Type-II: Memories Of My First House (2 page)

We got few
letters, although whenever my sister and I were home, we raced each
other to grab them. Kamla Bua, papa’s cousin in Bangalore whom I
never met but of whom we were very fond because papa said a lot of
nice things about her, wrote regularly. She wrote in English and
signed her letters ‘Kamal’. When I was very young, I wrote to her a
few times, and she replied promptly every time. One of mummy’s
brothers also wrote frequently, and every raksha bandhan he sent
her a money order. Grandfather was always nasty. When he wanted to
be very nasty, he wrote a postcard so that everybody in the world
could read it, otherwise he sent a blue ‘inland’. I liked inlands
more than postcards because they were more ‘private’. Only the last
fold could be read without opening. And to open them, I used the
tiny penknife in our tiny nail clipper. I liked it when people
pasted only the last fold, because then opening the letter was
easy.

But best of all
were the envelopes that brought large foam rakhis for papa and me
from the village. A grain or two of rice sent for ‘tikka’ would
slip out of the paper in which it was folded and slap around the
loose envelope. Long white envelopes meant a letter from ‘Badi
Bua’, papa’s elder sister in the US. She wrote after long
intervals, and filled up sheet after sheet in her scrawl that mummy
struggled to read. But she always sent family photographs, and all
their vans and cars and lawns and sofas and TVs were our first
introduction to life in the US. The Christmas-and-New Year cards
from America were in a different league and graced our drawing room
shelves year-round.

***

The houses in
our building became smaller as you went upstairs. Those on the
ground floor were called Type-IV and had three bedrooms, a
drawing-cum-dining and a lawn each front and back. Houses on the
first floor were Type-III and had two bedrooms and a large terrace.
And those on the second floor, like ours, Type-II, had only one
bedroom and a small terrace. Each house, complete with its open
terrace, occupied the covered area of the house below.

On the first two
floors the house doors faced each other, but on our floor, the
doors were side by side, and the drawing rooms had a common wall.
The wall beside each floor’s landing had two meter boxes painted a
bright red. The ones on our floor were badly rotten and lizards
crept in and out of them freely in summer.

As much as the
lizards, I was afraid of the old man who lived next door. He had a
booming voice and the heavy odour of tobacco hung about him. He
wore white kurta pyjamas that were as white as his hair, and cream
plastic juttis that I liked very much for their perfectly moulded
shape. To my child’s eye they were better than hand-stitched
leather juttis that never had the symmetry of the machine moulded
ones. Farmers in our village wore them to fields and the old man
next door was as much a rustic as them. He was probably an
affectionate man for he spent all day playing with his two
grandsons, Tinku and Padeep (the boy called himself that although
his name was Pradeep) in their front room that smelt of piss.
Whenever he saw me, rather found me alone, the old man laid his big
hands on my shoulder and asked, “Aur kya haal hain, Manav?” My name
was Manu, not Manav. Manav was a year older and lived in the next
block of six houses.

He had been doing
this, asking the same inane question, from maybe the time I was old
enough to slip out of our front door alone. Maybe two or three
years old. I would answer him well enough, but it was never enough
for him. He would delay me on the landing several minutes, and that
was why I hated him. As I grew older, I learned to ignore him, slip
past him in the stairs. It didn’t occur to me then that I might be
hurting the old man’s feelings.

There was a didi
on the ground floor, perhaps 10 or 15 years my senior, whom
everyone called Baby Didi. She was no less a tyrant. I had some
flesh on my cheeks then, and she used to tug at them and demand “my
rasgullas”. Every day. I hated her too. If I saw her on the
concrete strip outside our block, I went back upstairs right away.
Some years later, a new block was built across the road from ours
and they were allotted a house on the ground floor there, putting
an end to my troubles with her.

Our front
doorframe had a solid wooden door and a casement window that let
the air in through two large steel mesh panels. The mesh was
painted blue once every few years but remained a dirty brown for
the greater part of the year. On Holi and Diwali, mummy and my
sister scrubbed and washed it clean with Surf, and it turned blue
again briefly. The inner door was all wood, painted white.

Through the day,
these two doors were never latched. The main door was opened early
in the morning when papa went to fetch milk from Hallo Majra
Village, and so it remained all day till we went to bed. In summer,
when the hot loo hissed through the brick screen facing the
building and scorched the room, the door was shut for a few hours.
It was also shut on sunless winter days. But most days, it remained
open and the mesh window stayed unlatched, so you could have come
in unannounced into our house like the wind that billowed the old
curtain that hung in its path.

***

We didn’t have
it, but most people those days used to have a side of pinewood
painted with the words ‘Welcome’ or ‘Home Sweet Home’. Larger
pieces were nailed to front doors, but the smaller ones usually
decorated shelves. Above our door, there was only papa’s name, S C
Sharma, and by its side a buzzer for the doorbell.

A peculiar bell it
was. When you pressed the black, circular and wobbly button, it
didn’t ring but buzzed like an electric discharge. It had been a
textbook bell—a physical copy of the diagrams in our books with a
circular gong and hammer. But it was too loud for our house so papa
had removed the gong. Left with nothing to strike, the oscillating
hammer made an eerie sound.

The only thing
that came close to it in eeriness was our electric gas lighter. I
have not seen another electric lighter ever. But this one was blue
plastic with a nickelled front. You pressed a black rectangular
button in the middle of the lighter body and bright blue sparks
danced inside its front window to a staccato sound. The lighter was
useless in a power cut. Whenever the staff electricians were called
to attend to a fault in the house, they played with the lighter. I
guess even they hadn’t seen anything like it before.

After ringing the
doorbell, you entered our drawing-cum-dining. Right in front of the
door lay a divan, and between it and the billowing curtain was a
light steel chair woven with white nylon cane. The chair shifted
easily and since its thin, tubular legs didn’t have rubber boots it
made a sound like a train’s hooter. It was kept there just in case
the guests outnumbered our other chairs. That chair had a twin
which was kept in the bedroom and brought out in case one more
chair was needed.

The divan was
heavy, brown wood. It had a thin cotton mattress that wasn’t kind
to bones, but on days when mummy sunned it in the terrace, it
fluffed out and became comfortable. Later, we added a second
mattress to it. I used to hop on the divan, so its bedsheet would
crumple or slip off. And if the doorbell rang when the sheet was in
such an unbecoming state, I got a tongue-lashing from mummy.

The divan wasn’t
for guests, but if there were more than four they made themselves
comfortable wherever they liked. Hospitality in those days did not
limit itself to sofas and padded chairs. On winter afternoons,
mummy and the aunties who came calling sat on our double bed with
their feet tucked under a quilt.

Still, for guests,
there were four armchairs with purplish-pink back and cushion
covers that mummy had embroidered. Later, she made cream-coloured
covers and my sister painted them. We still have those chairs and
the cream covers. My parents got their cane backs and squabs
repaired just after Diwali in 2014, so I hope to inherit them some
day. Between the chairs was a centre table with a Formica top. I
once slipped off a chair and cut my chin on its edge. There was a
lot of blood. The third big thing in that room was our dining
table, also with a Formica top, and its six light, chairs.

Everything in that
room was as light as papa’s means. Only two things stood out: a
money plant in a glass bottle and a painting. The bottle was clear
glass and what fascinated me about money plants most was their
brown roots. As children, my sister and I believed in the
superstition that money plants brought money, and we kept a count
of our plant’s leaves. When they slowly started dwindling, we joked
about becoming poor, but when only a couple of withered ones
remained and the plant had to be thrown away, we shrugged off the
disappointment saying nothing had changed in our lives. The bottle
would remain dry for a few weeks and then papa would bring another
money plant stem from one of the ground floor neighbours.

Many years later,
when we had shifted to a ground floor house and I had started
writing for Chandigarh Newsline, I planted a money plant stem
beside our lawn’s boundary wall. It thrived in the sunlight and
covered the entire wall in a couple of years. And the cheques for
my articles didn’t stop coming.

***

The clear
bottle in which papa grew his plant was shapely and had dimpled
sides. It must have been a bottle of liquor. I tried searching for
the shape online and found that old bottles of Dimple Pinch Scotch
(it’s the first time I have seen the name) fit the description
perfectly, although I doubt the brand was ever sold in India. Papa
didn’t drink, he bought the bottle from our regular kabariwala, who
couldn’t do without his tipple. He used to cycle from road to road
and his gruff business call was:
“Raadi-la-pepyaar-la-botlya-kaapi-kitaab-la”. Each ‘la’ was short
for ‘wala’, and the words in sequence meant: raddi (scrap),
newspaper, bottles, notebooks and books. Notebook had only one
meaning in those days.

The kabariwala’s
voice carried far and he always had his pyjama legs drawn above his
knees, presumably for ease of cycling. He used to arrive with a
gunny sack, coughing and clearing his throat loudly, and I used to
wonder whether he had TB, because that sort of cough was a sure
sign of TB in the old Hindi movies that Doordarshan showed. The
other sound associated with this kabariwala was of his big iron
scales and weights that he dropped on the brick floor of our
terrace from about knee-high.

I don’t get to
hear the sound of large scales (we called them tarazu but the
sellers all used the Punjabi word, takdi) anymore. Greengrocers now
use small weighing machines of the type that grocers used long ago.
And grocers have electronic scales. Anyway, most things come
packaged by weight. Even our kabariwala has a spring scale that he
pulls impressively out of a pocket.

Like the
kabariwala, there were some hawkers who sold rice, rajma and chhole
out of gunny sacks slung on their bicycles. And every time they
stopped to deal, they crashed their heavy scales on the road.
People bought at least 5kg potatoes at a time so even the vegetable
hawkers had their takdis. It was a sound we heard at intervals from
the street below.

I know I am
digressing but I cannot pass up all the other sounds that have
risen in my mind just now. There’s the old Shiv Kulfi chap clanging
the bell hanging from his bright yellow and red ice box on whose
raised lid a blue Shiva sits meditating. He rumbles his
racquet-shaped damru. Where else have you seen that type of damru?
It seems to have been made for the exclusive use of kulfi sellers.
We were allowed to buy his white, icicle shaped kulfis once in a
while. Then there’s the popcorn man, beating his heavy sand
strainer on the black iron trough under which a coal angithi is
blazing. Half of his corn doesn’t pop but the children still run
after him every evening to buy the little packets of popped corn
and roasted peanuts. The packets are made from old newspapers, but
the script is neither English nor Hindi, not even Punjabi. It is
what we call ‘Urdu’, maybe Persian or Arabic. The popcorn man moves
down the road leaving a trail of little hot snowflakes behind. The
candyfloss man follows banging his stick crowned with pink fluff
and swaying a tiny bell in the other hand. Oh, but the first sound
of the day is of milkmen arriving on noisy Enfield Bullets, each
one as robust as his bike, and slamming the massive lids of their
cans time and again.

***

I have kept the
money plant bottle waiting too long. That bottle was bought before
I was born and it was always kept in the top shutterless shelf of
the drawing room where we also kept the handful of books—not
schoolbooks—we had. Every week, I deposited my school library books
and those issued from the Tarlok Singh Central State Library
‘mobile van’ there with their spines facing outward. Only once,
when I brought an erotic novel by mistake from the mobile van did I
hide it behind the other books. (It really was a mistake. The book
had been bound in plain cream paper after its jacket got damaged.
But I did read some of the ‘scenes’ and that’s how I knew I
shouldn’t have brought it home.) The inside page said Nick Carter
and all along I thought it was the author’s name. But I googled
just now to find it was a popular spy series published from 1964 to
1990, and erotic scenes and double-meaning words were its selling
point.

We bought Bagpiper
Whisky bottles from the same kabariwala in the first summer after
we bought our Godrej fridge. My parents hated the smell of liquor
and those six or eight empty bottles reeked. So a tub was turned
into a bath for them with Surf detergent and they were left to soak
in it overnight. Next day, their labels were peeled off and the
bottles were rinsed repeatedly early in the morning (we had short
and unpredictable supply hours). Those bottles served us for many,
many years, although the white-backed cork inserts of the black
bottle caps didn’t last long. They were thick bottles and heavy,
and inevitably they all met the same shattering end: slipping out
of wet hands and smashing on the floor.