Everyone has his or her own unique childhood memories, I consider them as personal treasures. Some memories might have brought tears in our little eyes, but once we grow up they make us smile and are priceless. As many people, even I have a treasure box of my own, which looks like a garbage box to my brother, mother and father. What my family calls with various names like "Uma's bhandaara", "Uma's kasada raashi", "Uma's santhe", "Uma's haragana" or "Uma's kaatu kattale", it has a different name is my dictionary and that is "Uma's Treasure Box"! I am planning to dedicate this post in my blog exclusively for this little box of mine! Though my family has been laughing about my treasure box ever since I was five years old, I have not let them throw it away till today. When I got married and went to my husband's house with my belongings, it had become a new subject for my brother to laugh at saying, "why don't you take your 'bhandaara' with you?" But all those memories belong to the place where I was born and brought up, it will remain there forever and I don't let anyone touch them even now.
Anyway, that was an introduction to my little priceless treasure. Let me now give you an insight to my box. First of all, I am very proud of the hundreds of colorful feathers in it. I collected them during my school days and that reminds me of the shouting I used to get each and every day from dad for roaming in the forest on the way home from school. That was the reason I used to reach one and half hour after my brother's arrival at home though we used to leave our school at the same time. But I am still very proud of those colourful original feathers in my box ranging from 2 cm to 25 cm. It still makes me smile when I remember my dad's unsuccessful attempts to stop this habit of mine by saying "birds don't take bath everyday".
The next treasures in the box are a few nests I collected after the birds flew from them. I had to hide them near the jeep shed since it was not allowed inside the house. I did try to hang them on the trees and make the birds re use them. But none of the birds accepted them.
Then there are a few of our childhood drawings. These are the drawing of my cousins, my brother and my own. Most of them are cartoons and our childhood hero characters from our story books. They are not drawn on a neat drawing sheet, but drawn on regular paper pieces and I get to see scribbles behind them. I get to see the way how my and my brother's signature changed in the course of time!
Also there are a few poems I had composed and a few pages of my childhood diary. Poems are absolutely in free verse, no rhyming words in it, nor any subject. And sometimes, the subject has nothing to with the poem. So I can now say that those are modern poems and it is left to the reader to find meaning in it! These poems make even my parents smile now.
If you still keep opening my treasure box, you can find a few favourite chocolate wraps, neatly pressed under a book. I had preserved some to show my dad after eating some particular chocolates, so that dad could get the same chocolate next time. We were not allowed to eat chocolates without wrap, so some were preserved to prove that the chocolates I ate did have wrap and are of 'campco' company!
Next comes a few old stamps, but some of them were not postage stamps. I had not realized it then. So it was collected and preserved. I also have a huge collection of greeting cards we got.
When I became a little older, I started collecting pictures of a favourite writer of mine. Though I haven't read many of his books, I have a great respect for Dr. Shivarama Karanth and collection of his pictures was the outcome of it.
I also have a few torn pages of stupid essay my brother wrote on my essay book in my absence to get me in trouble by the teacher. That reminds me of the time he wrote it. I had a homework of completing my kannada essay on Kannada proverbs and had started with the first line of introduction. That was when my mom called me to the kitchen for some work. My brother was sitting in the same room and when I returned from kitchen, the essay was complete. And the entire essay was written about a mosquito that bit him! Anyone can imagine the huge fight we had that day, and the complaint went to parents and the deserved person got punished too. But today when I read that angrily torn page of my essay book, it brings a huge smile on my face!
You can also find peacock feathers kept safely under the pages along with a few pieces of paper for the feathers to eat and grow. Because that was what my friends and I believed back then, that if we feed peacock feathers with paper pieces, they don't just grow in size, but also in numbers! Since I didn't keep an exact count of how many feathers were there when I kept them in my book, I can't say it if the number of feathers has increased.
So the list of items in my treasure box goes on from a stick I hid (so that nobody would find it to hit me) to dry flowers (which I had found beautiful) from various years. I had considered all these items as a treasure, I am considering it so even now and I will call it treasure in the future too. Because my childhood is exclusively mine and I don't want to forget these tiny funny details of it ever!
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