the story of the green tub

Do we always get what we want ? Sometimes we spend a lifetime yearning for a particular thing which perhaps is never to come within our grip. That is the story of my green tub. i don't know since when i developed a strange but strong liking for the colour green. i was bearly three or four years old when in Dr Parbati Sengupta's chamber i got to lay my hands on a very cute plastic green spoon. It was a bit peculiar because it had been manufactured by a medicine company. You could use both ends of the spoon to have medicine. I was strangely attracted to the spoon. Whenever i visited Dr. auntie's chamber she gave me the spoon to play with. What i liked about the funny spoon was not it's shape but it's colour. The green was very soothing to the eyes and at the same time it made me feel sad. Perhaps the oldy stucture of her chamber, the dark and ancient smelling maroon curtains had something to do with it. Apart from the spoon there was another thing which i liked. It was a blue tub placed under a blue tap in which she used to wash her hands. The tub and the green of the spoon somehow got combined in my mind and i asked my parents to gift me a green gumbla (green tub). As a kid i had somewhat weird choice of toys. I had once asked my parents for a plastic tap(a real one!). Though they gave me my tap they thought it ridiculous to give into my second demand. They thought it was a child's whim and that i really didn't want one after all. But both my dad and mom started doing a funny thing after that. Whenever they wanted me to do something which kids generally do not want to do they said in a strange sing-song voice "green gumbla pabe na"( You won't get the green tub if you don't do it). Today when i have grown up reasonably enough to stop yearning for such things i sometime wonder whether i have really stopped yearning for weird things. The green tub has become a symbol for all those unattainable things for which i really craved . A sing-song voice is always there to mock my failure as it softly whispers in my ears "green gumbla pabe na".