Type-II: Memories Of My First House (3 page)

The painting in
the drawing room is another unforgettable. It’s still there at my
parents’ new house so I don’t need to rely on memory to describe
it. It shows a dark forest girl with long black tresses gathered
away from the side of her face that’s in the frame. In her visible
ear is stuck a small, many-petalled flower. She wears no blouse but
her strong and pleasing figure is draped tightly in a long cloth
(doesn’t seem wet, though) from the knees to the waist, and then
across the shoulders to cover her breasts. Just a trace of her
shadow shows on the ground and it looks like block heels. It isn’t
a great work of art but an older cousin is said to have been
mesmerized by it. She was never my adolescent fantasy, maybe
because she was dark, or it could be that seeing her from childhood
reduced her to a mere fixture in my eyes.

In that same room
was a wardrobe built flush with the wall, and in it hung papa’s
clothes. It always smelt delightfully of shaving cream. In its
upper shelves were kept four photo albums—mine, my sister’s and two
from papa’s days in his village and Bangalore when he was an avid
photographer.

He used to keep
small change in a middle shelf that came up to my eye level if I
stood on tiptoe. When I was old enough to fetch Bakeman’s bread on
Sundays, I started swiping 25 paisa coins from papa’s stash to buy
Nutrine Bonbon toffees. Our family gospel was that Cadbury Eclairs
were the only good toffees, and we used to get one each on exam and
unit test days, or if we had been good in some other shining way.
Both my parents advised me against eating Kismi, Ravalgaon orange
and the thin, brown Nutrine toffees wrapped in green plastic that I
got on class birthdays. Eventually, I did give up eating them.
However, the Bonbons were my own discovery and I relished them
secretly every Sunday morning, making sure to finish them on the
way back from the market.

I had a sweet
tooth but I used to take only one coin, not to get caught. A
400-gram loaf of bread cost Rs 2 in those days. I don’t remember
how I broke the toffee habit finally. Maybe I just realized it was
theft.

There was another
secret pleasure I discovered in that wardrobe years later as an
adolescent. Papa kept a copy of Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care in a
shelf. As a kid I used to marvel at the pictures of plump white
babies in it. Those were advertisements published inside that
authoritative guide on parenting, and one of them was for something
called—tantalisingly—applesauce. But that wasn’t my secret
pleasure. One of the chapters explained milk expression for
lactating mothers and had a simple diagram accompanying it. But for
my overcharged mind it was as good as erotica.

***

The shop where
I bought bread was called Singla Store. It was part of the troika
that served our daily needs. It was the second shop to the left of
the road outside our campus in Sector 30. The first or corner shop
was called Kailash Sweets, and it was a sweetmeats shop but we
never bought anything other than a bit of curd from it, and that
only as a starter when we had been away from home for long. Papa
had set ideas about sweets shops in Chandigarh and we only bought
sweets from three shops those days—Sai Sweets in Sector 22, Sindhi
Sweets in Sector 17 and Ma Durga Sweets in Sector 34. Ma Durga was
the last to open but became our favourite quickly with its Bengali
sweets. For pastries, we went to Bakewell in Sector 17, and I
haven’t found the taste of those small childhood pastries
again.

So Kailash Sweets
was a no-no for us, but every Diwali and Karva Chauth it used to
set up a tent outside from which it sold quintals of very tempting
fly-magnet sweets. There were a lot of pink rasgullas under the
white tent, I remember, and just looking at them made my mouth
water. And thinking of them now transports me to the quiet, cool,
blue, breezy atmosphere of my childhood Diwalis when I used to
burst roll cap crackers in a toy gun. Diwalis have never been so
special again. Those Diwali guns came in two types, a shiny tin gun
that was cheaper and had sharp edges on which you could cut a
finger or the skin between thumb and forefinger, or a black one
that was heavier and better made, and looked like a revolver. I
always got the tin gun. I had a blue shirt that I was very fond of,
but on Diwali a spark from a friend’s gun burnt a tiny hole through
it.

I gave up lighting
crackers after class 8 and spent the money on cassettes instead,
but my son is five years old now, and this Diwali I went cracker
shopping for him. You probably know this, but I was surprised to
find ‘Lakshmi’ bombs still around after 25 years.

Singla Stores was
less remarkable because it was just a grocery. My parents always
called it ‘Dayanand ki Dukan’. The ‘uncle’ at the counter had six
fingers in one hand and his store smelt strongly of spices. Mainly
dhaniya, I think. Under the counter, he kept almonds and cashews
and raisins in large glass cubes, and above it toffees and
bubblegums in jars. NP bubblegums were the thing to buy at the
time, and they came in two variants: Double Yum and Big Fun.
Talking of ‘double’, do you remember Cadbury’s Double Decker
chocolate in a red wrapper? It wasn’t very popular and didn’t sell
in my sector market. You could always get it at Empire Stores in
Sector 17, though. The bubblegums were big and bright pink and
shaped like a bar of detergent soap. But I was no good at blowing
bubbles. Bubble gum was banned at home, so whenever I bought any
for the taste, I spat it out before reaching home. In those days it
used to be said that bubblegum contained worms and we really
believed it.

Further down that
side was Rama Flour Mill from where we bought atta. You had to
stand in a queue for a token, and the atta that fell into a vat was
freshly ground and warm. That place always set me sneezing. Our
third staple shop was Prem Book Depot that smelt of binding glue
and was our one-stop shop for stationery although the school books
came from English Book Shop in Sector 22. That’s right, Sector 22,
not 17.

***

Back in our
drawing room, the bigger walls were a dirty, patchy blue because
rainwater from the roof seeped down that side. The walls were
whitewashed with lime once every two years and the indigo added to
the colour was responsible for the blue shade of the patches. The
whitewash job used to be quite messy, and I was never in favour of
it because it involved upending the whole house. Everything had to
be moved out into our little terrace. Half the things were pushed
under cots and beds, and the other half were piled on top of them.
After the workmen left in the evening, all four of us got down on
our knees to scrub the floor where the lime had crusted. It was
best to scrub it while dry as it came off in a powder. If you tried
washing it off it swam around the floor and countless bucketfuls of
water were wasted. And after the cleaning, everything had to be put
back in its proper place. I liked spreading new sheets of newspaper
on the slabs and shelves. And the day ended with khichri, which I
didn’t like, because mummy was just too tired after the long day to
cook anything else.

One year, the
whitewash happened when papa was away, and mummy, tireless and
resourceful in these matters, decided not to put it off. It was
July and the skies opened up at noon. A lot of things got soaked in
the terrace. Some water also seeped into a sugar tin, and
afterwards the sugar had to be dried in a tin tray. The sugar
crystals stuck together in clumps and I ate a lot of them over the
next month.

Oh, that tray!
Mummy used it to sun-dry spices. When she made suji or besan katli,
she spread it in that very tray. In winter, she cut saag in it. It
was a much used article of her kitchen.

I never noticed
the blue marks of seepage unless friends were visiting. Then they
seemed very embarrassing and I hoped that nobody would think any
less of me for them.

There was one
window in the drawing room and it was partly blinded by the
concrete slabs of a sunbreaker. It had four shelves in all, and
pigeons roosted and scatted in them. All day, we hushed the
pigeons, and tried to take them by surprise by banging the window
casement, but year after year they only grew bolder and we had to
steel ourselves to their cooing and the sounds of their fighting
and taking off in a scraping of feathers. The shit they left behind
stank like hell if it wasn’t cleaned for a day, and every morning
mummy scrubbed those shelves with a stiff broom.

The stench was
especially terrible in the rains, but worse were the nests that
pigeons sometimes managed to build unnoticed on the top shelf. At
times, a nest was detected before an egg had been laid, but there
were other times when we had to bear the presence of the egg and
its expectant parents out of finer feelings. When the hatchling
arrived, the mess was terrible and we simply fastened the glass
shutter of the window and waited for the whole family to take wing.
After many years (I lived in that house till I was 19) the
government, which owned our house, decided to fix a wire mesh
around that sun-breaker and our problem was largely solved. But
there was no getting rid of pigeons as they continued to colonize
the brick lattice that fronted the building and it was not possible
for us to reach its upper pigeonholes. At times, through
carelessness or an accident, the birds themselves toppled an egg
onto the floor and then the stink had to be borne until someone
took it upon themselves to clean the floor.

The pigeons were
annoying but the view through the window was excellent despite the
sun-breaker. Sitting at our dining table I could see just the tops
of the rich green mango trees that grew in the back lawns of the
houses below. In the house on our ground floor lived an Andhraite
vegetarian family from whose kitchen wafted the most delicious
aroma of sambhar and freshly ground spices. They were the first
ones with a TV in our building and I saw many an episode of Star
Trek and Lucy and Yes Minister and Giant Robot sitting on their
carpet. Besides that mango tree that had existed before they
arrived, they planted many plantains, papaya and guava trees. They
also had many beds of the most colourful flowers.

But all of these
could not be seen from that blinkered window. We could see the
verandahs of the first-floor houses across the service lane behind
our block. In the two houses directly opposite ours lived two very
different families. One was Bengali and the other Punjabi Sikh. The
Sikh uncleji’s morning raga was a series of loud retching sounds.
It sounded like he was dying on his own vomit when really he was
only getting rid of his hangover determinedly. Believe me, you can
grow used to the most terrible sounds. From the house of their
neighbours, the Bengalis, came only two feminine sounds. One, of
the mother calling aloud her son’s pet name, “Tushu, Tushu” in
various degrees of agitation. And the other of her plump and short
elder daughter practising classical vocals to the accompaniment of
her tanpura. That didi went on to do a course in journalism at
Jamia in Delhi and this achievement caused quite a sensation at a
time when all the parents were trying to funnel their progeny into
an Indian Institute of this or that, where this stood for
engineering and that for medicine.

There was a little
more of the campus that could be seen through the sunbreaker but
mostly the view was of the tall eucalyptus trees that bounded the
campus on all sides and the wide main road beyond them. It was the
same road by which I went to school, and if I cycled home fast I
could catch a glimpse of the bus that took my then beloved home.
No, I am not saying I could see the dear girl from that distance,
but there was a satisfaction in seeing the bus pass by all the
same.

***

There was
another room in our house, I told you, and it looked upon a road
and the rest of the campus. It was our ‘designated’ bedroom
although the drawing room was where I slept on a cot every night
once I was old enough to sleep alone. Most of the furniture from
this room has also worn well. There was a study table on which we
kept our black-and-white Uptron TV. The TV went kaput in the year
2000 but the table serves as an ironing board still.

There was a Godrej
refrigerator that was retired after 25 years when papa retired from
service in 2006. But other than these two, the TV and the fridge,
everything is intact. The old and sturdy brown steel almirah graces
my parents’ room. I remember the day it came in 1981. Papa had
already made several trips to Industrial Area because the order had
been delayed, and it was finally dispatched with the paint not
fully cured. On its journey up the staircase, it nicked a corner,
and that scratch is the only blemish on it after 33 years.

The double bed on
which I slept between my parents is… Well, I am writing this
chapter lying prone on it. Many winters ago, I was sitting on it,
feet hanging over the edge and a morose look on my face when my
school sweetheart got up and impressed her first furtive kiss on my
cheek (I was too shaken to remember whether it was the right one or
the left one), unbidden.

The room was so
small that the bed had to be pressed against two walls, one of
which had its lone window. The window ledge was hardly a foot above
the bed. My story very nearly ended when I was a year old because
one day when mummy wasn’t looking I managed to sit down on the
window sill. She laughed every time she told that tale (must ask
her to tell it again, it’s been so long) but when it happened she
had her heart in her mouth as she tiptoed with a cat’s stealth to
grab me from behind.

The room had a
loft in which were kept our trunks and leather suitcases. The
leather was red but had been wrapped in brown canvas. There were
little sliding locks at the sides of the suitcases that opened with
tiny sheet metal keys. All of papa’s collection of Mirror magazines
from the 1960s, when Hindustan Ambassadors cost Rs 13,000, was
housed in it. Did you know the Ambassador also came in a station
wagon model? I used to dig out those magazines one at a time and
read them in the holidays. There was a short story in one of them
titled ‘You Only Live Twice’ (such a coincidence after the movie).
The name was obviously borrowed from Ian Fleming, but the story was
rather homely. A man is reading in his bed and feels a voice
calling out to him. He steps out to check and then hears a crashing
sound. He rushes back to the room and finds the ceiling fan has
fallen on the bed. The story gave me an enduring fear of ceiling
fans. If I am in a room with a fan that swings too much, I stay
near the walls expecting it to crash any time. I liked those
Mirrors, their sketched covers, the simple artwork of their ads,
and the smell of old, browning paper. Now I cannot find anything
about them on the internet.