Our brain is a funny animal.

It plays tricks on us all the time. And the way it gets that done most of the time is through the filing cabinet we keep in the basement of our head; memory. Experiences, skills, and even emotions that you were so sure you never had, inexplicably appear one day when you’re least expecting them, but there they are gathering dust.

As if they had been with you all the time.

On my fourth birthday, my grandfather predicted that I would become a government officer. It was an off the cuff observation, given the nature of the occasion and the age/ mental state of the person he was making it about. But my grandfather stuck to his guns; he had seen enough to reach that decision and he was not going to budge. Apparently, within the first four years of my existence, I had proven to him that bureaucracy was going to be my true calling.

I wasn’t very talkative and smiled even less and yet, he said, my eyes seemed to miss nothing. This was too much information for a four-year-old to handle let alone understand. So, I filed the incident away, tagging it with all other meaningless experiences I must have encountered in the fourth year of my existence on Earth. All I kept with me were the words government officer and the sense that this entity had some sort of superpowers.

It was true that growing up I wasn’t the kid who told the best stories. But I certainly wrote the most imaginative ones. Writing came naturally to me. As if to compensate for my lazy tongue God had given me an over-imaginative nerve and a prolific writing hand. In order to feed my starving mind, I developed over time a sharp eye for details and a keen nose for plot and narrative.

For me it wasn’t enough that my milk was cold that day. In my mind there had to be a backstory to it. Maybe the cow ate a lot of ice cream that morning or went outside without wearing a hoodie. Ok, fine maybe the bottle had been in the fridge for too long.

Point is, everything had a story.

I don’t know if my grandfather’s remark turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy or weather he just saw something that was always in me before anyone else but as I grew up I found myself being pulled towards a career in the public sector.

Well, if I am being really honest, like, really reaaalllly-I-hope-my-parents-and-family-don’t-read-this honest, it was more push than pull.

I can still remember clearly the day my dad took me out for lunch when I had come to the city for my O levels exams. By that time I had been in a boarding school for three years but this was the first time I was having a one-one-one grown-up ‘business lunch’ with my father. Every son worth his salt looks up to his dad and strives to live up to their expectations. I was no different; having endured hundreds of hours slaving over Mathematics (which might as well have been in Latin for all I understood) I had finally succeeded in securing admission in a prestigious boarding school in the country and my father’s alma mater). In my adolescent mind, I had finally won, I could now rest.

Then ‘disaster’ stuck in the form of a younger brother forever shattering my ‘only son’ hegemony. Years later, I would realize that although I love my brother but his arrival had activated a medieval button in my mind which in turn, triggered an eternal quest to always gallop off on another quest to vanquish some foe and redeem myself in the eyes of my father as his true and worthy successor.

In my case, the damsel in distress that I had to constantly rescue was always my father’s approval. I just had to have it. Time after time I had to slay the same darn dragon everytime my brother something new, like take his first step or achieve a breakthrough like uttering ‘Googoo gaga’.

I’d like to say that it was juvenile and I grew out of it. But it happens in every family and looking back, I’m actually grateful to my brother (although I’ll deny it to his face if any of you ever bring it up) for it gave me the tailwind I needed to pursue whatever goal I had at that particular time. The same theme has been playing on and on in an infinite loop albeit with slight plot changes. It happens in every family more or less to some extent.

And so, back to my lunch with my dad.

As I munched on my chicken cheeseburger with fries, my dad asked me about my future career aspirations. Now any fifteen year old will tell you what the standard response to such query when it comes from a grown-up is to be; go for the vetted (read: socially acceptable) career choice. In my case the answer should have been the Army (my father was a proud soldier) or the Civil Services (fulfilling my grandfather’s prediction).

Having already proved my worth three years ago, I felt I had enough cache to let my father know that I just did not see myself in military fatigues. And he, with a father’s intuition (it is a thing) knew not to push. In fact, he himself said on numerous times that his father wanted him to go in to the Civil Services too but the entrance exam was just too tough. In an interesting game of pass-the-wish, my father felt that if I cleared the exam and joined the Civil Services, he would in a way be living up to the expectations of his father and my grandfather.

Birds: 2

Stone:1

Me: stone

Little did I know at that time what I was putting myself in for. But then that’s the thing; we never know the consequence of our words until much later. At that time I was much more preoccupied with my chicken cheeseburger and proving myself to my father. Both equally important and commendable. So long story short, I knew what my answer had to be; the Army (just to see dad light up) or the public sector).

I said neither and went for the third option.

The truth.

I don’t know if it was the extra mayonnaise or my new-found ‘adult’ status but the operator inside my head whose duty it was to prevent me from blurting stuff out in front of grown-ups slipped up and I said that I wanted to be either a writer or a professional tennis player. As I was washing down the last of the burger with my Coke I saw my dad give me an exasperated look and with that our first man-to-man ended on a low.

Don’t you sometimes wish there was a chance to go back and rewrite your history? Or at the very least change some of the things you had done? Alas, humans are not born with a button that restores us to our factory settings. As the years go by one starts looking backwards more than forward. Like a passenger on a train that is closer to its destination than its point of departure. Once you hit your mid-thirties nostalgia dressed as a ticket collector with his trusty partner Hindsight, starts visiting the various booths of your memory.

Every action of ours has a timeline and if you go back far enough you come to the point where you could have switched the tracks of the train and ended up on a different destination. Hindsight knows those points and once he finds out where you live, hindsight visits regularly and demands that you answer for your actions. It is better that you have a response ready, for hindsight is a persistent bugger and can really get under your skin if you do not block him off at the outset.

And if you’re really special it comes with its side-kick, nostalgia.

They make a formidable pair. Nostalgia has the ‘good cop’ part down pat. He will show clearly how there had always been two passengers on the train, the part of you that you were always meant to me and the one you decided to be. There’s no malice or animosity in nostalgia’s mannerism when he exposes how you trapped the real you in the basement, sneaked food down to him but never let him out into the light. Nostalgia just lays it out in the open.

Hindsight comes with the fangs. He sinks them into the flesh of your memory to lay bare the wound that had healed the first time you decided to suppress your true self. And he will not let up unless you have an air-tight case. For if he senses even the tiniest hint of regret on your part, he will not let you rest until you have resolved the issue or gone mad tearing your hair out.

And so it was that time and time again, just when I had thought that I had learned to play the part of the government officer, I would look down at my official note pad and see the prologue to a story involving three brothers born in three different decades, while my boss would be giving me dictation on a letter to be written to the Agriculture department for the latest import procedures for cotton. As much as I tried or ignored him, I could not kill him off. Over the years he kept planning his escape route through the various tunnels in my personality. Like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption the writer in me has never given up on the dream of crawling through rivers of shit, just to be finally able to walk out clean. Since I did not kill him off completely, I guess that makes me Morgan Freeman’s character. There isn’t much I can do besides silently hoping for the best.

For we are told that once the train leaves the station, whatever and whoever you decide to become is what you will be. There are no refunds or changes of destination. In time I will reach my destination and then there will be no one to remember the stowaway I have been carrying with me.

He has been a good companion. Through him, I have made sense of the world. Of love, life, and everything else in between. So this is to you old friend; who knows what the future holds.

For now, scribble away.