A Gift Forever
If I attend every single birthday that our kids are invited to I would soon weigh more than a few hippos considering the amount of cakes, fries, pizzas and all kind of junk is served in these birthday parties.
Fortunately dad’s are rarely invited (I am not complaining parents of Hunny, Bunny and Sunny, in case you are reading this), and I am yet to reach hippo proportions. Anyways this post is about the debate we have every time the kids are invited to a birthday party. While the girls debate what to wear, their mother is more worried about what gift to give to the birthday baby. How old the kid is, did she came to one of ours birthday? Can we circulate a gift received by one of our kids? Do you think they will notice that the gift given by us was given to us by X? And it goes on.
During one of these debates I went down the memory lane and reached my childhood when we first celebrated my birthday that I remember. If my graying cells are correct it was my 10th birthday and around 8-10 kids of my age with their siblings in tow came to attend the same.
Like all kids, I was more interested in the gifts hiding in the colorful wrappers and was trying to guess the gift from the wrapper color, size of packet and even the weight when I was receiving it.
Soon the guest left, or probably I shooed them away after collecting my booty for the day. Even before the door was locked I was ripping apart the wrappers and looking at what I have received.
Here are a few things I remember
- A chess board
- A small car
- Some toys ( I don’t remember exactly what they were or who gave them)
But there was this one slim packet that I opened in the end but screamed with joy on opening it. It had a book with beautiful pictures, a translation of a Russian book in Hindi with the title
‘Nanha Shoorvir’…or Little Brave heart. Over the years I lost all my toy, the car was dismantled to understand how it moved, making it immobile forever.
Of all the things that I received all those decades ago, I still have the book. The pages have become a bit pale but the pictures of the little Brave heart helping a Russian commander with some secret information to defeat the Nazis in that area are still bright. The story is still itched in my mind, and every now and then when I am browsing through our book shelf I stumble on it and go through its pages. In those few moments I am transported back to that day when I received it as a gift on my birthday. When I flip though it’s pages I am once again a 10 year old boy surrounded by his friends merrily singing “Happy Birthday”, with an eye towards gift packs.
For some reason the book survived when all the toys, games and other stuff that I got on my birthday were lost in time.
Although I have been reading even before I got this book as a gift, but for some reason this one has always been special to me. Perhaps after receiving this book as a gift my love for reading blossomed, that has resulted in a small library in our home and the girls are adding to the collection.
What is your earliest memory of books other than your text books? How about sharing that here?
Sasha and Prasad Np are proud parents of 2 girls whom they fondly call Princess and Pinkette. He wears many hats after taking a break from being corner office critter for a long time. He is now an entrepreneur, blogger, photographer, traveler and a potential investor in start-ups with unique concepts especially if they are in travel related business. He blogs at Desi Traveler, and can be reached at Facebook and Twitter.
