Honey, I shrunk the house!

Have you ever felt like taking your kids back to the place where you spent your childhood, felt like showing them the home that you grew up in, wanted to walk along with them on roads that you once walked with your parents, longed to play with them on fields that you once played on and yearned to sit with them on the classroom benches that you once sat on?

This may not resonate with those of us who are fortunate enough to have our children grow up in the same home and surroundings that we ourselves grew up in. But in today's world, such of us are significantly fewer than the many of us who have moved far away from our birth places to make our lives and to bring up our own families, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from our home towns, in different countries, often in different continents even.

And to those of us who have made our homes far away from our childhood homes, there comes a stage in our lives when the nostalgic pull to revisit the past becomes too difficult to ignore any more. And then we need only the slightest reason to make that trip - an excuse of a school reunion or a family get-together is usually the last straw that gets us booking our flight tickets in a hurry. Of course this situation does not apply as much, for those of us whose parents still stay in or around our childhood homes - each visit to see our parents would present many such 'homecoming' opportunities.

And so it was with much nostalgic expectations that I returned to the place where I had spent most of my childhood, almost twenty years after we had left the place. I had left as a young boy and was now returning with my wife and two young boys of my own! Bitten by the nostalgia bug, we also made a trip down to where Preethi had spent a lot of her childhood. These trips opened a floodgate of pleasant memories for both of us; and the memories of these nostalgic trips back to our childhood will always remain with us - memories of memories in many ways..

But amidst the rekindling of all those memories, I had felt something quite strange - at first I could not really place it, but when I thought about it a bit more, I came to the conclusion that it was not just a fleeting feeling - something really strange had indeed happened. The places that were so familiar to me, the houses that I remembered so well, the roads - all of them had shrunk! They were not as big as I remembered them to be. In fact, even a few of the people that I knew so well had also become much smaller in size!

The feeling first hit me when I met someone I remembered very well as an imposing man and a towering personality. I am pretty sure that he had been close to six feet tall and almost as wide! But when I met him now, he seemed to be of such small stature that I had to bend down to look at him! When I put my hand around him, I almost covered his entire frame! Surely this could not be the same man! But there had been no mistake - it was indeed the same man. Though the first glance of him did take me slightly by surprise, in my heart I rationalized it away - he had lost weight, his bones must have compressed or something, and then of course, I was not the little boy anymore; I was six feet tall myself. So a combination of my growth and his reduced stature must have been the reason for this sudden diminishing of size.

The next time I had the same strange feeling was when I missed the side road which led to my old home. I missed it because I just did not see it. We had to turn and come back after we had passed it and had driven on for some time. And when we came back, I was careful to drive very slowly; and yet, I just about managed to not miss it again! It was no longer the wide road that I remembered it to be! The road which had been big and wide enough to host many cricket matches when we were growing up. The road which had become a football field for us on so many occasions. The road which would become an ocean during the monsoon. And now, I had barely managed to spot it even!

But the feeling struck me hardest when we drove past my old home. Again, I would have missed it had I not had been literally counting the houses - ours was the third house on the left. It still was. But it was not the big home that I so fondly remembered. The big courtyard in front of the house seemed to be almost non-existent now and it seemed that the house had moved so much closer to the road. The house itself had definitely become smaller. It seemed to be almost buried deep down in a hole now. I reasoned later that it must have been partly because the road had been raised considerably to prevent the flooding during the monsoon. The big mango tree in front of the house almost dwarfed it completely now. As we drove past, I almost felt a pang of grief at the drastic change in the appearance of my home. My excitement as we set out in the morning seemed to have been sapped out of me. My home had shrunk!

But had it really? Of course not. But the things around it had grown bigger - the road had been raised, the mango tree had grown; in relation the house had shrunk. It was the same with the road. Most of the houses on the road had walls now, constricting it on both sides. A huge apartment complex had now come up in the corner almost completely hiding the entrance to the road. Again, in relation to the developments all around, the road had also become smaller. I guess, in some way, it was the same with that man who had also shrunk. It was more because I had become bigger, that he seemed considerably smaller now.

And that I think is just the way life is - as we grow older, as we grow taller and bigger, things that were very important at some stage in our lives may fail to retain the same importance later on in our lives. That is indeed normal - because we all have priorities and as we grow, our priorities will change and so will our perspectives.

But I also sense somewhere deep down, a small fear.

A small fear that quietly reminds me not to forget the home that I grew up in, regardless of the bigger homes that I may now be used to. A small fear that gently prods me to not miss seeing the road that I used to walk on, regardless of the multi-lane expressways that I now drive on. A small fear that prompts me to ask God for the grace to be always willing to put an arm around the shoulders of those who were once big in my eyes, regardless of how they might appear now.

PS: Yes, the title is indeed ungrammatical and "shrunk" should ideally be "shrank". But as some of you may have guessed, it has been inspired from a 1989 science fiction family film "Honey, I shrunk the kids"..