Down memory lane
Last week I walked, after many years, down the lane where my best friend used to live.
And I felt sad.
During my schooldays this used to be in a genteel part of Colombo, the lane broad enough to allow two cars to barely edge past without scraping each other. The lane was quiet enough for the neighbourhood boys to play tennis-ball cricket on it, the wicket represented by a wooden box (a convenient pakis-pettiya) and the bowling crease marked by a large stone. On the rare occasion that a car wanted to go through, the game was paused, the box and stone moved away and the car allowed to pass.
My friend (who sadly passed away a few years ago) lived there with his parents and two siblings – an older brother and younger sister. The boys in the neighbouring houses down the lane made up the ‘Lane Cricketers’. In between innings, we were supplied with iced water from my friend’s home – and if his mother was around, we might even get some iced passiona at the end of the game.
When it was too wet or we were not in the mood to play cricket, we would get together in his house and on the broad verandah overlooking a well-maintained garden we would play card games – usually that noisy game called ‘Three Hundred and Four’. The game required four players, and on occasion we would grudgingly include my friend’s sister to make up the foursome. Cheating now and then was part of the fun – although it was not easy to cheat when Little Sister played with us, so sharp was her eagle eye!
Walking down the lane last week brought back so many bitter-sweet memories. It was not the memory of our card games and cricket matches that made me sad, my profound sense of sadness was brought on by the realisation of what people had done to the built environment. Gone were the old-style open bungalows with their front lawns. The houses (if they had not been knocked down to be replaced by three storey apartment blocks) are now hidden behind hideous ‘modern’ constructions on what used to be well maintained lawns, the flourishing trees having been cut down long ago. In the past there was a driveway or at least a path from the front door of a house to a gate that opened on to the road. Now the front door opens on to the street itself.
The greenery has gone. Where there were houses with gardens now stand commercial establishments – a travel agent, a cake shop, an eatery with patties and Chinese rolls and even an occasional fly inside a glass case. One can no longer walk freely on the lane let alone play cricket because of the danger posed by cars and three wheelers passing with regular frequency.
Of course, the young ones of today are no longer interested in playing cricket on the road with a pakis-pettiya wicket and a tennis ball – they are more interested in hunching over their mobile phones, oblivious to the passing vehicles. I wonder if they still play card games like 304? Half the fun of playing such card games was the opportunity (occasionally of course) to cheat! Can one cheat when playing computer games against oneself? I wonder.
I suppose one cannot fight change – it is inevitable. As the skyline of Colombo has changed with impressive looking buildings like the Shangri-La standing tall on what was once the army sports grounds, the Racecourse Grandstand of colonial times now converted into a Hong Kong-type shopping mall and Galle Road, Duplication Road and the Marine Drive carrying far more traffic than ever travelled along the single stretch of Galle Road in those pre-21st century days, so too have the houses along the humble lane where we used to play cricket been converted into architecturally ugly entities.
I feel sad when I see these changes. This part of the sleepy Colombo of my youth has metamorphosed into a modern yet aesthetically less appealing 21st century commercial zone.
Of course, if one walks along the Galle Face green of an evening and looks up at the brilliantly lit hotels on the other side of the Galle Road like the ITC Ratnadipa and the Cinnamon City of Dreams, one can be forgiven for feeling as if one is in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.
I wonder – is this change in the name of progress and modernity all for the better? Am I just an old dinosaur who is looking before and after – and pining for what is not?
The children we were have grown up and grown old – and are left to look back with nostalgia on our childhood.
I am sure that seventy-five years from now, the children of today will look back from their 22nd century world and remember their own childhood.
Will they too then feel sad for what has changed during their lifetime?
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