Type-II: Memories Of My First House (6 page)

That B-block was
one of the few to have staircases open to the sky. The child
searching for the others was always nervous because the others
could see her and signal to each other, and ambush her easily. It’s
how a cop flushing out terrorists holed up inside a building must
feel. Where I live in Ghaziabad, I haven’t heard the triumphant cry
of “biscoorite” even once. Don’t children play it anymore?

***

Since papa
understood glass very well and wore two kinds of lenses, we always
had a bit of methyl alcohol in the house. It was great for cleaning
lenses of all kinds. The tightly capped bottle was kept in the cool
of the shelf where papa kept his loose change. At first, all I knew
about methyl alcohol was that it is poisonous. It’s the sort of
thing parents tell children first, like not playing with the gas
stove’s knobs or keeping away from electric plugs. (It doesn’t help
always if your child is super inquisitive. I once plugged two
fingers into the bulb holder of our table lamp to experience an
electric shock. It was a nasty surprise and left a black mark each
on both fingertips. Nothing happened when I flicked on the switch
and I thought I was proof against electric shock. But an instant
later, a wild sensation ran through my right arm and I pulled my
hand out without any further bidding.)

About methyl
alcohol, the next thing I learnt was that it has an eye-watering
odour. If you inhale it, your head spins. And then, many years
later I learned in class that alcohol of any type can be used as
fuel. So, one afternoon, when mummy was visiting one of her aunty
friends I tried burning a bit of methyl alcohol in the terrace. I
used to wear loose white kurta-pyjamas that mummy stitched on her
Usha sewing machine those days, and was holding the uncapped bottle
very foolishly in my hand while lighting a capful of the volatile
liquid on the floor. As it burst into flames I leaped back and then
the bottle in my hand also caught fire. In panic, I threw the
bottle on the floor and the alcohol spill burnt with the colourless
and odourless flame mentioned in our textbook. I didn’t come to
harm but the bottle was destroyed and when papa came home in the
evening, he was very cross. Anyway, a new bottle took its place
after some time and I did not try lighting alcohol ever again.
Instead, I found out that just a drop of it could kill a small
insect. I killed many ants with it. I watched them die swiftly and
in extreme agony as the alcohol seeped into their tiny bodies. It
was potent enough to kill a cockroach.

Once, instead of
methanol, there was acetone at home and I used it to clean my tape
deck, not realising that the stuff that removes nail polish can
also remove other coatings. It was only when the cotton swab came
out black that I sniffed suspiciously at the bottle. Luckily, the
deck wasn’t harmed, and though it doesn’t work any more, it remains
with us at my parents’ house.

That deck was
something again. I got it after pleading with papa for years. My
best friend used to have a fancy Sony stereo on which I heard
Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the first time, and Beat It became
my favourite song thereafter. But we didn’t have a cassette player
at home and I used to rush to his house every afternoon in the hope
of listening to a song or two before we went out to play. How can I
forget ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ and ‘Faith’? ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Rock Me
Amadeus’ were among the funny ones. Then, he went to the US and
brought a JVC CD player, and a CD with Paula Abdul’s Straight Up on
it. But we still didn’t have a cassette player. Finally, in the
summer of 1990, we bought a 120-Watt PMPO Murphy deck from Pahwa
Radios in Sector 19. It had cassette-to-cassette recording but no
CD drive. That was the age of Philips Powerhouse and BPL music
systems, but our Murphy was cheaper. It conked off the day after we
bought it and had to be replaced. The second piece served us well
for years. My first cassette was Roxette’s Look Sharp, bought from
Deepak Radios in Sector 17.

***

On two sides,
brick screens enclosed our terrace. Without them the space would
have become claustrophobic. Their empty squares were very useful
for climbing up and were used as a ladder to reach the roof. I
never tried it because I was afraid of heights but there were boys
who used to spend the better part of the day flying kites on their
rooftops. I used to climb the screen up to a point where I didn’t
feel unsafe and that was until my neck cleared the wall.

The screen on the
east provided a clear view of the road separating sectors 29 and 30
and the open ground where I learned to ride a scooter in Sector 29.
Looking northward, the mountains loomed in the distance and Kasauli
was always so near. We went out of Chandigarh rarely, so the
mountains became fixed in my mind, and when I came to live in Delhi
many years later I found it a bit disorienting to not have a view
of the mountains at all. The westward wall looked out upon Sector
20 and we had a clear view of the spire of Gaudiya Matth Temple. On
Dussehra we didn’t need to go to the Ramlila Ground but saw the
flames shoot up from the effigies from our terrace. Sitting in our
drawing room, we could tell which set off effigies had been set on
fire. There was one on the TBRL side that was burnt first and had
fewer crackers. In Sector 20, there were three effigies, each one
loaded with crackers, so they made quite a racket. We would listen
intently and announce, “There goes Meghnad”, “seems like
Kumbhkarna”, and finally, “that’s Ravana”.

The westward
screen also looked out upon our street and from there we watched
other children play in the evening. Papa didn’t like our climbing
up on it, and as soon as we saw him returning from work we ducked
out of sight. Those screens were the best place for watching Holi
from a safe distance as there was no way anyone could drench or
colour me at that height.

For years, I was
scared of Holi. I didn’t like strange people touching me, and I
don’t like it now also. But for a few years in between, from
classes 4 to 8, I think, I became a Holi reveller. I would get
soaked again and again, and if the others tired of pouring water on
me, I would empty a bucket or a plastic bag upon myself. I would
start my Holi with children in my own block, and then quickly move
to my regular group. We went from house to house like the
grown-ups, mainly for sweets—gulab jamuns and gujias—but a lot of
playing happened in the staircases and on the roads. And finally,
the whole lot of us gathered at the old community centre in ‘A’
line (there were three A lines, and this one was in the middle). It
was just one of the duplex houses (we called them bungalows), the
first or the last one in its short row, depending upon which side
you were counting from. But instead of being let to an officer, it
was used for various campus activities, and on weekdays there were
tailoring lessons too.

Its gate was
always open and we could play in its lawns without bothering
anyone, and since its boundary walls were low, we could also cross
over into the adjoining lawns, each one of which had many
fruit-bearing trees. I am not sure but perhaps the house right
behind it had a large dog named Cindy. That dog was quite a
celebrity on the campus, all of us knew it by name and were afraid
of it. Another family in A line had two small and furry dogs, one
black and the other white. The older boys looked out for them
because their mistress, a girl many years my senior, was the
campus’ resident style icon.

And why did we
play Holi in the community centre lawns? Because, like all the
other big houses, it had a couple of taps outside to fill water
guns and balloons with, and a fat black garden hose was left
attached to a low spout to water the grass with. And since it was
nobody’s house, nobody cribbed or complained about the mess we made
in the front yard and the lawns.

One year—I must
have been no older than 10 years—we found a nest in one of the
ornamental bushes with three or four hatchlings inside it. We were
thrilled and spent the greater part of our evenings crowding around
the little opening in the leaves through which the little blind and
helpless beings could be seen and heard cheeping. Somebody
cautioned us that if we touched the nest, mama bird would abandon
them. And that’s what happened. We never harmed the chicks, but all
of them died because the attention we lavished on them drove away
their mother.

My younger self
was peering over the brick screen in the terrace when I took you on
this long detour in the maze that is my mind. I should be more
careful. The screens didn’t look very strong—after all they were
sarkari brick and mortar—but thankfully there never was any
accident in all the years I spent at CSIO Campus.

***

Just as I
missed the view of mountains in Delhi, I also found it hard to
tolerate the scarcity of trees when I came to live in Mumbai. Our
campus—although I took it for granted in childhood—had diverse
flora. There was the grass, to begin with, in two types: a stringy
and strong grass that spread quickly by growing roots from new
nodes. It was low-maintenance, cheap and so the most common. But if
you let it grow just a bit more than the average height, it looked
wild. But then, there was also a ‘junglee’ grass that occupied
lawns of houses lying vacant and crept quickly into those where the
mali made only fortnightly visits. With its long and wide blades,
this grass was only fit for cows. Some types were razor-sharp and I
cut my finger on one as a child. But that wasn’t the ‘second’ grass
I had in mind, The second one grew in the lawns of senior officers
and gradually spread to the garden patches of the subordinate
staff.

This was called
‘carpet’ or ‘vilayati’ grass, and where it grew tightly packed and
neatly cropped, it was better than Persia’s best carpets. There was
nothing like walking barefoot on it on a dewy morning. Other than
these two types of garden grass there was also the dreaded congress
grass that kept the city sneezing and scratching (and reporters
writing). It used to grow in the rains and by September its pollen
gave half the city some allergy or the other. Then there was
elephant grass that grew thickly in the open space between my
campus in Sector 30 and school in Sector 32. Its thick stalks were
useful for making craft items and I think it was also the dreaded
‘cane’ that nuns in my school always carried to chastise
children.

I haven’t written
a word about trees so far. For me, eucalyptus is the definitive
Chandigarh tree. It wasn’t a native tree and in later years it
earned a bad name for destroying the water table, but it was
beautiful nonetheless. There were so many of them in and around
CSIO. They formed a curtain around our campus boundary and also
shielded parts of the CSIO office space. Like a careless person
these trees were always losing something. Their thick white bark
used to slough off, and when it hardened and separated from the
trunk, we children tore it off and crushed it between our fingers.
The trees shed leaves like copious tears and every morning on every
street end sweepers burnt a heap of them. It was one of my
favourite growing-up smells. And then, there were the cones, the
tiny seed of this enormous tree that rained down in its flowering
season. With the cones came a fine pollen that filled the air with
the smell of eucalyptus oil but also gave some of the residents a
reason to sleep on Avil and Phenergan.

Eucalyptus cones
could be fitted end to end like tiny ice cream cones and it was one
of our childhood games. There were wide, grassy pavements in the
elite part of the campus and there we cycled and walked crunching
the dry, brown eucalyptus cones.

There were many
other types of roadside trees, most notably the flowering amaltas
that used to paint the whole city’s roads yellow in summer. We had
many in our campus and the trees produced a long and heavy
tamarind-like pod. It was so heavy that if you hit someone with it,
it really hurt. The pods, which were strong when green, would turn
brittle and black on drying and we pointedly made our cycle wheels
go over them to make them snap and ring with a hollow sound. I
don’t recall neems and peepals on the campus but there were a few
outside. And there was the odd banyan too. The one that comes to
mind first stood at the intersection of the roads near the Sector
21 scooter market. Gulmohur was the other flowering tree on our
campus but it was less abundant than amaltas.

Every ground floor
house on our campus had at least one tree. And they were all
fruit-bearing trees. Mangoes and guavas were the most common but
there was a mind-boggling variety besides them. We stayed in three
ground floor houses after more than two decades on the second floor
(I spent 19 years in that house but my parents and sister had
already lived in it a few years before I was born). The first of
these didn’t have a big garden but we still had two guava trees and
a mango tree in it. The mango tree was young and yielded fruit only
once in two years, and then it was only a mango or two. But they
were delicious, aromatic mangoes, plucked at some peril because the
tree’s branches were not very strong. One guava tree was old and
stood in the middle of our ground and it rained pulpy fruit
throughout the rainy season. Its guavas were soft and sweet but
many had worms in them. In winter, the tree yielded fewer guavas.
The smaller guava tree was just beginning to yield fruit when we
left that house. We had also planted a lemon sapling when we came
to that house but it didn’t make much progress in four years, so we
took it away with us in a bucket to the next house where we stayed
only about 10 months. Besides mango and guava, this house had a
custard apple tree and we savoured its fruit that September. Our
last house in CSIO Campus where my parents stayed about six years
had a large mango tree that gave us basketfuls of fruit every July.
Even our lemon tree had started fruiting by the time we left that
house (yes, we had transplanted it again). Our efforts to grow
papaya near my bedroom window were not spectacularly successful. We
got really good loquats from a tree in our front lawn. That lawn
also had a large mango tree on which passing children shied stones.
It yielded few mangoes and small ones at that, late in the season
but they were the succulent type. So that’s six types—mango, guava,
lemon, loquat, papaya and custard apple. But there were neighbours
who grew banana, pomegranate, wood apple, litchi and ber also. It
was a very fruitful place, our campus.