Saunters

I just finished reading a book. On the earliest memories remembered and what they mean. I thought long and hard. And my earliest memory is of a kitchen that smelled of… well it smelled tangy and mysterious and not like detergent or food or spices or anything else you’d expect a kitchen to smell like. In fact, now that I come to think of it, it smells like my mother. Sort of. It has grey tiles. Not those dainty, polished ones but the big grainy sorts one finds in government bungalows. The sort that make you want to rub your heel against the floor to feel the slight grate. And I remember there is a shelf… quite low… stone. I firmly believe I don’t remember anything other than the floor or that shelf because I was short. Kids are, you know. So anyway.

This shelf must have had stuff… obviously… mom would consider it criminal to waste space. It’s strange but I don’t remember what she kept on, or rather in this shelf, for at my height then it was more of an alcove. Except for a pink plastic… I guess you could call it a basket for lack of a better word. And she stocked onions in it.
And I remember it so well because the earliest memory of my life is of dawdling in to that kitchen, up to that shelf, painstakingly upending the basket so that the onions tumbled out one by one and rolled into the remotest corners possible, then taking that basket outside and gathering those pink-paper-flowers-whose-name-I-never-knew and putting them in the pink basket. Dark pink against pale pink. And I remember being delighted and happy and pretending I was grown-up and that this plucking of flowers and putting them in the basket had a purpose crucial to the scheme of the world.


What is really strange is that this memory is complete in itself. I don’t remember whether I got scolded for throwing the onions, or for sneaking out without telling anyone or for bringing flowers into the drawing room and messing the place up. I don’t remember being praised for it either or being told that I had amazing resourcefulness for a child who had just learned to walk. It’s just this snatch of memory… on its own… alone.


According to the book, this means I am creative, aloof, sociable, impetuous, fixated-with-family, rootless, calculating, and either good with children or extremely daft with technology… I’ll get back to y’all on the last bit soon as I figure out what page 72 really means.

P.S. Strange how I got the tenses mixed up while reminiscing… and grammar has always been my strong suit. Damn.