My Childhood Room

It was a magnificent home. In it, I was Alice in Wonderland, getting lost in the new things I explored day, discovering myself and the world around me all over again each day. Born in Pakistan, I vividly remember the huge home I grew up in—all seven large bedrooms, the beautiful garden, the porch, and the trees that enveloped our house in their mysteriousness.

The small desk in my room bore perhaps little resemblance to the desks of most children. I am and have been obsessed with newspaper clippings every since I was a child. I kept different notebooks of various cut outs, categorizing them in a way that only I could understand. During the evening, while I sipped on mango lassi or milkshake, I’d immerse myself in the pages of the notebooks, getting lost in the stories my mind created with their images and headlines. A cut out of a teacher teaching a class brought about endless stories in my own mind—I’d think about my own teachers, I’d think about what my says about respecting teachers, I’d think about teachers in other parts of the world, and finally I’d think about what could the teacher in this specific picture be teaching. It may sound a bit naïve, but this was the highlight of a my evenings until—

“WHY do you have this newspaper on my desk again??” interrupted my older sister as she snatched the newspaper and threw it on my bed.

Despite the size of our house, my sister and I shared a room. Like many other siblings, we didn’t get along too well as children. There was a dividing line between my side and her, so much so that we even outlined this line with duck tape.

The favorite part of my room was the money plant. My love for the money plant that both my mom and I grew together never died out. My mother gave special attention to it, increasing my interest in this piece of nature. I’d water it at the break of dawn when the intense Pakistani sun would show its face across the sky, signifying the call for the morning azan, or prayer. To me, the money plant represented life. I remember at night, I would vigilantly watch one of its branches that stretched all over my wall, trailing the mysterious green “texture”. I’d imagine the branches as different roads of my life. I’d sit comfortably in my bed, sometimes in the warm care of my mother’s arms around me, which road was the safest, the one that would take me to eternal happiness in life.

Of course, now when I look at a money plant, I know there is no such thing as “eternal” happiness. Life is filled with happy, sad, challenging and successful times.