My Indian Childhood

Camel Ride There were many reasons why camels had caught my fancy when I was quite young. I had seen pictures of them in my alphabet and rhyme books (“c for camel” often came to mind). I had seen a couple of them at the Byculla zoo, tossing their big untidy heads impatiently while chewing what seemed to be a perpetual cud. And my paternal grandparents had told me about them. They said that they would see camel-drawn carts in Delhi during their decades-long sojourn there. And, then, they had gone into camel country itself, so to speak, when following his retirement after spending almost four decades of his life in government service, my grandfather took up a two-year appointment as chief financial advisor to the Maharaja of Bikaner in Rajasthan around 1940. My grandparents described what they had seen and heard about an old tradition and celebration, the camel festival, where at the beginning of each year, in mid-winter, camel owners came from all over the Thar desert, bri...

The Old Picture Album    The large heavy photo album was kept on a shelf inside my grandparents’ ancient teak almirah. Sometimes, one of them would lift it down carefully to turn its pages and show me old pictures, some of which went back to the late 1800’s. I recall seeing several sepia-toned posed photographs of my paternal grandfather’s parents, my great-grandparents, one sitting, the other standing, with their young children around them. I learned to point to the serious-looking toddler who, I was told, was my paternal grandfather. I remember searching for even the slightest resemblance to my grandfather as I knew him then while I was still little; he was aging, medium-built, lean and bald with an aquiline profile and not finding any congruence, I accepted it as fact anyway, as one of those things that would probably make sense by and by in a world that I was still getting to know.     My grandfather would often tell me anecdot...

Legacies “Our” people had been on the Indian subcontinent for millennia, my grandparents told me when they thought I was old enough to understand the concept. I must have been about four or five. Ever since I could remember, I would go into their room whenever I felt like it but it was most often as soon as I woke up. As a young child, I would awaken early, eager to begin the new day, like my grandparents, probably around 5:30 a.m. and find that my parents had no intentions of starting their respective days yet. I think that one of them probably carried me sleepily into my grandparents’ room or my grandmother came to take me there in the beginning because it became a daily habit that slowly dissolved as my sisters came along, I started school and our family routines adapted to our new priorities and changing schedules. Sometimes I would play off in a far corner of my grandparents’ large room under the high clotheslines, where the drying laundry would serve as a high cano...

Head-Bath Days Throughout my childhood, usually, once or twice a week, came the head-baths, the crowning rituals of our grooming routines. Head-baths were not to be taken lightly, they were special events not to be interfered with. Everything adjusted and fitted around head-baths, not the other way around as it is with most of us today. Large pots of steaming hot water augmented the efforts of our struggling hot­-water geyser and we mixed the hot and cold water stored in buckets into the one we were using to bathe from.   For reasons of convenience, our head-bath days were almost always on Saturdays which marked the respite from a full week of going to school and packed weekday routines. For hours before, hair would be oiled and combed and the scalp massaged furiously. Two or more cycles of washing, shampooing and rinsing would be followed by toweling dry. My sisters and I, taken one by one into the bathroom by our mother with her sari hitched up to her knees...