Nothing can beat the wilderness of Kohima* during my growing-up years. They have the best of memories etched in me, never to fade out. We call our weekend outings to one such jungle as jungle hunting.
The trickling stream with ankle-deep water and pebbles all with moss, I now realize how that place was less traversed. We tiptoed our feet as we wet them, holding our slippers in one hand. The mirth and excitement of being carefree was exhilarating, now, a distant dream.
Let me stop by to recall and share a rofl moment we had on this particular stream. All the pebbles looked green like emerald, glistering in the afternoon sunlight. There was a huge flat green shiny stone too. It looked tempting for my elder sister and she went running and stepped on it and had a nasty slip. I was too small to understand her pain but no flicker showed on her face. So I thought, I too can step on it. Well, you can imagine. No wonder it pained me really hard. There was no laughter, and both of us hid, but tears trickled down my cheek I tried to see if my sister felt the same but everyone joyfully went their way and moved on as if it was just a fall. Maybe ignoring only made us forget the pain and we continued our venture.
We were always five of us on such jungle expeditions. Three were our neighbours and my sister made five. This sounds more like the famous five of Enid Blyton. My elder sister was the most adventurous. She never stopped me from being in awe as I recall now. Perhaps, her childhood made her the strongest and the most supportive of all our siblings.
Our house was the last among all the others and beyond starts the explored forest cover. Our main attractions were the wild fruits. There was always abundance and it is always a tricky job to pluck them. There grew luxuriant wild apples, wild passion fruits, raspberries, blue tongue fruits etc.
We once brought back home some blue tongue fruit for our mom and she happily ate them and said she liked it. She was always kind enough to let us venture out to bring those fruits. Life was indeed so free then.
Then came a time when we brought enough of those blue tongue fruits for mom and we all enjoyed them together. The fruit is tiny and sweet but the tongue becomes blue and stays for quite long. One day, my dad was home early. It was a Saturday, and he wondered why all our tongues were blue. He was very furious as he thought, eating wild fruits might be dangerous, we don’t know. I now understand his apprehensiveness then. Well, the next time we ate the fruit, we made sure the color no longer stays before dad is back from the office. We used to put body soap to scrub our tongues but it was awful. Lately, I learnt ,lemon works great to remove the color.
* Kohima is the capital state of Nagaland in India.
Picture courtesy – Google
My Musings 
Lovely memory captures
Thank you so much Piudi for stopping by.