My first hobby

I have found my stamp albums while cleaning my study. I started collecting stamps when I was in class 4th or 5th. I had read about the stamp collection in the monthly Urdu magazine Taleem-o-Tarbiat’s friendship corner.
Today, I showed my stamp album to my mother, asking does she remember it. She said no. I then recalled the whole story and narrated it. It was summer season. My mother used to go for shopping with my maternal grandmother. We call our grandmother Bari Ami Jee. Bari Ami used to carry her cream-coloured bag for shopping. I told my mother that I needed a stamp album and that she would get it from any bookshop. She brought the album and it cost Rs 45 in 1995. I can recall the way she handed me the book after taking it out from the bag and how I unwrapped it.
I had very few friends in those days. Befriending people was impossible task for me. I was shy and weak and would spend most of my day in the house after school. My cousins would leave home to play in the village playground in the evening, leaving me alone in the house.
The album gave me satisfaction. It gave me the sense of production. I had something I could call mine. It was my treasure which I could show to people. It was my identity.
My late maternal grandfather was a professor. He would receive a lot of letters from across Pakistan. My two aunts were abroad and they used to write letters periodically. Emails and faxes were unheard and telephone was very expensive, so there was steady inflow of letters. I would peal off stamps from the letters and put them in the album. Later, I discovered other families having members abroad and started getting stamps from them.
This is how I started my first hobby.