My world History books.
Also, World History classes taken by Mrs. Ranu Chakravarty ("Ranu Miss" in short). She was an extremely beautiful, charismatic and utterly well-dressed teacher. One of my all time favourites.
On top of everything else, her voice was this crystal clear and sparkling bubble spring that gushed and gurgled and smoothly flowed from point A to point B; and when she spoke, it was like listening and sweetly surrendering to music.
This magic also applied for Indian History, but then that was a different well-trodden mysterious pathway that went one step down in my inner "hierarchy" of concentric circles the moment I was introduced to World History.
On top of everything else, Ranu Miss reminded me of one of my aunts. Almost everybody I meet reminds me of someone from my family, seriously. Its like the family in itself is such a huge vortex of people and skin and body language and gestures and idiosyncrasies that I have a lifetime supply of memories; of people who inevitably remind me of someone or the other from my family. It is like pick a random far flung person in the universe, just pick anybody, I will have one person from my family that that particular random far flung person will remind me of.
Anyway, I was always a ....what should I call it, a "costume-noticer"? I remembered what all my teachers wore at school because I used to be very pepped about these things in school. I had my pick of well-dressed teachers throughout the thirteen years of one school and two years of another school; this constant preoccupation (among thousand others, so as to speak) about noticing what teachers are wearing would stem forth from the simple fact that we had "uniforms" and teachers did not. So World History classes, I will always associate with colours; the yellows and the greens and the blacks and the reds of all the beautiful taant sarees that Ranu Miss used to wear and I used to gape unabashedly at her while listening to her talk musically about ferocious politics and propaganda.
