Ask anyone who grew up in Thoha Khalsa a few decades ago, and their eyes will light up before the words even come out. Childhood here wasn't measured in screens or scheduled activities — it was measured in long afternoons spent chasing each other through narrow lanes, climbing the low branches of neighborhood trees, and gathering wherever the older kids decided the day's game would happen.
Summers meant early mornings before the heat set in, when children would sneak out to help (or pretend to help) with the animals before running off to play. Marbles, gully cricket played with a bat carved from scrap wood, and kite-flying during the right season were the currency of status among the village boys — a good kite, carefully guarded and repaired after every scuffle, was a prized possession.
Winters brought a different rhythm. Families would gather around fires in the evening, and it was often here — half-listening, half-dozing — that children first heard the stories that shaped their understanding of where they came from: tales of grandparents' grandparents, of hardships endured, of small victories remembered fondly decades later.
School days had their own texture. Long walks to the local school, often in groups, gave children unsupervised time to talk, argue, and bond in ways a classroom never could. Lunch breaks meant trading food from home — a paratha for someone else's achar, a shared laugh over whose mother's cooking was better that day.
What stands out most in memories like these isn't any single event, but the sense of a whole village raising its children together. A neighbor's scolding carried the same weight as a parent's. An elder's advice, however unsolicited, was rarely ignored. There was little privacy, but there was also little loneliness — everyone knew everyone, and childhood unfolded inside a web of familiar faces who all, in their own way, were watching out for you.
Many who left the village for cities or for opportunities abroad say it's this particular kind of childhood — loud, communal, unhurried — that they find hardest to describe to their own children now, and easiest to miss.
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