Wellington

Some time back I wrote about the places i have lived in, and the list in not short thanks to my defense background. This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write describing what I remember of those places.

I was 3 years old, I am not sure how much a 3 year old is expected to remember of a place she stayed in for a year and a half. But I have faint and very scattered memories of Wellington a town where my father was posted to to pursue his degree from the Staff College.

We stayed in a house located on a hill top. With a small kitchen garden in the backyard, we only had to climb a small hillock from the garden to reach the children's park.Where there was a slide with broken steps, every time some animal (I think it was a bull, but might need to confirm that with my elder sister) came into the park all the kids ran to climb from the sloping end to the top of the slide (as I mentioned the steps were broken) to be safe and I remember never being able to reach the top myself.

There were pony rides we went for every Sunday. And than there was the ride to School on a "shaktiman" truck which collected us from our bus stop, which was a leveled land closed from 3 ends by hills.

On those Sundays when dad would be around he would sit out with his friends and have beer rolling the empty bottles down hill, behind which we went rolling to fetch the bottles.

On days when dad would not be in town and I only remember one such time though, there would be guards out side the house all night and I wondered if we were prisoners.

On the base of the hill we lived on was a graveyard somehow I can still close my eyes and see the place, a little ahead of the graveyard were more multi storied homes. I remember visiting someone there once but can't recollect who. Some times we used to walk a long way, to check on our house maid who had a tent like house in a valley.

Than of course there were times when we went to Ooty lake for boating and this one time that I remember clearly is when Nani ( of course that is what we called her) fell in the lake because she would not let any one help her get off the boat (and she was my age), we only realized that she was missing when we started looking for the car keys, which she had.

I would love to live in a place like that again !