Type-II: Memories Of My First House (4 page)

There were other
odds and ends that we kept in the loft, all the things that we
didn’t need in a season, like the heater and the rubber hot water
bottle in summer.

It wasn’t an easy
space to access, that loft. Papa stood on a light stool (it still
serves as a pedestal for our old Rallifan table fan), then found
toeholds under the plastic sheets that lined the whitewashed
concrete slabs on which our schoolbags and books were kept, and
hauled himself up into the narrow mouth of the loft. While this
operation was underway, the rest of us watched him breathlessly
from below, ready to grab him and anything that he would retrieve
and drop. We kept the ceiling fan off when he climbed up there.

***

Water was
scarce on our floor, the supply hours were short and in summer the
pressure sometimes dropped so low that we had to fetch water in
buckets from downstairs. It was a different age when neighbours
knew each other and helped out.

We had to store
water for the whole day. In our kitchen was a green bucket with a
white tap that mummy used to wash dishes. There was a brass drum in
which we stored water to drink. There was a wash basin in the
verandah, and under it was kept another bucket filled with water to
wash hands with. It was kept covered with a grey plastic tray that
was too big to serve tea in. Two big buckets and a tub were kept
filled in the bathroom to flush the loo, and it was best to get the
loo business over during the morning supply hours. Many years
later, we were provided taps inside our cycle garages on the ground
floor and that ended the awkwardness over knocking at doors at odd
hours to request for a bucketful of water. When I was old enough to
help, I used to fill my bucket up to the top to show off my
strength with the result that I came up spilling water on the
stairs. And then, another trip had to be made to mop up all that
spillage.

Our kitchen was
quite unremarkable in design. It had a high window in one corner
covered with a glass pane that could be opened for ventilation with
a string attached to its latch. There were open shelves in which
dals were kept in old, light blue plastic jars of Rath Vanaspati
that had navy blue caps. Sugar was kept in a 400g tin of Nestum on
which the artwork was already fading when I was a little boy but it
remained in use till the time we lived in CSIO Campus. I liked the
smiling baby on that Nestum tin so much that I fancied myself as a
Nestum boy although both my sister and I had consumed more Farex
than Nestum in our infancy.

For tea, there was
a bigger golden tin with nothing written on it but the words Brooke
Bond pressed into its lid. Mango and lemon pickles were made and
stored in huge glass jars of Coca Cola concentrate (the pre-1977
Coca Cola; papa had sourced them from a factory) but their lids
were yellow plastic caps of Nescafe. We still have those huge
bottles and they are still used to sun pickle every few years.
Everything was useful then, and bottles and jars were never thrown
away. Plastic shopping bags were preserved under mattresses. The
Andhra family were regular Maltova drinkers and gifted us some of
their beautiful empty bottles. Their red tin lids didn’t say
‘Maltova’ but ‘JIL’ which stood for Jagatjit Industries Ltd.

Pickle making was
one of the summer tasks and when we were children mummy used to
make lemon and mango achar every second year because she and papa
liked them very much. Now, their teeth and throats don’t tolerate
sour things much and she’s made mango achar after almost a decade
this year, 2014. It’s ironical because now she has her own two
floors and plenty of sunlight to make pickle easily, while in that
second-floor house she had to constantly move the jars around to
keep the passing sunlight on them.

Mummy made pickle
in summer, but she never made sweet mango chutney that most of my
classmates brought in their tiffin boxes and I liked very much. In
winter, she made mixed pickle with carrots and some other
vegetables that was tasty but couldn’t be kept long. Come Holi, it
was time to make tangy kanji. I haven’t had kanji ever since I left
home 10 years ago.

For me, the more
fascinating of these operations was the making of lemon squash at
home. There was shikanji, of course, that could be made any time by
quickly stirring sugar in a glass of water and squeezing lemon into
it, but squash was different. When lemon prices had cooled
sufficiently, papa would buy a couple of kilos of bright yellow
lemons from the Sector 26 mandi. Next morning, Sunday, papa and
mummy would sit beside the terrace door and squeeze the whole lot
of them into an urn. Three old bottles of Rooh Afza and Kisan
squash, washed, dried and half-filled with sugar, were kept ready
to receive this juice.

At first, the
juice sat on top of the sugar, but by and by it worked its way
down, the sugar slowly melted into it and what had started out as a
white, opaque liquid slowly got sun-cooked into a thick, golden
syrup. I would give those bottles a vigorous shake to make bubbles
inside them that rose to the top in slow motion. If even a drop of
the syrup leaked, ants made a line for it and we had to be careful
lest a bottle got contaminated.

The squash was
supposed to last all summer but finished in about a month because I
couldn’t be kept away from it. And that was true of anything sweet
in the house.

Making pickle and
squash was relatively easy because the bottles and jars could be
made to chase the sun on our terrace walls, but potato chips and
rice crisps posed a problem as they had to be spread out on sheets
to dry, and sunlight lifted from our terrace floor very early even
at the height of summer. So, on days when she had to make them,
mummy got up early to boil potatoes and sliced them on a wooden
plane with a serrated blade. My sister and I then quickly spread
the soft steaming discs on large plastic sheets spread on our cots.
We never bought Uncle Chipps, unless it was for the school
Christmas party.

Guided by the
ground-floor Andhra didi, who was a home science student (do girls
still take up that subject?), mummy learned to make apple jam and
tomato sauce at home. The jam needed citric acid, and the sauce,
acetic acid. The jam was very tasty, and though mummy made it only
once I remember its taste very well. She didn’t make it again
because it didn’t keep well. The sauce became a regular and I just
loved the smell of it cooking. Mmmmm

I used to
practically drink it in sambhar and soak parathas and pakoras in
it. A litre of that sauce wouldn’t last a month, which was fine
because even it didn’t keep well after opening. If you were so
careless as to touch the bottle’s rim with bread or roti, a white
or green mould would form there in a day or two. That’s not the
case with the preservative-laden sauces we buy now, but still, not
touching the bottle rim has become a habit with me.

Our kitchen also
had a chimney and every few weeks a baby squirrel fell through it
from the roof, perilously close to the stove, in a shower of straw
and other nest padding. Then came mama squirrel cheeping loudly and
we stood aside not to frighten her, so that she could safely take
her baby away.

***

We were on the
top floor, so six months in a year were torture. The summer sun
baked our roof and its light filtered through the curtain of the
bedroom window. The bedroom became too hot to spend the afternoon
in during May and June. The refrigerator was in it too, and its
compressor ran without pause, further raising the temperature.

In the summer
vacation, we use to spend the afternoon in the drawing-cum-dining.
Years later, when Doordarshan started showing soaps in the
afternoon (Shanti and Mandira Bedi come to mind), we had to move
the TV to the first room to be able to watch them. Until then,
afternoons were siesta time. Mummy would take the divan while we
children spread a durrie on the floor between the armchairs—that
were crunched together to make space—and papa’s closet.

If the doorbell
announced a visitor, we jumped up, rolled the durrie in a flash and
drew the chairs back to a welcoming position. But ‘aunties’ rarely
visited on hot summer afternoons. They came in the first half of
the day, before the men returned from office for lunch at 1pm.
Evening visits were always made with families.

If my grandfather
arrived from the village, mummy had to confine herself to the hot
bedroom and become a whispering figure because of the accursed
purdah system. I mentally blamed the old man for her suffering and
resented his visits. Our ‘affection’ for each other was mutual.

I was seven or
eight years old before we bought a desert cooler. It was the year
when most of our acquaintances also got theirs from a factory in
the industrial area. All of our coolers were grey and bore the
names ‘Khosla’ and ‘Cool Command’, but papa got his made with a
heavy-duty mustard-colour exhaust fan kit. It was money well spent
because almost 30 years later the fan and pump still work and cool
the first floor of my parents’ house.

The cooler was
fitted in the verandah by removing one of the glass panes and it
was super effective. It used to chill the verandah and cool the
drawing-cum-dining. We used to keep the main door slightly ajar to
guide the cold air through the house. Even the bedroom became
liveable.

The cooler had a
big tank and it was filled every morning in the supply hour. I
can’t describe the daily rush of that hour (more like 20 minutes or
half an hour) in summer. Not only buckets and tubs but also every
bottle, pot and pan was filled up with water. We couldn’t waste a
drop in summer for the next day’s supply was not guaranteed. In
weeks when the supply became very erratic, the cooler wasn’t run to
conserve water, and all 50 litres in its tank were used to flush
the toilet. It wasn’t that CSIO Campus was a dry place. There was
water round the clock on the ground floor, but the pressure dipped
in summer and it couldn’t rise the two floors to our house.

On normal days,
extra water was kept underneath the cooler in a big bucket because
with the day’s heat and the powerful sucking action of the exhaust
motor, the 50-odd litres in the tank didn’t last more than 2-3
hours. On Saturdays, when papa bought the week’s supply of fruits
and vegetables from the Sector 26 mandi in the morning, we dipped
mangoes and muskmelons in the cooler’s tank to chill them.

Every summer had
at least one punishing week when the temperature soared to 45 or 46
degrees centigrade, and it was the worst time for us water-wise.
Sometimes, we had to fetch all our water from the ground floor for
several days. At every landing, I changed the bucket from one hand
to the other, still the calluses lasted for days. Every morning, we
waited for the taps—left open through the night—to hiss and
sputter. And if they did—if they poured out only two bucketfuls of
water—we felt grateful. And then came the day when the supply
normalized. We greeted it by hosing the terrace floor and walls in
the evening. It was the best way to cool down the house. Pores in
the bricks and cement walls made a sucking sound as the first
stream hit them. An invisible steam rose carrying the scent of wet
earth after rain... For us, it was like that Hindi movie moment
when clouds appear over a drought-hit village.

On summer nights
we slept in the terrace. That was where the cooler was also kept.
When I was small, there were three cots and I slept with papa. He
half-slept through those nights with one hand kept protectively on
my shoulder. Later, I got my own cot and fitting all four in the
length of the terrace was a feat. Two of the older and slightly
shorter cots had to be laid sideways so that both their ends
touched walls. I refused to sleep in those cots because I feared a
lizard might slither off the wall and alight on me.

Summer nights
started hot and stuffy but the air cooled down through the dark
hours, and just before the break of dawn it used to get cold enough
for a blanket. There’s nothing like sleeping out in the fresh open
air. Only, now there are few houses with terraces and the air is
not clean, not even in Chandigarh. Sometimes there was a
thunderstorm at night, and we children ran inside sleepily
clutching our pillows. Papa and mummy brought in the bedding, and
then the cots that had to be rested against the verandah walls. If
the rain stopped in a little while, the others returned to the
terrace but I couldn’t be bothered to move out again. Those nights
were exciting.

***

Winter was a
different kind of hardship. Our house became very cold. For a few
years the terrace door had only a wire mesh on it. The government
didn’t think it necessary to provide us a wooden door, and on
frosty January nights our house turned cold as an icicle. The night
wind howled through the house, knocking against the kitchen
ventilator that tap-tap-tapped at regular intervals. We slept with
the bedroom door shut to keep out the chill, and against the wire
mesh of the outer door we hung a heavy cloth and propped a cot to
stop the wind from getting inside. When the government finally woke
up to the deficiency in our homes and made amends by providing
proper doors, our suffering reduced greatly. It became possible to
warm toes inside our heavy cotton-filled quilts.

Every night, we
used to warm ourselves in front of a simple electric heater whose
tube-like element glowed red. If you stared at it fixedly and shut
your eyes, you saw different patterns dancing against a black
background, as in a kaleidoscope. Papa always told us to sit away
from it as the dry heat wasn’t good for skin. But just before
bedtime, my sister and I would push our hands very close to it to
warm up quickly. The intense red light shone through skin and made
even the backs of our hands glow. That heater had one other purpose
which it served round the year: bending and straightening and
loosening and tightening my parents’ plastic spectacle frames.
Whenever the fit became unsatisfactory, papa turned on the heater
and softened the frame in front of it before bending it this way or
that.