Date: 19/06/2026
All Rights Reserved by the Author
“We do not remember days; we remember moments.” — Cesare Pavese
While cleaning a bookshelf, a man found an old address book.
Its pages were yellowed with age.
Inside were names, phone numbers and addresses written over many years.
Some belonged to childhood friends.
Others were former colleagues, neighbors and relatives.
Many of the addresses had changed.
Some of the people had moved far away.
A few were no longer living.
Yet turning the pages felt like taking a walk through different chapters of life.
Each name brought back a memory.
A conversation.
A celebration.
A challenge overcome together.
In today’s world, contacts are stored in phones and cloud accounts.
Convenient, certainly.
But an old address book carries something more.
It shows not only who we knew, but who we were at different stages of our journey.
Sometimes a collection of names becomes a collection of stories.
And those stories continue to accompany us long after the pages have aged.
Rajat Chandra Sarmah
Guwahati, Assam, India
email: rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com
youtube: conversewithasmile
musingofrajat.wordpress.com 