Type-II: Memories Of My First House (5 page)

For the night, our
main armour against the chill was heavy cotton-filled quilts that
warmed slowly but I loved the smell of naphthalene they became
imbued with after residing in a trunk for eight months in a year.
There was also a green Duckback rubber bottle that was passed
around to warm toes. When my sister and I were small, we slept very
snuggly, all four of us, on the double bed. Later, it was each one
to their own quilt, and I used to sleep with socks on to warm my
toes.

Winter was a time
when we were allowed some coffee in milk. Papa and mummy were both
tea drinkers but he kept a little bottle of Nescafe at home. It was
used rarely, and sometimes, in the rains, the long-unused coffee
turned into hard stone from the moisture in the air and had to be
thrown away. Nescafe used to be a dark powder at first, the
granular instant coffee came later. The rich aroma of Nescafe from
those days has remained in my mind. I can even recall the
delectably bitter taste, but it’s not there in the Nescafe instant
coffee you get nowadays.

We were
vegetarians. We still are, but papa let us have eggs in winter.
Mother used to retreat to the bedroom while he boiled them huddled
over an electric kettle in the verandah and we waited expectantly
around him. The eggs knocked against each other and the kettle wall
as the water boiled. We waited for steam to start rising out of the
kettle spout. First, it rose slowly like vapour, and then it came
fast and hissing. That’s when he turned the kettle off and waited
for the eggs to cook thoroughly in the boiling water. I liked
omelettes more than boiled eggs although I liked the latter’s yolk
very much and saved my salt and pepper for it.

Papa made
omelettes without onions or herbs and his thin ones were the best
omelettes I ever had. I liked them with toasted bread but our
toaster was moody and used to break down frequently. But it was
easy to repair and he frequently bought mica elements from the
Sector 29 market for it. Such bread we had in those days! I have to
tell you about it.

***

There was
Dalima bread that papa was always nostalgic about but it came to
the shops in our neighbourhood rarely, so I cannot vouch for it.
There was Modern bread, made in a government factory that was
supposed to be modern and fully mechanized, but people said they
kneaded dough with feet at the factory. And we children believed
them (just as it was said about bubblegum that it had boiled worms
in it), but looking back now I don’t believe that story about the
bread. Anyway, we didn’t buy Modern bread, whatever the reason. And
then there was Bakeman’s bread with a chef for its symbol. It was
probably the largest selling bread in Chandigarh. And Bakeman’s
biscuits were very popular too. Although Parle was the king of
glucose biscuits across the country, Bakeman’s was a powerful
regional satrap. It was sad to see the brand lose its identity when
it wound up the bread and biscuits operations and was reduced to a
confectionery player under the name Candico. But back in the days I
am writing about, Bakeman’s was big.

I won’t say I was
a bread connoisseur, or that Bakeman’s had an incomparable taste,
but it was definitely good. For us children, the chief charm was
the numbered stickers that came inside each packet. Carrying the
wax paper-wrapped loaf home we scanned the surface for a small,
dark rectangular patch made by the sticker.

Sometimes the
sticker lay at the bottom of the packet where it was impossible to
spot because the wax paper was thickly folded. To get to it, we
used to rip the paper and were roundly scolded for it. We bought
bread only on Sundays, and mainly in winter or when mummy was
unwell, so I didn’t have as many stickers as most of my classmates.
But the few I had were stuck on doors and my school notebooks.

Bread slices in
those days used to be smaller and softer. Brown bread was unheard
of but the white bread we got had a delectably sour taste and a
rich aroma. It used to turn golden brown, not chocolate brown, on
toasting and tasted best with homemade white butter. You don’t get
factory sliced bread like that anymore.

Mummy made butter
at home every weekend, although it was safest to eat in winter
because power cuts were fewer and the cream removed everyday from
boiled milk kept better in the refrigerator. On Sunday mornings we
had butter on toast for breakfast after the sun lit up the terrace.
The light used to creep down the wall of the house as the sun rose
higher and entered the verandah through the large glass windows and
the open door.

My sister and I
used to sun ourselves against the wall while papa toasted bread and
mummy heaped butter on it for me. My sister always pulled a face at
the sight of butter, removed the film of fat that floated on her
glass of milk, and many were the mornings when she got spanked for
pouring her glassful of hot milk down the kitchen sink. I always
liked milk and anything made from it.

***

As the morning
warmed, squirrels appeared on the top of the terrace walls, They
usually came in twos and twittered around like birds. Swift on
their legs, they were impossible to catch and I could never pet
them. The boy on the ground floor—he had a trunkful of Indrajal
comics and Amar Chitra Kathas—once told me the stripes on
squirrels’ backs denoted Ram, Lakshman and Sita. The little rodents
had been blessed for carrying small pebbles to build the bridge to
Lanka, he said.

The squirrels
didn’t come before 8am, by when sunlight had turned the top bricks
of the red wall orange. I would rush inside to fetch peanuts.
Pulling out the blue Rath Vanaspati 2kg tin in which they were
kept, grabbing a few unshelled nuts and running out to the terrace
took me all of a minute, but every moment mattered because it was
almost time for my favourite He Man show. Everybody remembers He
Man, and even Giant Robot, but what about Appu Aur Pappu? I was a
fan of that Sunday show too.

It was fascinating
to watch squirrels hold nuts in their front paws and shell them
with razor sharp teeth. They would clamber up the wall near the
kitchen ventilator as I came near and then watch me with tail
raised as I softly placed two peanuts on the ledge, and then wait
for me to retreat to a safe distance before coming down.

The squirrels
always played on the westward ledge and crows—although they came
infrequently—sat on the eastward wall. Pigeons seldom came down to
the terrace but rested in whole flocks on the TV aerials planted on
our roof. TV aerials used to be huge in those days. They were
bolted on to tall poles and caught signals from as far away as
Delhi (but not the Delhi-2 service) and Jalandhar. The smaller
antennae caught signals from Kasauli, which was close by, and for
our TV we used only a small aerial that we trussed to the brick
lattice of our terrace wall.

If the TV signal
played hooky—and sometimes it disappeared for more than a
day—people said “lagta hai Kasauli mein baraf pad gayi hai (Kasauli
seems to be under snow)”, regardless of the season.

In winter, when we
needed it, the sun shunned us. It shone late on our terrace and
retreated early. By the time we got back from school it had
deserted the terrace floor and even the walls. Mummy got precious
little of it, although she needed it the most after starting her
day with washing and mopping. By the time she wrapped up the day’s
chores, it lit up only half of the terrace’s eastward wall. Minute
by minute, the light blocked by our own house slid up and she had
to move with it along the wall. The sunlight hours were shortest
during late December-early January, and when papa came home for
lunch at 1pm, he got just a bit of sunlight on his neck and face.
The light quickly shrank to a tiny triangle at the top corner of
the wall and was gone before he finished his three chapatis. But
when the days grew longer again, he was able to shell a few peanuts
after lunch lit up by a slightly larger patch of light.

Both papa and
mummy loved soaking in the sun. He stayed in office from 9am to
5.30pm five days a week and so didn’t have any way of sunning
himself, but mummy used to go downstairs in the afternoon after she
had fed us. She spent most of her winter knitting for the four of
us and divided the week carefully between the various colony
aunties to not stretch her welcome. When I think of her knitting,
the first thing that comes to mind is the rustle of the plastic bag
in which she kept the skein of wool. The bag rolled with the ball
every time she tugged at it to loosen a length of yarn. The other
sound is of her counting knots for a sweater border under her
breath. Surprisingly, though I remember the chatter of needles
well, it doesn’t jump to mind the way the other two sounds do. When
I was in class 7, baggy sweaters were in, and though mummy hated
them, she knitted me one in maroon wool that was only halfway
baggy. I wore it for many years and used it roughly in my athletics
days. It spent hundreds of hours squeezed into the steel trellis on
the school stage, yet survived in good shape. That sweater and
three others—two of them very finely knitted in mustard and olive
colours—are waiting at home for my son to grow up. My only worry is
that he will turn out taller than me, and not use them long
enough.

Mummy was friends
with the two aunties on our ground floor, but the aunty she clicked
with best lived a few blocks away and she spent more afternoons
with her than anyone else. Then there were a few first-floor
aunties who weren’t sun-deprived like us and mummy spent a couple
of warm, happy hours in their terraces too, sometimes. But on many
days, she didn’t visit anyone and just knitted standing by a hedge
with her ball of wool kept in a bag on the hedge top. On Saturday
and Sunday mornings, papa spent a quiet two hours lying on a cot in
the sun-lit terrace.

***

I was a timid
child with a volatile temper. I got bullied by the older playmates
in the early years and had a cruel streak. I am not juxtaposing
these points to justify my behaviour.

Papa worked in an
optics lab and sometimes brought home a damaged lens to use as a
magnifying glass. Lenses and prisms were playthings for me and I
had been warned early on not to look at a light source, especially
the sun, through them. I was always careful on that point, but
after finding out that a magnifying glass could not only make
objects and letters appear bigger but also concentrate the sun’s
rays, I put the lenses to diabolical use. In summer, the sun also
shone in through the drawing room window (despite the sun-breaker)
and I burnt a hole in the dining table’s Formica veneer by focusing
the rays on it with a lens. I also burnt a tiny hole in a
tablecloth once. Newspapers were the quickest to smoulder. Paper
never really burst into flames but let out a wisp of smoke rapidly.
The burning would start with a small brown circle that turned into
a black hole and then spread in a ring of ash. If you kept the lens
focused on a page in a notebook, the sunbeam drilled a pinhole
through several pages but the hole on the top page did not measure
more than a couple of millimetres across.

Impressed by the
speed with which lenses worked, I tried one on my hand. But only
once. It was a stinging, unforgettable lesson. And then, I turned
upon ants that marched in a column on the terrace wall. There used
to be two kinds of ants those days. Red ones that bit painfully and
black, harmless defenceless ones. I don’t see the black ones in
Delhi but they were the more common type in Chandigarh, and by
black ants I don’t mean the giant ones. No, these were only
slightly bigger than red ants but more fragile. Since the ants
always moved in a straight line, they were easy prey for my lens.
Unlike squirrels, ants weren’t bothered by my presence and I could
pick my target while breathing down on their column. I would bring
the lens over the line, focus the rays to a glowing pinpoint and
then pan it over a moving ant. Within a moment, a puff of smoke
would shoot from the little black body and the ant would fall off
the wall, writhing its tiny legs. I would then stamp out its life
and experience a sense of scientific achievement.

There was another
use I found for the lenses in, perhaps, class 7. Using an empty
cardboard box of tennis balls, I made a telescope with just two
lenses. It showed everything upside-down and was good enough to
watch the moon with, but that wasn’t my intended purpose. I was so
shy that I would feel tongue-tied in the presence of girls even my
own age. The telescope helped me watch the prettier ones in our
campus from a safe distance, but there is no long-term satisfaction
in an inverted world, and I gave up after just a couple of
days.

Yet another ‘use’
for my lenses was to project images onto a wall. It wasn’t a ‘use
use’, but an interesting demonstration of a principle we had been
taught in class. A convex lens facing a window and held close to a
white wall would cast a tiny inverted image of the scenery outside.
It became pin-sharp at a certain distance—the lens’ focal
length—and I felt very wise doing it again and again.

There was another
instrument in which papa’s lab rejects proved useful. This was the
humble periscope. I used to make them out of Forhan’s Toothpaste
boxes, inserting a mirror each in windows cut out at the top and
bottom of a box. I used them while playing hide and seek, but the
‘periscopes’ were so short that my head was always visible above
the wall behind which I hid, and I was called out.

My sister and I
played in a large group in which one girl was younger than me, and
of the rest, the oldest were five or six years elder. Our houses
were spread all across, from A-line to C-line, but somehow we had
fixed on one of the B-blocks to play hide and seek, and another
game we called—I’ll have to spell it phonetically—biscoorite. It
was a difficult, punishing variation of hide and seek, and to play
it, you needed a ball, a brick for a base, and seven flat pieces of
stone or brick that could be stacked upon the base. The stack was
broken with the ball and all but one of us ran to hide. That one
person had to find everyone and ensure that the stack didn’t get
broken again.