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Childhood exists in a country all its own-a place we've all inhabited but can never fully return to. It's a landscape of firsts: first friendships, first heartbreaks, first discoveries. The borders of this country are barely noticeable in youth, but gradually solidify until one day, we find ourselves firmly on the other side, looking back across an unbridgeable distance.
Memory becomes our only passport back-unreliable documents that fade and shift, embellish and diminish. The streets we once roamed seem smaller when revisited, yet in other ways, memories magnify-a summer afternoon stretches into eternity, the taste of a long-ago ice cream becomes more vivid than yesterday's dinner.
In my childhood, Guwahati was a living map marked by landmarks invisible to strangers: the spot where I fell from a bicycle; the tree whose branches formed a perfect reading nook; the shortcut past a dog whose bark was worse than his bite. It was a city in transition, much like childhood itself-a temporary state that feels eternal while you're in it.
Time moved differently then. Summer days stretched toward infinity, yet paradoxically, the years themselves passed in a flash. One day we were racing through open fields; the next, those same fields were being measured for apartment buildings.
The stories that follow capture fragments of this vanished country as it existed in Guwahati from the 1980s through the early 2000s. They explore the tension between preservation and progress, between honoring what was and embracing what could be.
Perhaps as you read, you'll recognize something of your own childhood. For though we can never truly return to that country, through stories and memories, we can send messages across its border-reminding ourselves that the map that guided us then still influences the paths we choose today.
