According to Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi, “Childhood means simplicity. Look at the world with the child’s eye – it is very beautiful.” It was a Sunday evening. After my rigorous office hours, I came home tired and lay on my bed. My eyes got stuck on an innocently smiling face of myself, beautifully photographed while I was a fifth-grader. At once, I had a photographic memory and I took myself to my world of sweet-bitter bygones. I remember how I used to feel free of tensions: enjoying, playing with my fellow escorts, going cattle grazer, visiting mela of my nearby locality called Gwaldubba Bazaar, swimming in the small river called Gauriya of my hometown Gaurigunj, Jhapa.

Childhood memories are sweet and they are even sweeter when you recollect them in tranquility while you are an adult. The memories become picturesque, and you get lost in the Utopian world. They bring alive the lively, vibrant and unforgettable moments of the past. That’s why, Agatha Christie rightly says, “One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.”

One of my early childhood memories was my granny every Saturday visiting the nearby Gaurigunj haat and buying me dhong papad, a special variety of papad, found in the Madhes. I used to quarrel with my siblings over this precious thing. That was the moment I used to get heavenly bliss, a bliss that I would die for regaining that paradise, but now it is just a memory. Time has snatched my granny and her papad mixed with love far away, but the memory is alive and it is timeless.

I’ve come a long way from my world of a carefree child to the present one of an officer of Government of Nepal. However, I prefer the world of my childhood. Like W.B.Yeats in ‘’The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner,’’ I feel like spitting into the mouth of the ‘time’. It’s time that has alienated me from my joyous childhood days.

I long for my bygone memories. The flashbacks only leave a momentary pleasure on me. Human beings hardly forget the happy childhood days, moments and years. Years pass by but memory remains. The childhood memory plays a vital role to make survival meaningful. Without it there is no significance of the life in adulthood.

Like me, there are many who can’t forget their bygones. We make the sweet-bitter moments of the past a token of life. We remember the childhood memories and we laugh the moments loud and at the same time we cry in tears. We should abide by Tom Stoppard’s words: If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.