Children collect things, I suppose mimicking and learning from their adults' behavior or propensity to hunt and gather. I also collected things when I was boy, going through the various stages or more appropriately collecting epidemics that seem to sweep over the whole populace of boys of a certain age. The first things I collected were the foils, both gold and silver, extracted from discarded packs of cigarettes, some after my father was done with (he smoked then, Gold Flake brand) and some after begging the corner-shack cigarette-seller, Ramu, to give up a few more when we were sent there on Sunday afternoons to buy half a pack or so of cigarette for the adults to indulge in a smoke or two after heavy lunch.

Soon afterwards in primary school, I accidentally stumbled upon the geological joys of a vast and wild rocks at school; more than fifty acres of rocky land for a curious doggish nose to sniff and go over, an unheard of luxury for an urban school, and I suppose my dumb luck that took me to it for a few sharp and joyous years. Soon my pencil box (made from sheet metal with sharp edges) always had pieces of rock in it: red hematite, a glinting volcanic piece of hard iron, layered mica pieces with their shining fish scales that you rubbed on your arms and face to get a feel of stardust, and then the pieces most sought of all, those hexahedral quartz crystals.

To extract these, one had to improvise a chisel and a hammer to knock them out of the surrounding duller rock. And often a time, since we couldn't find the right mining instruments or leisure for the expeditions were undertaken usually in lunch break after feeding the least favorite course to the stray dogs, we had to lug the whole largish boulders home, much to the exasperation and amusement of adults. This behavior now enables me to understand those fevers for gold, diamonds etc that seem to sweep over men, and take them out into far out places, for those quartz crystals were as desirable to me then as objects of beauty and value.

And as the seasons turned, other objects sought out our attentions: the late winter when in those tropics weather turned really glorious and livable, and after the North Eastern Monsoon, if it was beneficent and dropped some rain, the school wilds used to break out in these waves of tiny clustered wild flowers, and we used to run around in those fields of white, our writing pad reversed, stalking and chasing, beauties of wing and air, butterflies.

Usually we used to put these trapped butterflies in the pencil boxes, or if they were a little bigger in the lunch boxes and take them home with us, where after their pigments colored our finger trips, we used to release them.

However I remember one year when I set up a coop made of wire mesh in the weediest part of my backyard, about two feet square box, and transferred the butterflies from the box to the coop. And the next morning when I went out to monitor their domestication (the idea was to have these as pets), two were dead and two were hanging in one corner, lusterless and weary. Perhaps this was an object lesson for the young me on the limitations of art and artifice, and the requirements to keep untamed beauty flying free in and through the mysterious air. Other animal collections included two notable kinds of bugs; what we called velvet bugs (which a few weeks ago, during an intense discussion at midnight were actually revealed to be some kind of mites), and then antlions, those killing machines to who I fed fire ants. I will skip this bug anthology for now, for it is a whole remembrance in itself.

Then among the more inanimate collections...

to be continued...