Type-II: Memories Of My First House (7 page)

The houses in CSIO
campus were built in neat rows. Only two blocks with 36 houses
between them rose to a height of three floors, the rest were all
two-storey buildings. Land was cheap when the campus was built and
where three blocks could have been built, only two were. That left
a lot of space vacant even after allowing each ground floor house a
lawn front and back. The residents put this waste ground between
the houses to good use as kitchen gardens. So, you had the front
lawns with fine grass and flowers, walled rear lawns with flowers,
fruit-bearing trees and sometimes a vegetable patch. And then, the
kitchen gardens in the open where the range of vegetables was
limited only by a resident’s imagination and their mali’s
capabilities. Often, the residents themselves did all their
gardening.

When we first
shifted to the ground floor, we got an overgrown patch that we took
on with borrowed spades and shovels under attack from buzzing
mosquitoes. We grew chillies in it, tomato, carrot (not good)
radish (good), spinach, fenugreek, green onions and even corn. So,
we had corn on the cob, roasted on our gas stove, and lots of
dhania chutney in winter. The chutney dethroned mummy’s tomato
sauce as my favourite condiment. Our neighbour was a better farmer
and produced the whole year’s supply of turmeric on his patch (he
had extended his kitchen garden almost to the road). He had plenty
of arbi (colocasia) too. (Not this neighbour but our favourite
aunty used to send us arbi leaves with which mummy made a delicious
fried vegetable.)

In later years and
houses, we stuck to growing simple things like spinach, methi
leaves and chillies. At one time, grapevines became a craze and
people got steel trellises made for them. The grapes grew in
abundance but they were not very sweet. Actually, they were sour
and thick-skinned, and the best way to use them was to blend them
with sugar, ice and water, strain the pulp and drink the juice.
Talking of vines, a lot of people also grew lauki and turai in
their kitchen gardens. The vines crept along the length of a lawn
wall and sometimes straggled outside. If the veggies grew in
excess, the owners left them on the vine, and after a while these
dried to a massless, fibrous form resembling a weaver bird’s
nest.

And of course,
there were flowers everywhere. Talking of lauki and turai, their
vines grew large yellow flowers. But Chandigarh was a fine place to
grow flowers in, even the traffic islands were little gardens, so I
won’t praise those of my campus too much.

***

There was a
desolate ground in our campus, at the end of B Block near the
office. There was a deep pit in it that used to fill up with
rainwater. Tall grasses grew around it and frogs croaked in them.
Above the pit, on the level ground, there were many mounds of mud.
The ground had been like this for a long time and we children
avoided it because it wasn’t fit for any game. But one day it
became our evening haunt for playing cops and robbers. The ground
was our ravines. The pond gave it a picturesque look and a feeling
of isolation from the order of the campus all around. Just above
the water was a hollow that my best friend and I made our cave, and
attacked our enemies from there. The plot of the game was thick,
for nobody quite knew who was on which side. Mainly, you fought for
yourself. And the fighting was not done hand to hand but by
flinging clods of mud. The mud was soft so nobody got hurt even
with a direct hit but by the time we wrapped up the game late in
the evening our hands, clothes and shoes used to be horribly
dirty.

One day, a
construction crew arrived at the site and took over our ravines.
Slowly (construction always happened slowly in those days) a large
building started taking shape. We forgot all about that playground
and got back to cycling, skipping and the hundred other games
children play. One afternoon—I don’t remember the day or the
season—we heard a loud rumble. A few hours later, we learned that
the roof of the new building had collapsed. It was a time when
jokes about bad construction were common. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was a
cult movie and everybody remembered its bridge collapse and the
resultant Mahabharat drama. But the roof collapse in CSIO did not
tickle anyone as some workers were badly injured. One of them was
impaled on a steel bar. The construction stopped that day and
shrubs and weeds again took over the ground on which the building
stood. For several years it looked like a haunted ruin. But
eventually it was completed and became our new community centre.
Many marriages were solemnised there. My own wedding reception was
held inside it in January 2005. Ten years, already!

I can’t skate or
swim. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me skates and they were
afraid I would fracture a limb, which is what all the skaters did.
There was no swimming pool on the campus, although one summer
vacation a friend and I did give swimming a try in a fountain pool
at the Indo-Swiss Training Centre that was part of CSIO Campus. The
pool lay outside the ISTC mess that always had a smell of, perhaps,
stale salad or vinegar. I don’t know what produces that smell but I
can tell you where exactly you can find it. Go to a ground where a
marriage has been solemnized at night and sniff around the place
where the cooks worked. There will be a small pit and burnt bricks
on which the black urns and cauldrons simmered the previous night,
and there will be chopped vegetables lying around—cabbage and
radish and beet—and there will be a cow poking around this feast
and a timid dog near it. There, you will find that smell. On second
thoughts, you won’t find this scene at all, but that’s how wedding
feasts were arranged when I was a child.

Sitting in a tent
on closely spaced chairs woven with blue or red plastic tubing that
stretched if you pulled at it (of course, you pulled at it) all I
cared for was to keep my distance from aunties and uncles, and the
girls—some of whom I found hideous and some who were so pretty that
their coming near made me uneasy—and the boys I didn’t play with.
But I also cared for the little glasses of ThumsUp or Campa that
bearers in dirty white uniforms bore around on wet aluminium
trays.

I didn’t dance
when the other children danced, and I found it irritating to look
at them dancing. I didn’t like the shaadi food much either because
tandoori rotis used to be so thick that chewing them was a chore.
Later, much later, I developed a liking for what I call shaadi
paneer and shaadi jeera rice and shaadi missi roti, but I could
never heap my plate with these. I did like fried papad, though. And
I liked the big chairs on a pedestal for the bride and her groom.
But I felt envious of the children who were related to them and got
their pictures clicked sitting on their armrests. For me, a shaadi
ended with my white or pink ice cream, and then I pestered my
parents to take us back home.

***

I got carried
away with that shaadi business and here you’ve been waiting at the
ISTC mess for me. The mess had one, two, three, maybe four doors
and many tall, narrow windows that served as walls. The chairs had
steel frames topped with wooden slats and were heavy. If you
dragged them on the polished floor, the racket was intolerable. All
the chairs and the tables for dining were on one side of the mess
hall, close by the kitchen. The other half got bright sunlight from
the windows and it had two ping-pong tables lit by hanging lamps.
When a ball smashed into the light dome of a lamp it made a tinny
sound. I don’t know why but the sound of a cracked TT ball just
came to mind. It was the most depressing sound possible when you
had only one ball remaining and were at a decisive stage in a
game.

We used to cycle
right up to the mess hall, lean our bikes against its pillars and
walk inside pushing the heavy and tall doors. Sometimes, if it was
the TT season, we younger children never got a chance to play as
there was a crowd of seniors waiting on those same heavy chairs. Or
they would ask us to play a quick doubles and get out.

But there were
times when TT was forgotten for football or cricket, or the early
morning Spider-Man show, and then my friend and I had the place to
ourselves. The first thing we did on entering was to turn on the
lamps and fix the net on one of the Stag tables by its steel
clamps. I usually lost. I always lost unless I was playing against
a girl who was a few months older than me, and was by far the worst
player among us all. I was second-worst.

I got my TT paddle
after much cajoling and it cost Rs 20 at a shop beside English Book
Shop in Sector 22. I don’t remember the year but it was around New
Year and mummy was away to her village to celebrate the birth of a
nephew. So, it must have been the end of 1985 or early 1986. The
bat’s handle was olive coloured with a shiny waxen finish. But
instead of smooth rubber pads backed with foam, it was surfaced
with hard, dotted rubber sheets (the pimples-out surface, as it is
called). It was cheap but I was not ashamed of it. One side of it
was red and the other blue, and both smelt like the inside of my
Duckback raincoat.

But we did not
start playing TT in ISTC. At first, one table was kept in our
colony’s dispensary. And in the evening, when the dispensary
closed, we were allowed to play there. It used to be very crowded
in those days and the dispensary’s front court used to be packed
with bicycles.

A moment, please.
I have to write a few lines about the dispensary. The first thing
that comes to mind is its thick black granite benches set in the
walls. They had curved backrests and seats, and I liked them. The
dispensary always smelt of phenyl. Every family had their
‘dispensary card’ that had to be submitted in the doctor’s room,
and then the invalid waited on a bench to be called in for
examination. It was there that I discovered the cold, ticklish
touch of a stethoscope, realized how difficult it can be to satisfy
a doctor intent on shining a beam of torchlight down your throat,
and wondered how doctors figured out what was wrong with you by
kneading your stomach with thumb and forefinger.

The doctor sat in
a room to the left of the dispensary door as you entered. The room
had an air conditioner set in a low window and its back, protected
by a wire box, projected into the ground outside. ACs were a very
big deal those days, and if this one was humming you knew the
doctor was in. That room had a heavy door, that took some effort to
open because of a big, hydraulic stopper attached to it. I always
marvelled at the stopper because, at home, we had simple hinged
stoppers for all the doors.

To the right of
the entrance was the real ‘dispensary’, the compounder’s room.
That’s where all the antibiotics and syrups and tonics were issued.
I only looked forward to chewable vitamin C tablets. Somebody had
stuck a little poster on its white window that said: “kaam to karna
hi hai, karna bhi padega, to kyun na khushi se karein (you can’t
avoid work, then why not do it gladly?)”. But our compounder wasn’t
so happy to work. He could shut the white window at any time for
tea.

Being sent to the
room across the floor was a sign of trouble. It was the nurse’s
domain, and at the least, it signified the necessity of a pin prick
to collect a blood sample. Wounds were dressed there, and tetanus
shots stabbed into butts (embarrassing). Even more embarrassing was
depositing urine and stool samples.

One of the
dispensary’s sides had a large opening that became ‘Super Bazaar’
for some years. It sold ration sugar and rice, besides other
groceries. Nobody buys palmolein now but the imported oil was cheap
and became popular briefly. It was the third article of note
available at that dismal store. The rice wasn’t good, and as for
sugar, it varied in quality from pure white large crystals to small
yellowish ones. But for a while, the government sold imported white
powder sugar there. To but any of the subsidized articles, you
needed to have a ration card, and the rationed articles were
available for only a brief period every month. So, every afternoon,
around the expected date, we children were sent to make enquiries
at the shop. “Uncle, chini aagayi kya (is the ration sugar
available)?” And when the supply arrived, the line of women outside
the shop reached the road. There was extra sugar on Diwali.

***

Cycling was our
favourite year-round pastime. There were all kinds of cycles, big
and small, roadsters and SLRs, with and without supporters. Before
I learned to cycle on my sister’s bike I had only my old tricycle
with large wheels. It was a sturdy little thing, all metal with a
sprung seat, but it was no match for my friend’s proper blue
bicycle with supporter wheels. I didn’t feel odd taking it out, but
it was no good on the road. I usually left it downstairs and
walked.

I finally learnt
cycling in class 3, the way everybody does—falling, making
mistakes, hitting the kerb. Papa used to hold the saddle from
behind and run along. It was tiring for him to put in the effort in
the evening after a long day at work. A week went by and I wasn’t
getting anywhere. He scolded me repeatedly and I came home and told
mummy that I would not learn from him. Then I persuaded my sister
to be my instructor. At school I kept reminding myself to keep my
back very straight so that I wouldn’t lose balance and when evening
came, papa was gentler and said he wouldn’t scold me if I went out
to practise with him. So we went round and round A Block and I
remember it was getting dark when I found my balance and took off.
I was so happy, papa was delighted. Learning to cycle is like a
rite of passage. Recently, I taught my son to cycle. He is only
five but in the 10 days it took him to learn balancing on two
wheels I must have scolded him a thousand times although I
remembered my own days so well. Luckily, he has a cheerful nature
and didn’t complain.