor dental ward, where a lot of people were waiting in the queue.
Yep, she was right there! Dad nodded, without looking at me. The dentist called for a nurse and asked me to follow her.
His silence rang a warning bell in my head. Though I followed the nurse, there were a lot of thoughts in my mind. She led me to a vacant cabin on the extreme right of the dental ward. In no time, I found myself sitting on a long reclining chair. She pulled a lever, it leant back. She pulled another one, and I was above the ground. I asked her what was on her mind. Meanwhile, the dentist appeared. As he came closer to me, I watched him slip his hands into a pair of gloves.
He then strapped on a mask. Watching that made me sure that something terrible was in store for me. I was trapped in that elevated reclining chair. I asked the dentist what was going to happen. The dentist and the nurse ignored me. I asked them to call my father. They still ignored me. The dentist and the nurse were now almost ready to dissect my tiny, pink gums. The nurse adjusted the overhead light so that it fell right on my face.
It blurred my vision for a second. The dentist picked up his tools and asked me to open my mouth. I was petrified. My legs trembled. I wanted to get off that reclining chair and escape, but it was impossible to get off. As he mentioned that, he picked up a large injection. It had a long needle that would have been around four inches, if not five.
He brandished that horrible thing right in front of my scared eyes. Doctor Rabbit lived in the very biggest tree in the Big Green Woods. He looked after all the other rabbits when they were ill and he doctored quite a number of the other little creatures of the Big Woods too, when they did not feel well.
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Some of the techniques listed in Like It Happened Yesterday may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, asian literature lovers. Like it happened yesterday Author: His second book was a yesterdwy let down. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: I have read some of reviews in which the people have actually criticized the book too much. Come, hold my hand, and take this trip with me. The process preceding the placement ravinder singh book like it happened yesterday the stomach still remains an unresolved mystery.
Do let me know if you have read the book or are planning to do so! Can Love Happen Twice? The title is completely appropriate for the book as all the memories that Ravinder Singh shared with us are the memories that are unforgettable and we will remember these memories till the very last breath. Ravinder ravinder singh book like it happened yesterday I am not sure if you are ever going to see this review, but if you do, please do consider the feedback for your future writes.
A great deal of care has been taken to bring out a quality product. But as life started getting more real, piece by piece, those pleasant childhood memories became more and more valuable to me. An OTP has been sent to your email address.
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